Nobody tells you, in any of the standard accounts of what midlife is going to involve, that the most important relationship you will have during it is the one with the version of yourself you were at twenty. The standard accounts focus on the more visible relationships. The marriage, if there is one. The children, if there are any. The aging parents. The friends. The boss. The various adult connections that constitute the visible social architecture of the period. All of these matter. None of them, on close examination, turns out to be the most important relationship of the period for the kind of person who has reached midlife having done any honest interior work.
The most important relationship, in most cases, is internal. It is the relationship with the twenty-year-old who, by some particular combination of stamina, naivety, ambition, fear, and willingness to take terrible advice, got you to where you currently are. The twenty-year-old is still in there, in some real way. The forty-year-old who is currently reading this is not, on close examination, a different person from the twenty-year-old. The forty-year-old is, more accurately, the result of what the twenty-year-old did with the conditions she had to work with. The twenty-year-old made the choices. The forty-year-old is, in some real way, living inside them.
The work of midlife, when one finally gets to it, is the work of going back to the twenty-year-old, apologizing to her for the parts of the conditions the forty-year-old has been blaming her for, and thanking her for the parts of the conditions that are, on close examination, the only reason the forty-year-old gets to be anywhere at all.
The apology, and what it is actually for
The apology is, on close examination, more specific than the cultural register tends to credit. The apology is not for the twenty-year-old’s mistakes. The mistakes were what they were. The mistakes are, in some real way, also what produced the present version of the person, and so they cannot be cleanly separated out from the parts of the present version that the forty-year-old would not, in any honest accounting, want to give back.
The apology is, more specifically, for the way the forty-year-old has been talking about the twenty-year-old in her own internal monologue across the intervening twenty years. The talking-about has been, in most cases, not kind. The twenty-year-old, in the forty-year-old’s accounting, has been the source of most of the worst decisions in the forty-year-old’s life. The job that didn’t work out. The relationship that should have ended sooner. The financial choices that produced the present configuration of constraints. The patterns that the forty-year-old has been trying, with varying success, to undo across the intervening decades. All of these are, in the standard internal monologue, the twenty-year-old’s fault.
This monologue is, on close examination, almost entirely unfair. The twenty-year-old was making decisions with the information available to her at the time, which was, by any honest accounting, considerably less than the information the forty-year-old now has. The twenty-year-old was operating with a nervous system that had not yet finished developing the executive functions that the forty-year-old, by structural maturation, now possesses. The twenty-year-old was, in some real way, doing the best she could with what she had. The forty-year-old, who has been blaming her for decisions made under those conditions, has been judging her by standards that were not, at the time, available to either of them.
The apology is for the blame. The apology is the recognition that the twenty-year-old did not have access to what the forty-year-old has access to, and that the standards by which the forty-year-old has been judging her were, in some real way, retroactively imposed in a way the twenty-year-old could not have anticipated. The apology is not for what the twenty-year-old did. The apology is for the four decades of being judged for it by a version of herself who, having absorbed the information the consequences eventually provided, has been using that information to retrospectively grade a person who never had it.
The thanks, and why it is harder to deliver
The thanks is, in many ways, the harder of the two pieces of work. The thanks requires the forty-year-old to acknowledge that the twenty-year-old, despite her various visible failures, also did a number of specific things that, by the forty-year-old’s honest accounting, made the forty-year-old’s current life possible.
The twenty-year-old took the job that, while ultimately unsatisfying, established the financial baseline that the forty-year-old has been building on. The twenty-year-old moved to the city that, while difficult at the time, produced the network of contacts the forty-year-old still uses. The twenty-year-old started the project that, while badly executed by current standards, accumulated the skills that the forty-year-old now operates with by default. The twenty-year-old ended the relationship that, while painfully, produced the conditions under which the forty-year-old eventually found the relationship she actually wanted. The twenty-year-old, in some real way, did the work that the forty-year-old has been benefiting from for two decades without ever quite acknowledging the benefiting.
The acknowledging is the thanks. The acknowledging is harder than the apologizing because it requires the forty-year-old to give up the particular narrative in which she is, in some real way, a self-made person who has built her current life on her own initiative. The narrative is flattering. The narrative is also, on close examination, almost entirely inaccurate. The forty-year-old has not built her current life on her own initiative. The forty-year-old has built her current life on top of the foundations the twenty-year-old laid down, and the laying-down was, by every honest measure, the more structurally consequential part of the work.
The thanks involves recognizing this. The recognizing is uncomfortable. The recognizing requires the forty-year-old to acknowledge that she owes a particular kind of debt to a person who is, in some real way, no longer accessible for the receiving of the gratitude. The twenty-year-old, in any direct sense, is gone. The thanks has to be delivered, accordingly, to a version of her that the forty-year-old has to construct internally, on the basis of memory, in order for the delivering to have anywhere to land.
Why the work has to be done internally
The cultural register has not, on the available evidence, developed particularly good vocabulary for this kind of internal work. The wider register tends to assume that the relationships of midlife are the visible external ones. The internal relationship, with the previous versions of oneself, is treated, in most cases, as either a piece of psychological eccentricity or as the kind of thing one might address briefly in therapy without quite registering it as the structural feature of the period that it actually is.
The structural feature is that the forty-year-old who has not done this work is, in some real way, in an ongoing internal conflict with the twenty-year-old whose decisions she is currently living inside. The conflict is not, in most cases, conscious. The conflict is, more accurately, the small background tension that the forty-year-old carries around all day, which expresses itself in the various forms of self-criticism, self-justification, and small ongoing negotiation with one’s own past that constitute most of the interior chatter of the adult mind.
The chatter, on close examination, is the conflict. The conflict is between two parts of the same person, separated by twenty years, neither of whom can directly address the other, but both of whom are operating in the same interior. The forty-year-old is, in some real way, still arguing with the twenty-year-old. The twenty-year-old is, in some real way, still defending the choices the forty-year-old has been complaining about. The argument goes nowhere because neither party is, in any direct sense, available to receive what the other is saying. The argument continues anyway, in the background, for years.
The resolution of the argument, when it occurs, is the work I am describing. The forty-year-old goes back, deliberately, to the twenty-year-old. She makes the apology. She delivers the thanks. The arguing, by the resolution of the structural conflict that was producing it, slowly stops. The interior gets quieter. The quieting is, in some real way, what most of the visible midlife peace that the wider register has noticed in some adults is, on close examination, structurally produced by.
What this looks like, in practice
The work, in practice, does not look like anything dramatic. The work involves, in most cases, the small ongoing internal practice of remembering, when one notices oneself blaming the twenty-year-old for some present condition, that the blame is, on close examination, misallocated. The twenty-year-old did not have the information that would have made the decision look different. The information arrived later, in the form of the consequences. The twenty-year-old made the decision in good faith with what she had. The forty-year-old has, accordingly, no honest grounds for the blame.
The practice involves, similarly, the small ongoing remembering, when one notices oneself taking credit for some present condition, that the credit is, in significant part, also misallocated. The twenty-year-old laid the foundation. The foundation is what the present condition is structurally built on. The forty-year-old, in honestly accounting for the present condition, has to allocate the credit to the version of herself that did the foundational work, even though the version is, in any direct sense, no longer here to receive it.
The practice is small. The practice, accumulated across the second half of one’s life, is what most of the visible interior peace of the older adults the wider culture admires is, on close examination, the result of. They have done the work. The work was not dramatic. The work was the slow ongoing rebalancing of the internal account between the present version of themselves and the previous versions whose decisions they are currently living inside.
The most important relationship in midlife is, in some real way, the one with the person you were at twenty. The relationship has been operating, mostly without your knowledge, since you turned twenty-one. The relationship has been characterized, in most cases, by a low-grade ongoing argument that has produced more of your interior life than you have probably been giving it credit for. The work of going back, apologizing to her for the unfair judgment, and thanking her for the work she did that you have been benefiting from without acknowledging, is the relational work the second half of your adult life is going to be, in some real way, quietly built around. The work is yours to do. Nobody else can do it for you. The doing of it is, on the available evidence, the most consequential interior work midlife has on offer. The doing produces, in some real way, the version of yourself who is, finally, no longer at war with the person who got her here.
