#RSRSeesTheUSA Day 62: Cedar Rapids, IA
I’ve been really enjoying bathing in the serendipitous joy this trip has brought me by avoiding planning out too many of its details. Some of that has been places I’ve stayed or things I’ve seen. And some, like today, has been the ability to see beloved people in person with little to no advance warning. To wit, here’s the text I sent on Friday morning, as I prepared to leave Lincoln, NE and needed to figure out where to head next.
We proceeded to plan a trip to the National Czech and Slovak Museum and a wander around the nearby Czech Village/New Bohemia area. It’s what led to my magical stay last night and to some deeply wonderful catching up on Big Life Updates with Essie, another friend who—like me—has been through pandemic moves and job changes and more in the last couple years.
It’s been lovely to have had the chance to re-connect with so many of my people on this trip who I’ve only been able to talk to via digital channels since 2019 (and some, years longer than that). Essie and I sipped our way through some local cider, ate our way through some yummy sandwiches, shopped our way through some vintage boutiques, photo’d our way through some excellent murals, and most of all, talked our way through a lot of emotional and deep life realities.
I think it was the Nagoski sisters, in their book Burnout, who talked about the surprising realization that what mid-life crises look like for women tends to be very different from the masculine stereotype of sportscar-buying, younger-women-dating, burning-down-the-bridges. Instead, it comes as a questioning of what we’re prioritizing for ourselves and an examination of how we want to feel/how we’re not feeling that we can change.
And then, yes, maybe that leads to making some big changes like resigning from jobs or relocating or changes in relationship status. But, in the best cases, it comes through some deep soul-searching and happens with consideration for all parties involved, and it gets us to embrace the values we really want to live by for the first time in our adult lives. Because we know those values for the first time in our adult lives.
Essie and I agreed that (along with many others) we’ve both hit this moment in our lives at the same time as COVID-19 has reoriented so much of what life looks like. For me, I know it’ll be near impossible to separate what might have come as a mid-life crisis anyway from what’s come as a pandemic reality. But that’s fine. It’s real and it’s happening, either way. This is a messy period of life, and also one that feels like time to lean on the things that are most important to me, to prioritize how I want to live more than the status markers of whether I’m living the way social norms expect.
