My 26-Year-Old Mid-Life Crisis

By Scott Bessenecker

The only birthday that triggered something akin to a mid-life crisis was my 26th. It dawned on my that I could never utter the phrase, “I’m in my early twenties.” Some might argue that that would have been true on my 25th birthday, but there was something about turning twenty-six that tripped me up. The early twenties are a kind of mythical prime, and the permanence of leaving my prime took me by surprise. At twenty-six I became conscious of aging.

I find now at fifty-six that I exist in all the ages I’ve lived until now. That is, my definition of “peer” stretches back a good long way. I see people 30 years younger as peers even though I’m quite certain they see me as an old man, which is how I viewed someone my age from the vantage point of my late twenties.

But those of you younger than me must realize that I exist perpetually in my late twenties and my late thirties and my late forties. Those persons live in me right now, and I can look out upon the world through the eyes of all the ages I have been. I can see simultaneously from my twenty-six-year-old self and my fifty-six-year-old self. And while anything beyond fifty-six seems old to me, I know that all the ages I turn will get absorbed into the collective of all the ages I have been.

A print of Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory was one of the first pieces of art I purchased as an eighteen-year-old in college. It intrigued me. In it, Dali expresses something of the relative nature of time. Time is a human construct and it is not as stiff and inflexible as we’d like to think. Time is bendable. We interact with it differently as we age. Time looks different from this elevation at age fifty-six. Smaller. Less daunting, less intimidating.

It is hard to see myself from the perspective of my younger “peers.” From their vantage point, I am just an older man, but in reality, I am their age and I am my age at the same time.

I will forever be twenty-six, the age I became aware of my age.