Midlife Blues

I can't identify for certain when it started. I think the earliest indication was that I had difficulty in conversations. Sometimes I had plenty to say, but found it impossible to compose the thoughts into coherent discourse; othertimes I found it nigh impossible to string two words together. I'm quite sure people would have found me rather odd. At work and at home, I found it very difficult to choose my battles – every disagreement was a watershed issue, and "letting it go" was a luxury for people with fewer and lesser concerns than me. I was given a much heavier cross to bear. More recently, I found I was overly emotional about relationships and work: after coming across anything to do with parent/child emotional connections in my children's bedtime stories, I would have to stop and wait for composure to return before continuing; I'd break down on criticism from my wife that I worked too much; and officious emails from my boss that failed to show any understanding of my situation would upset me.

Recurrent Idiopathic Acute Pancreatitis

After trying unsuccessfully over a period of time to join a specific forum on this subject in order to post this, I'm posting it here instead, under the aegis of midlife health issues. The purpose is to share the information and understanding that I have gained through five years of intermittent pancreatitis attacks. There are a lot of experiential hypotheses on the internet, and in one respect, this post simply adds to that collection. In another respect, however, I might have a unique perspective: on one hand I am a scientist with 25 years of education (through PhD) and experience (in academics and industry), and am therefore inclined toward the scientific method; on the other hand, after seven attacks, the condition is still classified as "recurrent idiopathic acute pancreatitis", i.e. inexplicable isolated episodes -- so I am left to draw on the experience of others in an attempt to identify conceivable, albeit unproven, potential solutions.

Running for Roman Consul

As I alluded to in my initial post, I am part way up a ladder on my career, beating my head repeatedly on an invisible ceiling. There are various reasons for this: in stark contrast to my world-view, my institution has deep anxiety issues in a perceived winner-take-all national competition, and has extremely myopic views on how to win; the institution and possibly the entire sector is in a contraction phase; and the entire sector has the most risk-averse profile of anything I've known or studied. I was also recently startled to hear the perspective on the matter of a good overseas professional friend who had visited and met with a number of higher-ups 18 months ago: even as I natively speak the language, and I've held the passport for five years, the cultural and professional jingoism is such that my opportunity as a "foreigner" is limited. Maybe I'm considered a flight risk. Ironically, I've never had plans to leave, but the persistent lack of respect has pushed me to reconsider.

42 is, in fact, the Question

As a teenager, I knew everything. 

In my 20s, I lived too close to a inexpensive book store, and explored everything from Russian history to Zen Buddhism to protein crystallography. Even through these years of mind-expansion, deep down I still thought a lot of people made rather odd choices in life, and that on the whole there were relatively few reasonable and obvious options in any given situation. I was family-free, children-free, and time-rich. I was in control of my life and its direction, even while I wasn't certain what that direction was.