Confessions of a tolerant mid-lifer

Confessions of a Midlife Over-Tolerator

I tried protein, supplements, red date tea, turmeric milk, and seven doctors before realizing patience is not a treatment.

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I am very good at solving things. Give me a target and I hit it; give me a problem and I out-plan it. This is a story about the one thing that hasn’t worked, and how long it took me to notice I’d been handed my own patience and told it was a cure. It starts, like most of my problems do, before I’ve finished my coffee.

The first call is at 830am, so I’m up by 630. Protein shake, because thirty grams before nine is the rule now, and getting all from a plate that’s mostly dal and paneer takes actual planning. I’ve soaked the sprouts, with a close fistful of nuts.. I’ve measured the curd, and did not succeed in making ambli for a good gut. As I sip my coffee, I know that it is either extending my liver’s life or spiking my cortisol, and that I’ve already missed the nine-minute window for morning sun.

I do more than is needed.. I always have. It’s the thing that got me here, the belief that if I plan a little further ahead and put in a little extra, and the outcome will bend my way.

So I bring that to my body too. The tracker, the daily macros, the supplements lined up like a small pharmacy by the diary. The well-traveled journal with wilted corners, shows and hides a variety of my inner monologue about this mind and this body… and there is ever more to be written.

On paper, I’m doing everything right…

And I am tired. Not sleepy-tired.

But again, everyone’s tired… my mother was tired her whole life and never titled it anything.

My friends are tired.

So I put up with it, take it “in my stride” and I “keep going”, except some nights it refuses to be defended. 4am in the morning, wide awake, heart palpitating as if I’d sprinted somewhere.. i see my husband breathing beside me, fast asleep, that beauty.. And, then the alarm goes, and the feeling gets folded back into the morning, because what else is there to do with it?

So I deal with it the way the women in perhaps this world, always have, with my hands… I try turmeric milk (with black pepper) at night, Methi seeds (as a matter of fact, not the seeds but only the water) soaked overnight and drunk first thing, because instagram tells me for certain that it cools the body. This with other little gems (or are they?) of knowledge, is widely shared and populated amongst my friends.

A colleague of mine, Chinese, laughed gently when she caught me refilling a bottle of cold water and said her grandmother would have scolded me for it, because bodies our age need warmth, never cold, never raw. The next week she left red dates and goji berries on my desk, a fistful to boil into a sweet red tea meant to build the blood back, the qi, whatever it is we’re all quietly losing… So now it all sits together by my desk: the protein scoop and the red date tea, the new science and the old care.. all amalgamated into some system that most women my age will relate, but not understand fully.

Honestly, I couldn’t tell you which one is working, but the tea, at least, tastes like someone paid attention..

But, It was only when it got loud enough that I finally went to a doctor (and another, and another, a total of 7 to date): and, these are the parts that still makes me angry, visibly angry. The stiff shoulder went to the bone doctor who told me about calcium RDAs. The palpitations bought me 3 heart tests (a painful scan and multiple pricks) all clean, all fine, and not once did anyone say the word hormones out loud. And o haven’t bought the $988 cheap mattress that will align with my spine and my chakras to get that sleep I deserve.

And, well, my mood walks with impossible heels into every room except the one I need.

So I stopped going. I decided I was overreacting…

And, that’s what I felt stuck with – not the symptoms, but how quickly I agreed to “be” the problem.

I’m someone who fixes things by trying harder; it has never once failed me at work. So when my body didn’t respond, I assumed I simply hadn’t tried hard enough… More protein, better deeper sleep, 1 DIM here and another supplement there. And underneath all that, the older training persists: “don’t complain, don’t make it about yourself”.

So, when the system shrugged (and it didn’t feel like Atlas), some trained part of me shrugged along with it, almost relieved to put the blame back to my own body. Maybe ….its just supposed to be like that.

Here is what I’ve landed on, slowly, over these mornings.

I keep being told I can live with all of this. And yes “I can” – that’s the whole trick of the word. Yes, i can. I probably won’t die of it. I’m living with it right now, optimising around it, out-planning it a day at a time and FAILING…

But living with something and it being fine are not the same, and somewhere the two got swapped without my say.

What I can tolerate got quietly rebranded as ‘what’s acceptable’ and I was too busy hitting my targets to notice the swap that the world made for me. Who cares about middle aged women anyway ;)

I’ll keep the red date tea. I’ll keep the haldi doodh, the protein, all of it. They help me carry this being… But I’ve stopped believing that carrying something well is the same as being cared for.

That’s the one thing I won’t tolerate anymore, being handed my own patience and told it’s a treatment.