On a 50th Birthday, and Few Milestones Sated, to Reflect or Worry?

When does a 53^rd birthday connote a midlife crisis?

A psychologically well and balanced man is confident and loves himself from and during early adulthood, his 20s, through middle adulthood, his 40s.

Is it common to have to recover in your late adulthood from a childhood marked by psychological neglect and abuse?

Is it a midlife crisis when, years after your early and middle adult years, you wish that you had had, during your 20s or your 30s, the benefit of the level of self-concept and self-confidence you feel at age 53?

This is common. It’s common enough that that lament is mentioned in movies. “Oh. Youth is wasted on the wrong people!,” said a minor character told George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

If your childhood was the opposite of well and balanced, then those career, romantic and social milestones might be delayed. Maricopa Community College citing a Prof. Daniel Levinson, he “found that the men and women he interviewed sometimes had difficulty reconciling the “dream” they held about the future with the reality they experienced.”

The reality is that I, as a man, I made the healthiest choices I knew how to in early adulthood and thereafter. Hopefully my “dream,” which Levinson observed among older adults, wasn’t a dream, but instead an ideal. I think the ideal holds less stress or pressure on my proverbial shoulders.

A friend marked my birthday by meeting for a simple lunch and conversation. An on March 21 and 22^nd, I had two different group supper celebrations of my birthday among family and friends.

Socially, I’m maintaining ties. I wish that I didn’t find myself needing to be the diligent one in consciously maintaining those ties.

I wish that the healing, and growth from niche talk therapy about childhood neglect had begun earlier; I wish that it had begun when I could enjoy self-love during my younger years.