How to be a midult

Annabel Rivkin and Emilie Mcmeekan on the glories (and occasional humiliations) of being a grown-up

The story of the Midults is a love story. Our love story. Before we knew what we wanted to do, we knew that we wanted to do it together. Emilie: eternally sunny, kind and too apologetic but with a steel backbone. Annabel: powerful, bossy and irritable but secretly soft-centred and fragile. One of us ends where the other starts. We have known each other for 33 years – first at school, Annabel in the year above, exuding that ‘year above’ glamour. Then later, in several workplaces, with our desks jammed up against each other’s like life rafts, on the phone first thing when we were hungover and last thing when we were broken-hearted – and all the time in between. Working together has become so personal that we take nothing personally. Even when one of us is combusting with PMT and the other is crippled with insomnia. No sleep, no sanity, no problem.

And, as we talked to each other and trusted each other and laughed at each other, we found that it made us feel less ashamed of ourselves and feel stronger. We wondered what would happen if we actively and publicly acknowledged these endless internal tides of emotion; if we rifled around in our emotional knicker drawer and faced those feelings that we had once hoped others would never see. What would happen if we wrote about even the darkest and maddest and most ridiculous things that we feel? And so The Midult, born two years ago as a website and newsletter and now a book, sprang out of our friendship.

‘How do you know what I am thinking?’ women started to ask us by email or in the street or at a party or in the gym. ‘Is it just me?’ they wonder before sharing something. Because we gnaw on that, don’t we? That question that feeds the brain-worm of loneliness. But remove the filter and we see that we are all more alike than we imagined. Welcome to midulthood; a place where it is never just you. Where, if we are not in it together, we are not in it at all. Our book, I’m Absolutely Fine!, is not a self-help book. And yet we hope it helps.

Our bodies have their own stories to tell. The people they’ve seen and the places they’ve been. And these tales – with their plot twists and their mini-triumphs and losses – have little to do with ‘pretty’.

If we were rational beings, we would understand that our bodies are functional things; brilliant, clever and complex machines that also happen to contain things that are harder to dissect – mind, spirit, instinct, soul.

But we are not rational… We appraise ourselves by comparisons with other women. Not the woman sitting next to us on the bus, but models, actresses, people who are freaks because they are unusually symmetrical, people whose job it is to be looked at. All those women who are so beautiful that they get turned into objects, which makes them so easy to break. As we grow we come into focus, we start seeing ourselves.

The mirror tells a different story these days. We see the accumulated scars from smiling too much, frowning too much, caring too much; speckled-egg blobs on the sides of our cheeks from sunbathing too much. Giggle crinkles. The beginnings of a wibbly neck. We see beauty that is not defined by anyone else. And flaws that matter if you let them. We no longer have the bodies we had at 20. And, thank God, we don’t have the brains we had at 20 either. We have what we have. We have ourselves.

Men might have sex on the brain, but women have sex in the brain. We think about sex fewer times a minute, but we think about it for longer, and in more complicated, narrative ways; a detailed landscape involving not just a friendly man but also clean, crisp sheets, a good-hair day, expert kissing, rough and smooth, worship, degradation, complimentary words about our beauty and brilliance.

Our sex brain is alive with a pulsing amalgamation of moments, all the different fingertips and lips that have written on our bodies. It is a valuable storage facility. And just one of those moments (let’s take five minutes with the personal trainer at that hotel in Turkey who was some kind of God and will henceforth be known as God) can keep us going for years. We make deposits in the sex-brain-bank and we draw on them.

The female sex brain. It has great power but if we are honest we are still not completely sure how to control it. I mean yes, we know that we have the magic ability to keep relationships sexually alive for years through the muscle of our own imaginations. And we are not talking about role-play, the horror of hearing a whispered ‘tell me what you want’ (answer: £10 million pounds and to be left alone), or fishnets or firemen or mermaids or teachers or driving instructors or tennis coaches or nurses or aliens or nannies or policemen. But rather the ability of the sex brain to invite someone else to the party (quietly and discreetly and invisibly). They’re there – Dylan from Beverly Hills, 90210 or that barman from that wedding – but only you know they’re there.

So far, so useful. But sex brains play tricks on us. We have flashbacks like a deranged junkie. One minute you are in a meeting listening to Geoff from digital droning on about strategy, and suddenly there it is, the memory of a table pressing on your back, or a hand unhooking a bra, and you are lost down that particular rabbit hole. ‘I do apologise Geoff, could you repeat that?’

So yes, we should be a wary of our sex brains, but also proud of them; of their incredible focus and creativity and meandering ways. We will, after all, be spending more time with our imagination than we will with any man. And our imagination can always get it up.

This is not a rant about women in the workplace, about all the attempts to get more ‘birds on boards’, about the fact that there are fewer female CEOS than there are CEOS named John. But this is not a rant about women in the workplace.

I was brought up to see work as a series of goals, each goal an ending in itself. It’s a very straight-line way of thinking. And life does not tend to move in a straight line.

I’ve slowly climbed the ladder of my profession. Or have I? Have I not just ping-ponged from job to job without a plan? The only time I actually made a plan – to ask for a pay rise – it was denied. I had a biggish job, definitely a career highlight, I shined the spotlight on young talent. I made them stars. I was at my desk, bright-eyed every morning at 7am. No one ever saw me in a bad mood. But, as more and more was asked of me, the pressure began to hurt, my personality began to malfunction privately. So I thought I would ask for a pay rise: let’s put a price on this pain. This is straight-line thinking, right?

So I asked, and I was told no. That the ones to be given pay rises were younger; they were ‘the stars’ said the (male) management. So I resigned. And then they said, ‘Oh no, stay, we’ll give you the money.’ But it was too late. I wanted more.

I was ambitious for work where I could be a woman without pretending to be a ballbreaker or a floosie. Where other women aren’t threats but rather strings to your bow. Where no one sits above like Zeus, directing his miniuniverse with fire balls of fear and the odd comment on my tits.

So hey, we are in new territory… It’s a quiet rebellion. Women don’t start wars with guns. But we are an army of women who have looked – really looked – and said, ‘No thanks – I’ll do it this way.’ But as I said this is not a rant about women in the workplace. This is about... well... let’s see.