When you did everything right and still feel blah

The specific flavour of this

You built a career. It worked. The money is fine, the CV is enviable, the life looks — from outside, and honestly from inside on a good day — like the one you were aiming at.

And you feel blah. Not depressed exactly, not in crisis, just curiously absent from your own life. You have caught yourself wondering what the next thirty years are supposed to consist of. Maybe you have thought about starting your own thing, or going back to school, or changing direction entirely — and then thought about the mortgage.

The unhelpful thing about this state is that it comes with no permission to complain. Nothing is wrong. That is, in fact, the problem.

This is a documented phase, not a personal failure

Developmental psychology has described this for decades: a stage in adult life where people reappraise the choices they made and the goals they inherited. It is normal, it is common, and it lands hardest on people who executed their plan well — because a plan that failed gives you something obvious to fix, and a plan that worked does not.

Which means the question is not what went wrong. It is a harder and more interesting one: whose goals were those, and do they still fit?

What runs underneath it, for gay men in particular

• Goals set during a time of not being safe. If a chunk of your twenties went on establishing that you were successful enough to be beyond criticism, that is a real achievement — and it was built to answer a question you may no longer be asking.
• Age in a culture that is strange about it. Gay life can be brutal about getting older, and midlife arrives with a second, social layer on top of the existential one.
• A generation with fewer maps. Many gay men in midlife now had no visible model of what forty-five, fifty-five, sixty-five was supposed to look like for them.
• The quiet drinking. Not a crisis. Just a bit more, most evenings, for a while now.

What we actually do

Two things, roughly in this order.

First, get the fog out of the way. The blah is often sitting on top of sleep that is not restorative, a nervous system that has been at low-grade alarm for years, and a habit of never stopping long enough to notice any of it. That part responds fast, and it is hard to reappraise anything while exhausted.

Then the actual question. Which of your goals are yours. What you would do if the money question were solved. What you have been calling impossible that is merely expensive, or frightening, or would require telling someone the truth. This is where the coaching and motivational interviewing side does most of the work, with hypnosis used to get underneath the rehearsed answers — because the rehearsed answers are the problem.