The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

The Original Man/Woman
A common experience for us humans is that at a certain point in life—
often near the age of forty—we go through what is known as a midlife
crisis. Our work has become mechanical and soulless. Our intimate
relationships have lost their excitement and spirit. We crave change,

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and we look for it through a new career or relationship, some new
experiences, even some danger. Such changes may give us a short-term
therapeutic jolt, but they leave the real source of the problem
untouched, and the malaise will return.
Let us look at this phenomenon from a different angle—as a crisis of
identity. As children, we had a rather fluid sense of self. We absorbed
the energy of everyone and everything around us. We felt a very wide
range of emotions and were open to experience. But in our youth we
had to shape a social self, one that was cohesive and would allow us to
fit into a group. To do so we had to trim and tighten up our freer-
flowing spirit. And much of this tightening revolved around gender
roles. We had to repress masculine or feminine aspects of ourselves, in
order to feel and present a more consistent self.
In our late teens and into our twenties, we continually adjust this
identity in order to fit in—it is still a work in progress, and we derive
some pleasure in forging this identity. We feel our lives can go in many
directions, and the many possibilities enchant us. But as the years go
by, the gender role we play gets more and more fixed, and we begin to
sense that we have lost something essential, that we are almost
strangers to who we were in our youth. Our creative energies have
dried up. Naturally we look outward for the source of this crisis, but it
comes from within. We have become imbalanced, too rigidly identified
with our role and the mask we present to others. Our original nature
incorporated more of the qualities that we absorbed from the mother
or father, and of the traits of the opposite sex that are biologically a