A Handy Gen-X Guide To Not Totally Melting Down After Decades Of Holding It Together
spwidoff | ShutterstockYou can take the girl out of the eighties, but you can’t take the eighties out of the girl. I know this because I am still, on some cellular level, waiting for those air raid sirens. Like the ones in The Day After and Red Dawn that signaled nuclear war was imminent and the bombs were about to rain down. Quick, hide under your school desk! Or so the drills went.
As so many Gen-Xers did, I grew up with stress as background noise. Our collective childhood anxiety was birthed, nurtured, and mass-produced by the adults in charge who weren’t doing much “in charging.”
Hence the nightly PSA at 10 p.m. that asked our parents: Do you know where your children are? A lot of them answered no. Or “Oh yeah, I have kids.”
We were a lab experiment; our little bodies crammed into a petri dish that sat unwatched and unattended as we faced trauma head-on. No safety nets and no permission to talk or have feelings about any of it.
Nuclear annihilation. Chernobyl. The AIDS crisis. The Challenger explosion. The Iranian hostage crisis.
And as if this fear of the unknown wasn’t bad enough for our immature frontal lobes, we also had Freddy Krueger, who made sure we wouldn’t get the sleep we so desperately needed. So yeah. Gen-X knows stress.
We also know what it’s like to handle it alone, as children, with nothing more than a used bike, a house key hanging from a string around our neck, and a knack for finding all the good trouble in the space between street lamps turning on and off.
Pretty sure if you look up “feral” in the dictionary, you’ll find a photo of my brother and me — scabbed knees, candy cigarettes dangling from our lips, and a wildness in our eyes that screamed social services.
Born between 1965 and 1980, Gen-X is America’s forgotten and ignored middle child
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We are the trial-and-error kids on whom the survival instructions for life are based. We know how to stop, drop, and roll. And only we can prevent forest fires. We know the dangers of quicksand, piranhas, the Bermuda Triangle, and Bigfoot (who was always just around the next tree).
We know to wait 30 minutes after eating to swim so you don’t cramp and drown. And to check Halloween candy for razors. We know Stranger Danger, Chester the Molester, and to avoid white vans so your face doesn’t show up on a milk carton.
Essentially, Gen-X grew up learning how not to die
We did not, however, grow up with adults who said things like, “That must have been really hard for you.”
More like: Go outside. Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about. Just wait until your father gets home.
And my favorite: Rub some dirt in it.
To be clear, this isn’t a pity party. Gen-X would never waste a party feeling sorry for ourselves.
Still, you have to give us credit for figuring out childhood: how to get through it, how to survive it. We learned to self-regulate before self-regulation was a thing. We learned to read a room, survey the scene, go unnoticed, dissociate like a pro, and find a way to laugh in the midst of every mental health challenge.
Gen-X knew from a young age that nobody is coming to save you; you learn quickly to just figure it out
With age comes dual caregiving, apparently. This is where life for a Gen-Xer gets really fun (FYI: we’re also the most sarcastic generation). We’re called the Sandwich Generation. The one smashed in between raising our own kids while simultaneously taking care of our aging parents.
Though, considering we’re also dealing with an increased cost of living and longer lifespans for the old folks, Fortune describes our duties more like a $15 footlong. (Oh, that reminds me, I need to eat lunch. I wish I didn’t speak from personal sandwich experience.)
I also wish I didn’t have to organize my life around this sentence: I am my mother’s sole caregiver. Every decision, every plan, every scheduled outing, every spontaneous whim on a shelf collecting dust: all of it exists in that sentence.
I love my mom. But it’s a messy, layered, challenging kind of love that any child of a parent they have deep trauma from knows. Still, I’m here when no one else is (Bueller, Bueller), and caring for her in a way that is dignified and compassionate and loving because I’m a decent human.
I wish I had other decent humans in my family to help out, but I’ll go on pretending I don’t have a brother out there somewhere (anyone else an faux-only child because of MIA siblings?).
This is the kind of stress that makes you grind your teeth until you get a headache. The reason for shredded cuticles. The kind that wakes you up in a midnight sweat when you realize there’s only one scenario that will free you from this responsibility.
And it’s the kind of stress that doesn’t fit neatly into a “How to Not Lose Your Mind” listicle: It’s the invisible load. The emotional math that isn’t mathing. The constant static in my head that never turns off, even when I’m watching a movie, making dinner, or sitting still and staring into the void in search of five minutes of peace. But I was built for this.
Here’s why: I didn’t go to therapy when I was a kid; I went to my room. I didn’t talk to other humans; I talked to the sky and let the wind carry my words. I didn’t process my feelings; I put on headphones and let the music do it for me. Which, by the way, totally works. But I’ll get to that.
Gen-X was raised on chaos and prepped for stress
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I’m not saying any of this was a choice. I’ve never met a Gen-Xer who is all “Dude, I’m stoked I had to raise myself and figure things out on my own from the age of 5.”
Not that we’d ever say this out loud since some trauma runs too deep to change. So yes, we’re a stressed-out generation, but we’re also the best at handling it. Not because we’re tougher. Not because we have a thicker skin (well, a lot of us do, but not because we chose to).
It’s because we’ve been doing this longer, with fewer resources, than any other generation before or after us. And a reason we make pretty awesome parents, for the most part, is that we want our kids to know that we do know and care about where they are, and not just at 10 p.m.
Could this explain why I haven’t lost my mind as I tread water in this new phase of life called Caregiving? Or why, on those particularly grueling days with my mom, when everything is a crisis, everything is going wrong, and it’s all I can do to not start walking toward the horizon with no plans to return, I stay. Maybe.
It’s something else Gen-X knows all too well: how to feel genuinely terrible but totally fine at the same moment
And how to anchor a nervous system before it derails to keep some sort of twisted balance until peace of mind finds you again. Those anchors — that’s the generational gold right there. And what I’m passing down to my kids. Since those $15 footlongs have cost me any actual wealth for them to inherit.
Now, these are not scientifically proven. There’s no routine involved. But they work. So try them. Give them a shot. Or not. Whatever.
Get Down On It
Put on headphones and lie on the floor on your back (something about being horizontal and not in bed makes your nervous system reset to “Permission to Chill”). Listen to an entire album: Boston. Fleetwood Mac. Prince. The Carpenters (Karen’s voice could soothe a Kraken).
This wires your brain for emotional release, and what you’ll see behind your eyelids is better than any drug-induced visions. Enjoy the trip.
Turn Up the Radio
Get in your car, turn on 80s on 8 on SiriusXM (or 70s on 7 or Classic Vinyl, whatever inflates your tires). Do not have a destination. Nor an agenda. Just drive until your endorphins are released, and your voice is hoarse from singing at the top of your lungs.
Shake Your Groove Thing
Do yoga to Def Leppard. Take a walk to Kool & The Gang. Run to Metallica. Whatever your version of unhinged body movement looks like, do that. The combo of physical activity and the music that lived in your body at fifteen is chemically different than doing just one or the other. Science probably supports this; I haven’t checked.
Spin Me Round
Though it’s not as easy as going to the mall or Blockbuster in the 80s, find a record store. Browse the albums. Smell the vinyl. If you don’t know why this works, I can’t explain it. If you do know why, you just exhaled.
I Wanna Go Back
Go through “the box” if you have one. You know what box I’m talking about; the one with old concert ticket stubs and blurry Polaroids and the thing you did that one summer that you never told anyone about. (You don’t have to tell anyone now, either. Just hold the memory for a moment.) You’re smiling, aren’t you?
For Those About to Rock
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Wear a concert t-shirt to the grocery store, the doctor’s appointment, the parent/teacher conference. The symbol of a band that mattered to you at seventeen is not nothing. Wear it with pride. If you don’t have one, go to a concert and get one (can confirm Def Leppard still rocks the stage even four decades later).
Don’t You Forget About Me
Watch WarGames, or a John Hughes movie, or binge Cheers. The comfort of stories that you already know how they end cannot be underestimated.
Watch commercials from the 70s on YouTube. This offers a hard reset for a brain that has been on high alert, since it’s impossible to remain in the dumps while watching an old lady ask, “Where’s the Beef?” If it’s the holiday season, watch a classic Christmas movie. Like Die Hard. This is not up for debate.
Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’
Sit on the grass. Directly on it. Not a blanket; not a chair. On the ground with the blades poking your skin (shorts are recommended). The way you did when you were a kid and furniture was stupid. Five minutes at least. It’s weird how well this works.
Make out in a car, or outside in the dark. I’m not elaborating. You know what this is about.
Say You, Say Me
Let the dark humor fly. But only with another Gen-Xer, since it’s like doing ecstasy: it only works when you’re with the right person.
Repeat “Whatever” in the mirror. Like you used to do with Bloody Mary. Gen-X invented this as a survival mechanism, and we should use it more. Not as avoidance, but as a release (there’s a difference).
Say no to anything you don’t want to do. We grew up with this slogan meant as a response to someone offering you drugs, but it applies to a boatload of life situations. So before you agree to something you don’t have the bandwidth for, ask yourself: What would Gen-X do? Then do that.
I’m writing this from the couch where I sit with one foot on the floor ready for action: to bring my mom her book after her nap so she can read on the patio, refill her water glass, change the laundry from the washer to the dryer, stop my dog from turning into Cujo on the sliding glass door when the neighbor and her dog dare to walk by, bring my mom’s book and water glass back inside when she wants to play Hearts on the computer.
This is my life right now (well, actually, this is just a snapshot of an hour of it). It’s a lot. And I can’t pretend otherwise.
What I keep coming back to, though, is this: I was trained for this. Not by my parents, not by any adult, not gently, not intentionally, not with any care for my developing nervous system.
Gen-X was trained by the chaos, the emotional neglect, and the understanding that we were on our own
Good luck with that. But for a generation raised on “Whining is for sissies”, I’d say we’re doing a pretty banger job. At least, if we’re talking about maxing out our X roots of the past to get through the present. Back then, we just tried not to die. Now, we’re just trying not to lose our last remaining brain cells on the way to death.
And many of us are doing it without assistance, acknowledgment, or the ability to veg out for a few hours on MTV (I do not doubt that if this were available, my entire life would change for the better).
This is totally on-brand for us, though. We know no one’s coming to save us. So we keep saving ourselves. One album, one long drive, one John Hughes movie, one inappropriate gut laugh … One whatever at a time.
Suzanna Quintana is a writer, author, and editor-in-chief of The Virago, a storytelling publication for women. Her candid essays on caregiving for her elderly mother, navigating midlife, and the Gen-Xperience have struck a chord with thousands who see themselves in her stories. Suzanna writes from the bone and isn’t afraid to say the quiet part out loud (well, maybe a little afraid, but that doesn’t stop her). She survives on dark humor and 80s music.
