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Our Creativity Columnist never thought of himself as a candidate for having a midlife crisis until he realized that time was running out for ...

I realize that the generation that warned "Never trust anyone over 30" has been over 30 for over 30 years. But it's still odd to think that the very term "midlife crisis" is now middle-aged. A Canadian psychoanalyst named Elliot Jacques coined it in 1965.

Recent research indicates that men are a tad likelier than women to have a midlife crisis. Seventy-five percent of the men surveyed claim that this is because they played with toy guns and G. I. Joes when young, but then grew up to spend their entire lives on the office IT help line. (I can document this survey. There were four of us in the elevator.)

I'm an authority on midlife crisis. Not only did I just google the phrase and read almost half of a Wikipedia article, but my own personal crisis began a few hours ago. I didn't realize that this was what was happening; I thought I had skipped my thyroid medication. It would not have occurred to me that I was having a midlife crisis. Frankly I always thought the term meant (for a man, anyway) that you bought a convertible or made a fool of yourself with younger women, and I had not done either recently.

But no, from my extensive research I learned that when Dr. Jacques coined the term, he was referring to the mind's resistance to the onset of emotional maturity that ought to begin with the realization of the inevitability of death. When I read this definition, I realized that I was undergoing a midlife crisis.

"So," you may be thinking, "I thought this column was about creativity."

So it is. My crisis is about creativity. Just when I get some decades of experience behind me — just when I feel a stronger sense of my own abilities and can sort goals from daydreams — I realize that I'm not writing quickly enough. I worry that I won't be able to finish all I want to do. We all have this experience, of course. Your own obsession may be places not visited, music not played or dollars not earned. Mine takes the form of obsessing on books I have not written and may never write.

Of course, back when I had my entire life ahead of me, I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. I hadn't realized the advantage of perspective that age brings: learning from experience by looking back at one phase of life from the vantage point of the next. I was still trying on personalities and flirting with possible futures. I hadn't learned to trust my own magnetism toward certain topics, or my natural way of responding to the excitement and confusion of being alive.

I need to think of this sense of urgency — which is really more about love of life than fear of death — as positive rather than negative, motivation rather than alarm. Is all creative endeavor just a fancy version of graffiti, scrawling I WAS HERE across the world? Besides making you face your mortality, perhaps a midlife crisis is about coming to terms with who you will never be, which means accepting who you are.

Michael Sims is the author of "Adam's Navel" and other nonfiction books, including the forthcoming "Apollo's Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination." He writes for The Washington Post, L. A. Times, and many other publications.