I grew up on Bob-o-Link Drive—a name that makes me think of buoyancy. Of fishbowls resting on my bedroom window sill, inhabited for one week out of every year by bloated, haggard goldfish won at the Lake County Fair. I would sometimes watch my parents leave for work through my window, the fish gimping along in the bowl beside me as if they were swimming in quicksand instead of water. I would watch as my parents backed out of the driveway in the morning, their faces becoming weathered with each passing year, the way that the stability of once-solid architecture begins to crack from being exposed to the elements of the world over time. It is something beyond simple aging that is slowly turning their bodies from “I’s” to “S’s”.

I somehow had justified it to myself that they were happy being middle class, only to see them leave looking more and more fatigued, and return 10 hours later, looking less and less satisfied. I didn’t understand where the weight of the day-to-day came from. After all, I grew up in a neighborhood full of streets with names like Oak and Brady. Streets with names that made putting your feet up on the furniture okay. Streets with names that look like the sweet center of the middle-class stomachache. But, now, looking out that window and looking back in, I am left trying to determine which fishbowl is which, while all of us struggle desperately to stay afloat.

I thought I lived in the crux of American idealism. I thought the middle class was the center of gravity in the American economy, grounded and well-balanced in both monetary success and communal generosity with plenty of golden opportunities for self-advancement in the status quo. So why am I so tired? Why do I feel like I am constantly behind? More than feeling constantly behind, why do I feel like I am part of a class that is stuck in a series of harrowing juxtapositions? In one ear I am told that the economy depends on consumer spending to create growth while in the other ear I am told that saving money increases capital investment. The middle class is taught both to horde its income and to spend it all at once, causing a relentless, perpetual treadmill effect on wage earners. If upward mobility is bookended in contradiction, then how is anyone supposed to get up the socioeconomic ladder?

This dialectic dilemma reminds me of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a man ordered by the gods to push a rock up a hill for all eternity. The rock, never quite reaching the top, would always roll back down the hill, giving no solace to Sisyphus for the fruits of his labor. Similarly, the middle class must simultaneously combat the financial force of gravity and the friction caused by trying to stay afloat and get ahead. Thus, the middle class, too, is stuck between a rock and a hard place—and the hard place is the poverty line. If the absurd, endless, relentless pursuit to the top is encapsulated in myth, then is the middle class a myth as well?

Even trying to unearth what it means to be “middle class” proves to be somewhat of an elusive task. The U.S. Census Bureau provides no definition of the middle class. It offers median statistics and averages of aggregate household incomes, but it presents no insight about what this information really means. For example, the Census Bureau says the average household income for 2001, based on four people and two wage earners, is $42,200. But these calculations feel somehow empty of any real relevance. They don’t give a sense of anything beyond the statistical logic of number crunching.

Sure, the Bureau provides a breakdown of information by demographics, but I don’t know what it means to be part of a $42,200 household in, say, French Lick, Ind., because I’ve never been there, much less lived there. So, if the elusive heart of the middle class does not add up in an economic sense, is it merely just a term of sentiment used to give shape to an idea of American living?

The fact that most everyone you meet seems to either consider themselves middle class, or at least anchored in the middle-class “I built this company with my own bare hands/blood, sweat, and tears” ideology, stirs up this notion of some illusionary hybrid of Rockefellean-Rockwellean American idealism. The idea of the self-made man, without the wealthy pedigree, and infused with the grassroots rebellious patriotism of the sweat from the American brow.

How can nearly everyone consider themselves to be part of the middle class? Is the middle class simply an expression relating to the desire to find the streets paved with gold and the opportunity to seize a disproportionate size of the American pie? Are most of us still living under this romanticized, outdated umbrella of the American-dream model? It seems like a question of anti-nature vs. anti-nurture. The myth of middle-class idealism trying to forcibly define the fundamental ethos for this country. That myth is perpetuated and reinforced throughout the decades, and even more so during periods of decadence. It’s socioeconomic Darwinism—when it comes to the wallet, it’s the survival of the fattest.

Perhaps the real middle of the middle class is simply a constant tightrope anxiety: How can we choose whether to try to change the system and or to give into it? This is the ultimate middle-class juxtaposition.

The wealthy don’t want to change a system that works for them, however lopsidedly, and the poor have enough trouble just trying to function and get by. At the same time, I am an active participant and product of this society. I can afford my food, my shelter, my tools for distraction. What I can’t afford is the guilt-ridden self-loathing of class-consciousness, and feeling overwhelmed with the weight of buying into the very thing that oppresses me. I am riddled with the apathetic sensation of feeling like I’m nobody because I’m just like everybody else. I complain about the system while flipping through magazines and praying to L.A. I feel like I can’t digest the numbers of the casualties and inequalities of social inadequacies because of our society’s legendary resilience. These numbers feel like they can never astonish enough to provoke true social change. I can drop a dime into the bucket of a homeless person on the street, but it still feels like just what it is…a drop in the bucket. Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor, I am told, is getting wider than ever, and I am stuck in this immovable middle.

I am afraid to find out that the middle class was a form of religious politicking, a fad birthed out of fear to give a false sense of security in a postwar 1950s world—a social trend in the dynamics of community that seems heartbreakingly out of date in the current age of divorce, single parenting, lack of job security and massive credit-card debt. It scares me that this idea that I used to find such comfort in, such American pride, is plagued with the malcontent of trying to hang on to some symbolic attachment to the American dream. A dream that is anchored to this past idealism and has not evolved along with our reality.

When I think of middle class, I want so desperately to recall images of the sitcom The Wonder Years. I want to think of the mom knowing more than she lets on and the dad coming home “from the plant” and not knowing how to emotionally communicate with his family. I want to think that I grew up like Kevin Arnold, and I cling to the last line of every episode, but I don’t know why. Maybe I’m just searching for a false sense of security in a possible prewar 2002 world, a sense of finding the center of what it means to be a citizen of this country.

Still, I hear the police in my American brain telling me that I’ve read too much leftist propaganda and that I’ve subscribed to another myth—the myth of equality. This voice says I should just accept that life isn’t fair, that the top 1 percent of income earners raking in the same amount as the bottom 40 percent shouldn’t be subject to scrutiny. I should rationalize that the Russian-roulette-wheel revolutionaries bet it all on red, only to have it fall on black. I guess I should just admit that everyone is middle class and no one is middle class because we all buy it—the American dream. However openly or latent, we all feel like we are chasing after the thing that we have come to believe as being an American. If we stop running on the treadmill, or even stop to breathe, we feel behind, counterproductive. We feel the incremental suicide of failure as the days and years fly past at a rate of acceleration that surpasses our running. Who can keep up?

Who can keep up with every headline, retail line, drive-thru line—all the while fighting the urge to fall in line by reading between the lines. There is an undeniable sense of anger, shock and sadness one feels when looking to that sacred middle and not finding it there. That certain sensation of being a red-blooded American, then going white and feeling oh so blue.