I am 40 today. In the card my parents sent, my dad wrote, “Congratulations on reaching the decade, that, for most of us includes the pinnacle.” He must have some fatherly intuition to be tapping into some of my most crushing and precious anxieties. It’s not that I have a problem getting older. I tell the girls regularly about my aspirations for being an eccentric old lady. How, if they choose to have children one day, I would really love being a grandmother.
It’s not the aging. The the side tassels spraying out of the corners of my eyes or the way the skin on either side of my chin seems to have loosened like day-old party streamers. The slow recovery from any night I stay up past 11. The feeling that I’m asking people to repeat themselves way more than I used to.
It’s the awareness that if this is indeed my pinnacle decade as dad says it could be, I have no idea what mountain I’m pinnacling. And really, it feels as if I’m not pinnacling a mountain at all, but a squat plateau that stretches on for miles and miles with a view of the soaring mountains that all the other people are pinnacling.
Forty comes on the heels of a pandemic where so many people seem to have dug deep into themselves and unearthed Big T Truths. Like Truths about where they should work or where they should live or what they should prioritize and clarity about the people they wanted to be. Meanwhile, I stumbled from quarantine into a career that seasoned professionals are leaving in droves wondering whether it’s the right fit but too IN IT to even ask the right questions. Not that I even know what the right questions are. Or what I would be doing if it weren’t this.
I find myself repeating, now more than ever, “what am I even doing with my life?”
I’m less a mountain climber and more a locomotive chuffing along a track with none of those little track switcher doohickeys. Or, if this paragraph can fit one more self-reflective metaphor, I’m like an eight-year-old who’s been spun around and around in circles while playing pin the tail on the donkey after too much cake and soda. I’m just fumbling around in a sightless, over-caffeinated state attempting to win a party game in hopes of impressing other party-goers maybe nabbing a Slinky or some other kinda cool birthday party trinket.
But if I’m going to be extra, extra special 4oth-birthday honest, beyond the accolades and Slinky we all know is going to be all misshapen within minutes of being slinked, what I’m really after is worthiness. Because the wrenching tightness in my chest that comes with dad’s reference to my peak decade is that if I stop doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, that I will stop mattering.
That I will stop being.
Stop being what? Relevant. Necessary. Needed.
Loved.
I guess I just tripped over a Big T Truth on my way to pinning that donkey tail to the door knob.
Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to handle that sort of Big T Truth in my 20s or 30s. It takes four decades to earn awareness of the source of your deepest fears.
It’s not just the doing involved with a career. It’s the doing as a mother. As a wife. As a sister. As a daughter. As a neighbor. As a writer.
As a good human.
If there’s something that being so inundated at work has taught me is that there will never stop being things that need to be done. Ever. And while many of those things are satisfying (I get downright giddy when a reluctant student drops some Big K Knowledge about a story we’re reading or when they write sentences with so much unintentional voice I’m ready to force them into careers as poets and novelists.), there is also so much box checking to do. So much it can be disheartening. Disenchanting. Disengaging.
I feel as if I look ahead at the next decade- as I’m climbing up or down or over- whichever way I’m actually going, I feel like those moments of giddiness are the breadcrumbs. That’s the trail. And it’s not so important where it ends up. Just that it’s the one I follow. And if I can be more aware of the breadcrumbs and less aware of the question of worthiness, then that is the good life.
I think something my limited brain has been unwilling to accept over the last 40 years is that I need to assume worthiness. I need to let go of the thought that it’s somehow something I can earn or prove deserving of. Because I would tell anyone who asked me today stranger or closest confidante, that they are worthy of love and deserving of peace just by virtue of existing on this plane. Hell – existing in any plane (or plain, if you’re hanging out on the plateau with me).
Think of all the ugliness we could avoid if we just assume worthiness right at the get go?
I know you’re not supposed to share your wishes, (but, like, who actually even knows how wishes work?!) but when I blew out the candles on the extra delicious Oreo Ice Cream cake Brad picked up for my birthday, I wished I could find peace in my own brain. Which I’m only now realizing is inner peace (not dinner peace as autocorrect so helpfully tried to suggest, although dinner peace would be awesome, too). That’s right, birthday candles all you have to do is help me out with some inner peace. No big thing. Even though I’m pretty sure I just ruined my chances of inner peace by announcing that’s what I wished for. Good thing I have a standing appointment at 2 a.m. for lying awake thinking about all the poor choices I’ve made. You’re welcome to join me. I can send you a calendar invite on Outlook if you want.
I love digression. It makes moments of painful honesty more palatable and less awkward. Except when you re-awkward it by pointing it out again.
Maybe my 40s will be about peak awkwardness. I’m on my way to summating Mount Cringe. I’ll use my old, wrinkled, tiny hands (and my tiny hands’ tiny hands) to plant a flag.
The flag will probably be covered in cat hair.
It might be the most important work of my life.
Or it might not.
Either way, they’ll be crumbs to nibble on.
Happy Birthday Sue! As someone who is on the cusp of 40, this spoke to me.