Time to celebrate?

Notes on a milestone birthday

Photo by Pineapple Supply Co. on Unsplash

In the lead up to my 40th birthday in May, I faced an inordinate amount of stress about what I would do to celebrate. 

I didn’t worry about looking older. In fact, the older I get, the less concerned I seem to be about outer indicators of age. I didn’t worry about getting older. If my heart issues have taught me anything, it’s that hitting successively higher birthdays is an accomplishment and a blessing. No, I worried about what I would do to mark the day itself. Somehow, what I did to celebrate would be the defining metric of whether I have a worthwhile life. (Yes, I know how silly that sounds.)

This kind of “logic” strikes me often. On anniversaries—of breakups, romances, hospital visits, apartment moves, first-days-of-work, all sorts of things—I wind up taking stock, comparing how far I’ve come (or not), how much has changed (or not), since the previous year. The feeling hits particularly hard on New Year’s Eve and my birthday. 

At 40, I could list the ways I was killing it: Great job, nice apartment, friends, family, a writing community, relative good health, a very fluffy cat. I could also list the ways I struggled with those things in the past year. Rolling layoffs had curdled morale at work. Friendships had changed or ended, hitting me hard. My heart had forced me to sacrifice, from cutting out caffeine to needing to catch my breath more often. 

The aforementioned fluffy cat

What verdict would my birthday render on all of this? Was I a success or not? In my mind, my birthday celebration would give me the answer. 

The solution turned out to be to take the focus off a particular day and celebrate in a bunch of ways. I went on a deeply relaxing beach vacation with my sister. I saw “Wicked” on Broadway with friends. I had a lavish, sun-drenched brunch with my family. I took the day itself off from work and spent much of it writing, an activity that makes me feel most like me. I am extremely fortunate to be able to do all of this. 

Strangely, as soon as I turned 40, the stress went away. In the end, it didn’t matter how I celebrated. It didn’t matter what stock I took of my life, what verdict came down. When the milestone passed, all of its power evaporated. My days are not stuck on a microscope slide, meant to be examined one by one for some key to who I am. The days keep going and going. Hopefully, they will keep going for many years to come. 

We’re all getting older, and if you start looking for writing about aging, you’ll find it everywhere. Here are some lovely/interesting/helpful links about notching the years.

• lyz
  Lenz’s interview with writer Glynnis MacNicol is a truly joyful romp about pleasure, sex, cheese, Paris and the belief that you can revel in all of the above at any age. 

• In fact, a positive attitude toward aging is linked to longer, healthier lives, research suggests. Here are five tips on how to change how you think about getting older, via The New York Times. 

• Arthur C. Brooks, who turned 60 last month, writes in The Atlantic about how milestone birthdays can mess you up—and how to make the most of them.

• This is the age when nostalgia truly sets in, per

  Jillian Anthony
  of Cruel Summer Book Club. 

• “I think about dying every day. I think maybe I always did.” Writer John Buskin’s triple-bypass surgery and recovery knocks free his denial about mortality.

• Do you have an inner ageist? Yes, you do. 

• Why do so many of us feel a different age in our heads than we actually are? The Atlantic’s Jennifer Senior delves into the bizarre, and seemingly universal, phenomenon known as “subjective age.” 

• Online calculators, wearable devices, and blood and saliva-based tests claim to estimate the age of your heart—but it’s not clear the results will help, reports The Wall Street Journal. 

• If you haven’t listened to “Wiser Than Me,” the podcast where Julia Louis-Dreyfus interviews famous women who are older than she is, get on it! 

• “I don’t want to be cagey about how old I am; I want to live life fully because of it, not despite it.”

  Jenna Park
  , writer of Everything Is Liminal, on embracing her inner ajumma. 

• I’ll give Anne Lamott the last words here: 

  “So many indignities are involved in aging, and yet so many graces, too. The perfectionism that had run me ragged and has kept me scared and wired my whole life has abated. The idea of perfectionism at 60 is comical when, like me, you’ve worn non-matching black flats out on stage. In my experience, most of us age away from brain and ambition toward heart and soul, and we bathe in relief that things are not worse.” 

📢 Keep this conversation going! How did you celebrate your most recent birthday? How did you feel about it? Leave a comment or send me a note at theheartdialogues@substack.com.