When I was in my 30s, I wrote that one day, I woke up, I was 32 and I didn’t know how I got there. The same thing happened in my 40s.
Each time, I felt a sense that I had done a flurry of things big and small, great and mediocre. Some, seemed senseless and stupid. Some, felt like a deliberate step towards the road to glory then inexplicably fell by the wayside and forgotten. Some, unplanned but turned out to be fortuitous decisions.
Through both decades, there was always this feeling that I still had a lot of time. Time for what? That was the big question that I sometimes faced but more often left lingering in the subconscious, without an expiry time stamp.
50 was different – I walked in with my eyes fully open. I am a single and childless woman, by choice until I decide otherwise. However, I didn’t have the marked life stages that my peers with marriages and children have. Their children grow up and they mark life’s passing with their growth stages, from a positive pregnancy test stick to being handed a grandchild by the one whose diapers they once changed.
I didn’t have that, so my life is a series of projects held together by the thread of things that interest me. There are many things written about lives within that socially normal path but very little of the lives lived otherwise. Or maybe I haven’t been paying attention.
Marching towards 50 has become a different life. At 45, the question of ‘Time for what?’ morphed into ‘What now?’ because, yes, I woke up one day and realized I don’t have forever.
A temporary break from Brexit turned into permanent return due to covid, spurred by seeing the ravage of time across the faces of my elders, their slowed movements, one aunt becoming bed ridden. Both aunts now depend on me to keep their lives moving and cared for through my presence in the household as their stabilizer.
An unplanned return home, a life paused evidenced by the boxes in the UK waiting to be resolved, a fortuitous job landing that initially was a covid only stint stretching over 3 years.
‘I don’t have forever.’ now sits alongside ‘What now?’. My answers to both became an exercise in re-assessing the woman I now want to be. I looked at all the different selves I was at different points in my life. A seemingly strange exercise, that celebrated the parts of me that never will be again and relegated to the past. They were part of the woman I once was, not the woman I am now. I cannot take them with me forward, towards the new woman I am evolving into as I write this.
The best thing about being a 50 year old is part realizing how rich my life has been. Messy times blending with celebrations and I fully intend to keep living that way.
Who I intend to be now is no longer daunting. I no longer possess the anxiety of who I really am in this world, whichever country I find myself in. On the burdens of blending in, on being a strange, outspoken, no-filter woman in a society, saddled with Catholic guilt and filial piety.
That is the best prize about being 50 – life has happened to me. I now understand that the opinions of people who don’t pay my bills or fund my retirement have no effect nor allowed participation in my life.
I confess, I have stopped trying to find answers to all my angsty life questions. The simple act of being tired of life’s questions and dropping them in favor of more interesting things is my definition of freedom. We cannot go back. There is no point carrying burdens acquired from the past, so I stopped searching for answers and resolved to just live.
This is 50 – I don’t have forever so no apologies, as usual, because this time is mine as it is yours. Time to live, however which way you now want to.