(In the cheerful manner of one who has absolutely not spent the past several months having a physical and existential meltdown)
“Hello!”
Greetings from a coffee shop where, as I write this, a toddler is having a meltdown in front of me. Not about anything of consequence, it appears—just a good old exercise in externalising her feelings.
Big feelings must be so hard for a little person to hold; I’m touched by the way the adults with her are giving her and her feelings space as she learns them—something I’m certain, from knowing and observing the adults around me, so many of us were not afforded the opportunity to do as children. Something I’ve learned as an adult—that’s so simple, but never occurred to me until I read it somewhere—is that infants have no way of identifying complex emotions and rely on adults to help them recognise and name what they’re feeling, before learning how manage them.
It must be (I don’t remember, personally) terrifying to begin to experience the internal onslaught of consciousness before we are equipped to understand what is happening to us. How many of us actually had someone take the time to explain sadness, frustration, anger, envy, disappointment, or contentment? I think what is more likely is that many of us learned to categorise, rather than identify, certain emotions as “good” or “bad” by registering the consequences of those emotions. For example, in the “bad” bucket might be any emotions we observed as an inconvenience to the adults around us, so our “management strategy” probably started and ended with simply shutting it—and, by extension, ourselves—down.
To paraphrase (/bastardise) Rumi: Out beyond ideas of wrong feeling and right feeling, there is a feel. I have a hard time identifying what I’m feeling—I’m told this is common for people with autism spectrum disorder, something I’m hoping to finally get some answers about this year. Pure emotions like joy and delight are the easy ones; anything heavier and more complex is harder to comprehend, probably because “negative” emotions are loaded with baggage like guilt, shame, and doubt. Whom am I inconveniencing with my feelings? Do I have a right to feel this way? Am I imagining this? These are the kind of questions that send me down a self-invalidation spiral before I can even begin to think about an appropriate outlet for my feelings.
As a result, I’ve often recognised the arrival of an emotion only as a generic discomfort; most feelings tend to elicit a similar discomfort, so anything unpleasant is often indiscernible from anything else. “What fresh hell?”, I think, as I try to decipher what existential malaise plagues me on a particular day or at any moment—although, in truth, my usual method of dealing with it has too often been not to acknowledge it at all. More likely, I ignore—or even fail to register—the feelings so that living is just a perpetual, sustained sense of discomfort.
I’ve gotten much better at recognising emotions in real-time, but it’s taken a lot of work; and once I learned to identify a feeling, then I had to learn to self-validate instead of gaslighting myself, and then I’ve had to learn to self-advocate, which, are you kidding me? I have to feel my feelings and stand up for myself too? Whoever said “Living is a terminal condition” really coined the most nuanced one-line indictment of life I’ve ever heard.
Unexpressed—worse, unacknowledged—feelings build up, in my experience, as a sense of mounting dread. It often catches me at moments between consciousness, when my mind is just quiet enough to let it in. Unsurprisingly, it happens most in the morning; that awful moment when the first thought in my mind is, “Oh, no.” “Oh, no” about what, specifically? Exactly. Not knowing is the worst part.
Thank goodness for coping mechanisms. Sarcasm—in case you didn’t detect it there—is one low-stakes favourite, but I also tend towards self-medication in various forms. That looks like reaching for a crutch whenever I feel discomfort, which has been a lot the closer I edge towards the day my favourite scene from a movie loses relevance.
I’m turning 40 in a few days, and I’m feeling inexplicably some kind of way about it. Yes, that is vague, and apparently I’ve been trying to keep it that way by keeping myself distracted from my feelings. For that reason, I stopped drinking a week ago and decided to go into my 40th year sober (which the friends looking forward to celebrating my birthday with me are thrilled about, as you can imagine). At the very least, I want to meet this milestone clear-eyed and lucid—even if that means we’ll be able to see the whites of my eyes like I’m staring down a barreling train. I’d rather be conscious for it than hungover.
When I stopped drinking, my friend Emma wisely told me that when we take away our vices, we become very aware of how we feel. I can confirm that this is true, and I must say it does not feel good; so much for looking forward to an energising detox. Taking away the noise has revealed that this is how I’m feeling:
My sobriety is in no small part related to my fear of ageing, which itself has been enough to send me to the drink. I’ve had a lot of thoughts on ageing—as a woman, particularly—that I’m still processing. I’ve started reading books with on-the-nose titles like Younger: A Breakthrough Program to Reset Your Genes, Reverse Aging, and Turn Back the Clock 10 Years by Dr Sara Gottfried. Early in the book, Dr Gottfried puts a question to her readers: Before embarking on this age-reversing protocol, what do we want to live a longer life for? She provides several examples—citing herself, her husband, and a friend—all of whom, among other reasons, wanted to live a long and healthy life to watch their kids grow up, meet their grandkids, and continue to participate in family life for as long as possible.
Well, I thought, I guess I’ll just go fuck myself. No, but really: what about those of us who don’t have kids? What do we have to live for? Whom are we supposed to live for? I wished, as I so often do, that those of us who fall outside of conventional paradigms had been included—and I was reminded, as I so often am, that I guess if that’s a narrative I want to hear, I better start sharing it.
My answer to her question—“Myself”—seemed selfish, and is supposed to sound selfish. Our society is one where the ones who choose ourselves still have to self-advocate, to argue that we matter, all by ourselves; that our lives have value, and that we are worth committing to if only for our own benefit. And I’ve never been more firmly of the belief that choosing ourselves is, in fact, for the benefit of all; if all of us prioritised our happiness and well-being more, everyone else would get a happier and healthier version of us. What I’m saying is, those of us who choose ourselves make the world a better place.
You know what I don’t have a rebuttal for, though? Aging alone. I’m consciously unpartnered and am pretty sure I won’t have kids—and I think procreating as an old-age insurance policy is about the shittiest reason to have kids—but man if I don’t wonder what’s going to become of me. Already, I have to ask myself, “Who will come to the hospital with me?” Whom do I not worry about inconveniencing when I need the support of another person by my side? The optimist in me tells me that things will work out, one way or another—then again, it’s a thought I’ve always felt young enough to push to the back of my mind.
I’ve always felt age to be an irrelevant concept and never related in any way to whatever my age was supposed to mean. This is the first time—right now—that I’ve started to feel my age in my body. My body is a different body from the one I’ve known and taken for granted all my life—one which was highly sensitive but fairly predictable with a reliable metabolism and an ability to keep up with my choices.
Now, I feel like I’m having to learn my body and its needs for the first time. It’s served me very, very well given my frankly lax attitude re its maintenance, and now it is telling me mainly one thing: I am tired. It is giving me no choice but to tune in, ask how it’s feeling, find out what it needs, and make major changes. I can pay attention to my body in the absence of noise caused by stimulants, which is basically a process of culling one habit at a time while my body continues to protest while I weep, “What do you need???” It’s felt more urgent since the onset of some frightening health issues that have brought home how important my habits are.
I’ve spent the last few months navigating the healthcare system as a person with a uterus which, I’ve discovered, is pretty shit. The level of care is just so woeful and disheartening, and a reminder of how systemically low-value the body of a childless woman is. Just the other day, I was recommended a hysterectomy—a hysterectomy if you please—that I’ve since been advised is medically unnecessary, but not without seeking out those answers outside of my doctor’s office. The amount of research, self-diagnosis, and out-of-pocket treatment I’ve had to take upon myself is frankly egregious and I want more of us to be furious about it.
I’ll doubtless return to this topic in the coming months. For now, suffice to say I welcome as much frivolity as I can get—but I can tell you it’s not coming from booze or boys.
In my last letter, I talked about approaching dating with renewed enthusiasm. I met someone shortly after, dated for three months, and subsequently lost enthusiasm for dating again. Evidently, approaching 40 means I am tired of spirit as well as of body.
This weariness, however, I feel pretty good about. In the past, I have had a tendency to over-invest in inadequate relationships (“inadequate” is my trigger word for misdirected overcompensation) and it’s nice to refocus my energies on myself. Naturally, this means that I’ve been on the receiving end of a healthy amount of interest from the type of person who has some game, but absolutely no follow-through. It’s very boring.
I don’t like being bored, so I am currently engaging in a flirtation, and entertaining the prospect of a fling, with a trainer at one of the gyms I go to. It’s a cliche of the highest order, and I blame its appeal on me being a storyteller. “One I haven’t had” is my favourite flavour of experience, and I am about to be a bored, sober 40 year old who trades in stories.
It is a dumb idea, and one I expect to get shouted at for by my friend Maru as soon as she reads this, upon which I will tell her that, don’t worry, I’m not actually going to do it, it’s just a story I wanted to tell for fun. (But wouldn’t it be a better story if I actually did it?)
I suppose I’ll have to get my kicks in other ways! How do people who don’t date and drink have fun? Actually, I’ve been finding enormous satisfaction in the wholesome: turns out starting my day early with a workout, eating a healthy, plant- and protein-based diet, and getting an early night is kind of the best. Apparently, there are other people who know about this already.
In case I didn’t overemphasise it, I want to feel as good as possible. All of the time. If it wasn’t clear, I hate feeling bad. While I abhor toxic positivity (get outta here with your Good Vibes™️, yuck) nor will I accept a status quo that is unsatisfactory to me. As well as lifestyle changes, I’m also looking into a whole bunch of alternative treatments including plant medicine, and I have my first EMDR therapy session next week. So 40 is already giving, at the very least, ✨content✨.
I was just talking to a friend about my Fear of Forty and described it as a fear of a concept rather than a reality. This would not be the first time the idea of something has scared me more than the thing itself. But as I sit here and reflect on it, I realise that my fear is of something very tangible; it’s a fear of not enough. Not having done enough, not having been enough, not having enough, not being healthy enough, not being fit enough, not being young enough. Not having enough value, in which value is a thing outside of ourselves, not our selves alone.
Show me a person who focuses on the abundance in their life—instead of their own inadequacy—ahead of a milestone, and I will show you someone I don’t believe. I’ve seen those people, and I just don’t buy it; it smacks too much of overcompensating for their own fear. And fear strikes me (ouch) as a pretty normal response.
This is the kind of thing I’d normally wait to process and make some peace with before I share with you, but it seems like an experience that shouldn’t be sanitised. It’s a feeling I’m conditioned to believe I should feel shame for—Wow, how unevolved am I? I better work on shifting my focus towards all the abundance in my life ASAP—but right now, I feel the correct thing to do is to reject bypassing raw human fear in favour of positivity. I want to see myself, and show myself, as I am. I want all of us to do this with each other.
Because what this amounts to, ultimately, is a fear of mortality—of seeing the life ahead of us with more ending instead of possibility. Is that true? Yes—because everything ends—and no—because something new always follows. Growth will never not be scary, and I believe that the corporeal and existential fear I’m experiencing now is the most natural thing in the world. So why don't we talk about it? When did we learn that a fear of getting older should be internalised?
I’m not going to help us to do that. Not because I’m not the most afraid person in the world—I really am—but because I’m sick of us pretending like we’re not all scared.
So stay afraid, folks! What other choice do we have, really?
P.S. If you came here for “Things/Cats That Helped”, I’m sorry—man did you not get what you came for! They didn’t quite fit this time, but I’ll follow up with a palate cleanser for anyone for anyone who feels bamboozled.