Middle age came to me as an unwanted surprise, a thief in the night, a gnarly traffic jam I can’t get out of, this unwieldy beast I find so hard to tame. But also, it wasn’t like I hadn’t known it was coming. The telltale signs had appeared here and there: white hair so difficult to cover up, eyesight that couldn’t focus on my minis, this energy eating monster that often sucked out all my best intentions on party nights, on workout evenings, on workday afternoons, or on my intended cleaning day.
My mind still feels young, it still wants to go, go, go but my body is a traitor. When before, all I needed was a good night’s sleep and the next day it was battery full, now I wake up and my body still feels achy, energy zero. I unwillingly get up and all I want is to go back to bed, lounge on the couch instead, where I am forced to stay put even though all I really want is run back to the ‘90s which had been the best years of my life.
Miserably but also happily, it is an experience I share with my closest friends because I met most of them when we were all the same age, from university days and as far back as high school. When we have our usual early night, weekend dinners and coffee after get-togethers, we breathe the same story of how often we get our hair color done, how much weight we’ve gained, how many doctor appointments we’ve made. Yes, same olde middle age stories.
Are we running with it or resisting it? It can be awful difficult to accept sometimes. Our collective sighs will tell you how we longed for those earlier years in our lives, when we also wanted to cheat time, wanted it to go fast forward, so we are already older, richer, wiser but now here we are and we don’t know how to hold it our hands. It’s an ember we didn’t want to touch, an ember burning, flying off of this slowly fading fire, burning our emotions, our memories, our responses to life. But then on those same nights, when we try so hard to stay up, we revive the fire with our nostalgic recollections: when we trod those forks on the road, when we loved so fiercely nothing mattered, when we laughed and cried hard at our mistakes. It’s lovely when our memories come together and it feels like we are 17 again.
So am I running with it or resisting it? Most days, I try to embrace it because resistance is futile. I weave through my list of middle age signs and each day, I find the list longer, a tad nastier. It’s the lack of sleep, and the hair loss, and the unresolved back aches, the unexpected vertigo attacks, the days of no appetite, the weepy cycles. There are days when I feel my bones getting a little more brittle, my arms unable to bear the weight of things, my heart aching for days gone by. Oh well, I should really stop and not bore myself and you with the details. It’s here—been here for a while—and being old is here to stay.
With my big five-oh birthday in spitting distance, it’s easy to find the headspace to mull over life. There was this one day that I came across some photos from when we were in university, skinnier versions of ourselves with sticklike figures and sunken cheeks that we hated then and desired so much now. I want to be a little lighter weight-wise so that I can jump up and down and tell the world, fuck off, I’m turning fifty, I’ve come so far, I deserve to yell this out.
But I’m too tired. So I will celebrate fifty quietly, by being with my tribe who saw me through then thin and now thick. I will try to keep the mood light, the night short, this life easy. The path after fifty should be that, I suppose. A reluctant acceptance, of grudgingly agreeing, bearing some form of adult enthusiasm for the path ahead. Recently, I’ve discovered this song from two decades ago called Unwritten, a song intended for somebody who’s 14, but it’s become my anthem for turning fifty: Staring at the blank page before you / Open up the dirty window / Let the sun illuminate the words that you cannot find / Reaching for something in the distance so close you can almost taste it / Release your inhibitions. The message is that we are authors of our life stories, we are empowered to shape our paths, we should live it in grace, and we’re golden. I still believe that as I turn this new page for self discoveries amidst middle age uncertainties.
Hi there, 50. Ready for ya.
Pictured: An illo of mine, where the heroine is running away.
Finally Dee 