When the pandemic started I was 38 years old. I turned 39 that first summer, and reveled in the strangeness that we have all experienced at least once now: the pandemic birthday. It wasn’t so bad that first time around.
But the pandemic is still happening, and this summer I turned 40. And I’m gonna be honest: it kinda pissed me off.
I was born in the warmest, sunniest part of the year, and I’ve always felt lucky to have a birthday in summer, the season of youth, when tomatoes are huge and red, when hummingbirds vibrate around the eaves. I’ve always felt like it makes sense that I come from all that bright light, from the time of year when the earth is wide awake. I smile a lot, even when I’m mad.
The day of my 40th, the weather was expected to be around 105-degrees (40-degrees C), so the idea of eating outside at a restaurant, or doing anything outdoors, was pretty much out of the question. The Delta variant was surging in Oregon and all of the old 2020 uncertainty about doing basic activities was cropping up again. I also had two weeks left on the biggest deadline of my life, and I was stressed about that. So I spent most of the day hot, annoyed and scattered, somehow surprised all day that the hands of the clock had in fact turned to midnight and I had become 40 and it just kept ticking, unfeeling, unceremonious. This wasn’t what I had pictured.
In the plentiful and embarrassing journals I kept as a teenager, I spoke about age 40 like I’d never reach it, because I think a small part of me wondered if I ever would. Or if I did, I’d become a stone statue. My perception of 40 didn’t account for any real living to happen.
You are 21 and then you’re 38 and then you’re 40, and none of it actually matters. I always said that if I had to get old I wanted to make sure I stayed punk rock — whatever that means. (Which is funny to think back on: I think I’m much more “punk” now than I used to be. When you are young, you wear punk; when you get older, you live it.)
Here’s something I’ve learned along the way about getting older:
During much of my 30s, I watched my husband, Joe, become an incredibly sick man. Life, suddenly, became very real to both of us in very different ways. No one expects that to happen when you’re young. I wrote a lengthy essay about this in 2016 for the literary journal Moss, and even now, it is difficult for me to read — the words written mostly while he was suffering in the other room.
I never wrote a follow-up to that essay, but the real ending is incredible. At the end of that piece, Joe was getting better. And in the years after I wrote it, he has continued to heal and understand what living with chronic illness means for him.
At one point, his doctors told him he had to get moving. If he could exercise, it would help with his pain. There were a few times we even bristled at the suggestion: how dare you tell someone in agony to get up and start moving around? But eventually Joe realized the weight of what he was being told. He took up hiking, started hitting trails in Forest Park or the Tillamook State Forest after work. Hiking turned into weekend backpacking trips, backpacking became mountaineering. Now he comes home and shows me photographs of himself on top of some of the highest peaks in the Cascades at sunrise. He limped up mountains until he could stand on them.
From time to time, his illness flares up, and that is stressful. Season changes can be rough. He’ll sleep 15 hours, waking up with pillow creases on his face, confused how long he has been down, only to go right back to sleep. But those times are momentary interruptions. We don’t focus on them anymore. What surprises me is how when pain is gone from you life, you forget that it was ever there. Which is interesting, because when you’re actually in the pain, your brain goes into a panicking, fight or flight mode. It hurts, and you freak out.
Going through that in our 30s left both Joe and I different. It changed how he thinks of himself, for the better. But I think it bruised me in ways neither of us understood until his pain had cleared: I’ve always been a fighter — someone who can power through just about anything. But aside from screaming on the phone at a few insurance providers, I’m not sure that really helped the situation.
The writer Simone de Beauvoir once wrote that the only solution to aging if we don’t want “to be an absurd parody of our former life” is to “go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning—devotion to individuals, to groups, or to causes—social, political, intellectual, or creative work.”
I look at how Joe has conquered pain we once believed unconquerable, and see someone who never looked backward. He is not interested in being an absurd parody of who he was at 21 or 31.
I share this all because (a) I’m proud of him, but (b) because I think that’s the lesson of this era we’re living through, too? Walk forward. Push. Feel, then heal. Things will never, ever be the way they were, and if we keep fighting to make things the way they were, we’ll go crazy.
Career-wise, I talked about the struggle of this process with my friend Mark Armstrong on his podcast, Everything I’ve Learned, and the need to stay malleable in who we say we are as writers and reporters if we want to do it long-term.
But personally, I have fought shedding the skin of my former self. I have been searching for the answer that will make me welcome aging, instead of fighting it. People talk a lot about self-care and… I don’t really get it. How can you face-mask or bubble bath away existential dread?
This past weekend, I found an explanation of self-care in Brittany Ducham’s herbalism guide, Radical Remedies, that actually resonated with me:
Every time we perform an act of self-care, we are honoring the legacy of those who came before us and committing to our fundamental needs, bringing our awareness to a root issue, be it personal or societal. When we take time to untangle what we have been taught about our worth and decide we are worthy of prioritizing ourselves, we take a stand for a radical, healthier future. We begin to see that what started as a personal act is innately political, setting a precedent for mutual aid and healing justice for all. When we dare to carve out time for ourselves, dare to imagine and fight for a society that supports the need for personalized and accessible care for all, we let go of what we have been conditioned to believe and reclaim our power.
For the chronically-pissed, like me, self-care can be defined as a fight all its own. It means logging off, drawing personal boundaries and actually sticking to them. It is a process.
I think part of that process means acknowledging that life is not eternal, endless summer, nor should it be. Inside of us are multiple seasons, many stories to be told and paths to explore. We can be sick, and then we can stand on mountains. We can change, and maybe we should.
Inside of us is both the bounty and the scythe. It is up to us if we want to harvest and replant, or if we want to stand by and watch, and wither.
As a journalist who’s always been an employee the podcast was really interesting. On the paid subscriber front, personally I’ve signed up to support your writing rather than access paid material (though it WAS not being able to access something that made me start paying!) The discount then tipped me into signing up. Thanks.
This hits deep on so many levels. That last sentence is stunning. This also resonates well with what many of us are navigating in our work and careers.
Certainly one I will bookmark and reference for the seasons in my life still to come.