I am five short days away from my (gulp) 49th birthday. Or, forty-FUCKING-nine, as I am affectionately calling it. I'm not exactly depressed about it, but I am a little bit freaked out.
Because after this birthday, I am officially flirting with 50. As in FIVE-OH-MY-GOD, WHERE DID FIVE DECADES GO? If I live to be 100, then I'm half-way there. If I don't make it to 100, then I'm well over that hill already. That is a very strange thing to be aware of.
I don't know what I thought 49-almost-50 would feel like, but it's nothing like what I imagined when I was younger. I thought 50 would feel "old", but it doesn't (well, other than the aching joints and back pain and wrinkles and gray hairs, and...) I'm sure others of you who have hit this milestone feel much the same as I do, which is that whatever the changes may be on the outside, on the INSIDE, I still feel like a much, MUCH younger woman. Not a woman in her teens or twenties exactly, but I feel like I'm in my early 30s. I liked my early 30s and felt good at that age, so maybe that's why I say that. In my teens and twenties, I didn't know what the hell I was doing most of the time, but around about 32 or so, I began to feel like I knew myself better and could handle my life with much less melodrama, and that felt great.
And my forties have been all about major life transformations. Because I am now very happy with my choices in recent years, and because I happen to have such a wonderful husband, I don't think I'll be sinking into a mental funk about this 49th birthday. There is too much that's good in my life for me to feel anything other than gratitude. But I now have a year to figure out what's next for me. What do I still want to accomplish? What do I still need to work on? What do I still want to experience?
If my life up until now has been about climbing up one side of that big giant hill to 50, then being at the crest means that I need to take time out to look at the view from up here... before I decide if I want to coast down the other side.
Or possibly... find another hill to climb?
