Musings

cw: mortality, suicide, death, body dysmorphia, seriously don’t read this if you’re in a bad place, oh dear lord

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For weeks before my fortieth birthday, I was hyping myself up to do a milestone post. I had plans about how I’d talk about wisdom accumulated and joys to come; how thirty-nine was spent learning how to pole dance, and the subjectiveness of time and age. I wanted to tie that to something a friend said once: how so many of his peers bemoan looking at their forties and fifties as old and regretting it later when old finally happens. How we need to stay feral through our lives, how that wildness keeps us vital.

I wanted to talk too about my grappling with perimenopause’s imminence. My one real regret these last few decades is the fact I didn’t recognize myself as beautiful in my twenties and my teens; it was only in my mid-thirties that I looked into the mirror and saw me as I was, which I resent because there’s now a part of me that whispers, ‘and in a few years, that’ll be gone.’ Except that’s equally untrue. Beauty isn’t reserved for the young; it’s effortless for youth but it isn’t unique to it. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to love the lines on other people’s faces, to marvel at how their bones shine through their skin, the way I can see the truth of them better with every year. Beautiful eyes? A kind smile? The way the mouth crooks around a saucy joke? These things stay through the decades, linger even when the people who remember you as a child are all gone. The bloody hypocrisy of dysmorphia, honestly. How ridiculous is it that it’d assign value to others and not yourself? Fuck societal preconceptions.

And on the topic of perimenopause and the subsequent end of one’s reproductive years, I wanted to talk about elders who’d mused about how the death of one’s appeal to men leads to the rebirth of the wild-eyed child we lose in puberty. How if we can stomach no longer being appealing to a certain demographic, we find freedom. How in losing my fucks with every year, I hear my child self a little better.

Instead, I started my birthday musing about whether forty was a nice round number to check out on. I thought about and ruled out methods as I got a massage; I contemplated what else I had to prove before leaving the mortal coil. There wasn’t much. I was twelve the first time I tried to kill myself. I remember thinking to myself that actually, I was dead and Death had kind of forgotten to pick me up for the ride to whatever came after. I had to do something to get to the right place. When my sister stopped me, I found myself blinking slowly in the aftermath and decided since I could stop being dead, I could do anything.

And I did.

As a kid, all I wanted was to create a life for myself that was so radically different from the horror show I’d grown up with, I’d look back on it one day and be unable to think of it is as anything but someone else’s nightmare. At forty, I can safely say that’s true now. But in being able to say that, I found myself struck by, not loss, but a sense that I’d fulfilled a checklist and the task was done. I was done.

For the last two weeks, I haven’t been able to picture going on. I was satisfied with my accomplishments, and I didn’t know if I wanted to grapple with the future or the strangeness of growing older. I certainly wasn’t sure how I felt about eventually dying under circumstances that might not be fully under my control, in a place I didn’t know yet, with people I might not like. It seemed like a lot to deal with. Better to bow out when it’s still good. (And depression says that my loved ones will grieve me but not as much as they think they will. In a few months, a few years, I won’t even be a memory. It’d be alright. Surely. No one would mind that I was gone.)

But if despair is the black dog that howls when you’re burned out (and I am burned out, so very much so, exhausted from a daisy-chain of crisises both personal and professional, by loss, by my own unfortunate habit of hollowing myself out even when I have nothing to give because I feel like a loved one needed me more) and vulnerable, hope is the wolf you become when you’ve survived enough to understand joy is a choice you make. That whatever anguish you’re feeling now is something you can fight tooth and nail (and with professional assistance as necessary), that you can wrestle down so you can remind it that the act of existence is a miracle onto itself. That being here, that being alive, that choosing laughter over fear of the void, that loving this life, all these things are holy and good and worthwhile.

That you can snarl despair down and send it back into the woods, tail between its legs. Because god, wouldn’t it be a fucking waste to miss out on all the adventures? The billions of variables, good and bad, that might surface? What is a story without its storms?

This is a very different fortieth birthday post from the one that I thought I’d make, but I guess it’s an appropriate one. I won’t lie and say it’s easy, or that I’ve managed to stomp down depression. It’s a work in progress. Today is the best day I’ve had in two weeks, and I still feel like I’m walking across a scrim of (thicker) ice; my chest is tight still with worry and grief and I can see my despair out of the corner of my eye, waiting, watching to see if it can take me by the throat again.

But yesterday, a loved one with severe body dysmorphia told me they’d practicing understanding their current physical shape by looking at the pictures I’ve taken of them; I’d like to think it’s because they know every picture is taken through a lens of deep affection. And for days before that, an old friend and I chatted about everything and nothing, quietly, as he walked me through the woods of my sorrow. Today, I got to tell a woman about how the best antidote to grief is to love so hard, there’s no room to regret any of the time you had with the people in your life. Today, a friend comes home from a long tour and I get to watch him perform again.

Grief will always come. And death. And endings. And loss. And it will hurt each time, and we will wonder how we will survive when it feels like everything is shattered. But today, we are alive. Today, we can love. Today, we have twenty-four hours to spend and if we spend them like we did as children during those endless school holidays, they’re going to feel like we cheated eternity out of a little bit of forever.

On tumblr, someone talked about how they had an end-of-life patient who burst out laughing, going, ‘It was all such fun. I just had so much fun.”

So, this is what I learned after forty years on this planet:

Joy is a choice. It isn’t an easy one to make, but it is a choice we can make and even if it takes a moment to stumble towards joy, each step counts. Each moment, each hour you get free of the darkness. Because they add up. Because they matter.

And so do all of us.

I love you all.

As always, a picture of the cats as tax: