I’ve been thinking a lot lately about getting older.
I turned fifty this year, and somehow I’m already almost fifty-one. That seems impossible because in my head I was just having my 40s birthday celebration not that long ago.
People ask me what fifty feels like. I never know what to tell them because it isn’t one thing. Some days I feel more comfortable in my own skin than I ever have. Other days I catch myself looking in the mirror wondering when everything started changing. It’s true what they say, almost overnight you have trouble recognizing yourself. Other moments I feel grateful that I’ve made it here; I know so many people who didn’t.
I guess what surprises me most is that fifty hasn’t felt like a crisis. It has felt more like looking around one day and realizing almost everything in my life has quietly shifted. My son is in college now. My husband and I have been married for more than twenty years. And the practice has grown into something I couldn’t have imagined when I first opened my office.
My mom is eighty-six. My dad has been gone for over twenty years, and my brother died so young that I’ve now lived longer than he ever did.
That one still catches me.
Not because I’m constantly thinking about it. I’m not. It’ll just pop into my head when I’m driving somewhere or listening to a song or doing something completely ordinary, and for a minute it feels strange that I’ve crossed into a part of life he never got to experience. I feel lucky and also, underneath, guilty.
I’ve found myself thinking about the orphan archetype lately—not literally, because my mother is still here, but psychologically. There is something about realizing that the people who represented your earliest sense of home, safety, and history are no longer here, or soon won’t be. I recognize that feeling from time to time. If I’m honest, I probably fear it more than I’d like to admit.
I think that’s one of the harder parts of getting older. Not wrinkles. Not menopause. Not any of that. It’s realizing that the people who always felt permanent actually aren’t. And you start realizing your generation is becoming the older generation. And trust me, that’s especially hard for a Gen X. We simultaneously felt indestructible while also never quiet believing we would get here.
I don’t know why this has affected me as much as it has. Maybe because there really is something about knowing there are fewer people left who remember you as a little girl.
I’ve also thought a lot about my “little boy and becoming an empty nester. I worried about it before my son left. I wondered if I had made motherhood too much of my identity. And I miss him—I miss him a lot.
Mostly I miss the ordinary things. Hearing him upstairs late at night with friends or watching a game. Walking into the pantry and finding him standing there eating my favorite cookies. I especially miss knowing him through his friends and the everyday. But I’ve been surprised that my excitement for him has been even bigger than my sadness for me.
I want him to go build his own life, have adventures that have nothing to do with me.
I know that’s what we’re supposed to want, even when it hurts. And I really do.
I’ve also been thinking of my marriage and my professional self. My marriage has felt different. Not worse. Just different. When you’re married for twenty years you realize that both people keep changing. At least I hope they do. I don’t think either of us is the same person we were when we got married, and I think that’s probably healthy.
As for my ambition, I’ve learned a few things For years I thought I was just someone who loved learning. I do, that’s true, but there was something else mixed in there too. I constantly strived for another degree, certification, or training. If I’m honest, some part of me believed that if I knew enough or accomplished enough I’d finally feel like I was enough.
I don’t regret any of it. But I know that’s what I’m chasing anymore. These days I care much more about whether I’m spending my time the way I actually want to spend it. That sometimes feels foreign.
Something else I’ve noticed is how complicated it is watching your body age.
I won’t skip over this because for a long time people did not even talk about menapause or “the change” and now we do, but we talk about it mostly in medical terms. They talk about hormones and sleep and hot flashes.
Nobody really talks about what it’s like to have spent fifty years living in a culture that values youth so much and then suddenly realizing you’re no longer young.
Of course I still want to look good. I love skincare. I use boyox and filler—I’m not above that nor do I judge the many ways people try to feel more like themselves. But I also notice that I don’t want to spend the second half of my life fighting so hard against something that’s going to happen anyway.
I don’t think those two things contradict each other. Maybe they just both get to be true. And versus but, right?
So many other things are changing as well. Lately My conversations with friends are changing, we still share our dreams but those have shifted as well. We’re talking less about careers, less about schools overall less about our kids (albeit this last one is still part of the conversation)
But now, we’re talking about aging parents, health, travel, and what we will want to get to do. The question of how we actually want to spend whatever time we have left is always there. At times we feel that there is so much ahead of us and at others we feel we are definitely on the later end of the story.
I’ve been reading Mattering, and maybe that’s part of why all of this has been on my mind.
I had already been thinking less about success and more about meaning. And I have different parts of me that sometimes seem to want to matter or find meaning in different ways. Sometimes I still want to build. I want to grow the practice. I want to improve it and dedicate so much time to it. Other days I picture living somewhere near the beach with a stack of books and nowhere I have to be.
A few years ago, maybe even months ago, I would have thought I needed to choose between those lives. Now I don’t think I do.
Maybe that’s what this stage of life is teaching me. Not certainty ( far from it), but it’s providing me with just a little more room to be honest about what’s changing and what isn’t.
I don’t feel like I’ve arrived anywhere. I actually think I have more questions than I used to, but I feel absolutely ok with that.