My 40th birthday was a truly miserable affair
They say life begins at 40. Or at least, the long-dead American academic Walter Pitkin did when he wrote the bestselling 1932 self-help book of that title. And so did John Lennon, who never got to record the song he wrote of that name because he was shot two months after his 40th.
Nowadays, it is only said by people in their 20s or their 60s who are trying to make you feel better about what is, as everyone really knows, a bum age. Those who have recently passed the rubicon offer an update, which I think is more helpful – “41 is a breeze compared to 40”.
I hope so. For, having turned 40 last Friday, I can safely say that it was the most unpleasant birthday of my life, and one of the least enjoyable days in recent memory. My life did not feel in any way that it was beginning, or getting a new lease, or any of those other hopeful things. On the contrary, it felt like having been slogging along in an increasingly parched desert I had finally hit quicksand. I was stuck, and sinking: I was still anxious. I was still me. I hadn’t found enlightenment, I hadn’t reached clarity on life goals or my desired shape of things to come, or got any closer to pinpointing my relationship to standard-issue things like husbands and children.
I woke to beautiful blue sky and headed to the Cowshed spa in Primrose Hill: aren’t birthday girls meant to get themselves pampered? Or is someone else meant to ensure they are pampered? I pondered this on my walk. It was nice, but then I experienced a “symptom” which resulted in me finding myself in an internet rabbit hole that ended firmly in CANCER. I thought of the courageous, searingly sad cancer babes, the late Deborah James and Rachel Bland in particular, dead or dying by their 40th birthdays, and I furiously doom-googled their early symptoms.
Falling down a hypochondriacal warren on my 40th did not feel like the beginning of an empowered new decade. It felt like evidence that at 40, I’m just like I was at 10, at 25, and at 38 – only older, closer to… well… Hopefully not death and destruction quite yet.