THIS IS 40

There isn’t a magical age at which you’ll have everything figured out. But realizing that is something. By Craille Maguire Gillies

I ’ve long been a keeper of quotes from books, from podcasts, from life— although not the cheerfully ironic sort found on Etsy posters or the inspirational ones in Instagram posts. For example, I once overheard a Montrealer say “I’d like to look like myself but better”—a sentiment I find absurd yet oddly appealing. “Yes,” I thought, as I scrawled it in my notebook. “So would I!”

Around the same time, a Quebec friend shared a few wise words: “C’est un mal

pour un bien,” which roughly translates to “It’s a blessing in disguise.” I’d jotted down these bons mots in 2008, weeks before I turned 30; I suspect my friend had intended them as a salve for the ennui that had been trailing me for weeks.

All summer long, I’d been going to bed at midnight and waking at 4 a.m. Each time I drifted off to sleep, I’d pop up with a start, gasping for air. My chest hurt from what a doctor might have diagnosed as acid reflux but what I now realize was anxiety of the most insidious sort: the kind you don’t even know is there.

And then—voila!—it passed. The chest pains disappeared, and the ennui became less acute. In the space of a month, I gave up my Montreal apartment, took a solo trip to Paris and moved across Canada to begin a new job—and my 30s. Perhaps my friend was right: C’est un mal pour un bien.

Now here I am, a decade later, anticipating another birthday with a zero in it— wondering why I was so out of my element then and whether I am more in it now. After all, you don’t have to go far to trip over a study that says women at 40 are more confident and happier than women a generation ago said they were. If your 20s were for making mistakes, and your 30s were about being comfortable in your own skin, these studies suggest that surely by now you’ll have everything sorted out. Piece of cake (but only a small slice—must guard against middle-aged spread).

By 40, we’re expected to have accomplished many of what I recently heard called “the life-building activities of youth”: house, husband, children, job. But if you haven’t ticked every box on that existential to-do list, then what? I am here to tell you: The notion that anyone ever has it completely figured out is one of the great fallacies of modern life.

When I look around at friends my age, I see more varieties of experience than perhaps any other generation before us. (In fact, my cohort—too young to be Gen-Xers, too old to be millennials—are not really part of a distinct generation at all.) Some are happily single, some have children, some are as angsty as ever, some are starting over. What’s more, I’ve watched friends in their 20s agonize as they establish careers, and I’ve seen a couple in their 30s lose a child. I’ve had friends in their 40s confront divorce and bereavement and older women face living alone for the first time in decades.

I recently came across another quote, this one from British author Penelope Lively, a woman more than double my age: “Life as lived is disordered, undirected and at the mercy of contingent events...,” she wrote. “Most of us settle for the disconcerting muddle of what we intended and what came along and try to see it as some kind of whole.”

And so, at the age of 39, peering over the cliff of my 40s, I suspect that there might never be a magical age at which everything is truly sorted out. For me, to be in one’s element no longer means an approximation of perfection but an acceptance that there will be other inflection points to come, other birthdays with zeros in them, other times when I won’t quite know what to do. Perhaps the point is not to be suspended in a state of equilibrium but to know that when anxiety sets hearts racing at 4 a.m., we can use the accrued interest of experience and have the confidence to deal with it.

Surely everyone has a sense they will be grown up someday, although in almost 40 years no one has informed me when, precisely, that day will be. But—spoiler alert—then I realized, even without all of the life-building activities completed, I am a certified adult. When life is considered a work in progress, the disconcerting muddle of it seems like a good compromise. Because I am as much in my element as I will ever be.

When I look around at friends my age, I see more varieties of experience than perhaps any other generation before us.