Fifty is a strange age. You’re not old, exactly, but you’re far too old to think of yourself as young. Whatever you are at fifty, for better or worse, is probably what you’re going to be for the rest of your life. Your midlife crisis is past, hopefully. There are no more kids on the way, probably. You’re nowhere near retirement, but you’re too close to it to seriously consider chucking your entire career and becoming a baker or a poet or a travel blogger unless you somehow became independently wealthy in the first fifty years. Who you are now is who you are, and if you can’t live with that, it’s important to understand why – and whether you can actually do anything about it.
Ten doesn’t feel like much of a milestone, and I don’t remember it being one, either. Twenty means you’re not a teenager anymore, and I remember feeling some pangs and angst about that, but our society hangs too much on 16 and 18 and 21 for 20 to really have any traction. Thirty is the end of your millennial adultolescence, the age where you feel like you have to start being a grown-up, get married if you’re gonna, buy a house if you’re gonna, have kids if you’re gonna, get on with your life. Forty…well, as I said, forty is the age you have to stop pretending. And by fifty, life has started taking away some of what you’ve been given. You might be given more, but you’ll never have it all at once. Assuming you ever did.
I think in a lot of ways, I’ve spent too much of my last twenty-five years trying to reframe my first twenty-five into a better story without having to make anything up. Trying to will it into being a better past than it felt like at the time. Maybe part of turning fifty is just accepting it as it was, and maybe letting time file the sharp edges off what was at the time a pretty painful trudge. Then again…is a memory really a memory if you don’t share it with anyone else? If there is no one else who was there who can still affirm your memories, couldn’t you have just as easily made the whole thing up? Or just as easily make something up to replace it?
It seems like the last decade hasn’t been as full as the one before – that despite adding two new continents and three more countries, despite finally getting the long-desired sysadmin job with options to work from home, there was a lot of drudgery and loss. And there was. But this is also when I remade my wardrobe with a capsule of things that weren’t in my life ten years ago. This is when I made the shift from gas to hybrid to electric. This is when I re-embraced the blazer and established that my most self-actualized state is a drink in one hand and a phone in the other, sat in the first class lounge getting ready to depart abroad. This is the decade I returned to glasses, for crying out loud, for the first time in a quarter-century.
Twenty-five years ago, my world more or less completely reset itself. Completely new career, in a completely new city, with almost no connection left to anyone from my past. My father dead a year later was just the icing on the cake. Now, at fifty, I find myself in a new house for the first time in sixteen years, in a new car that replaced one twenty-two years old, and…well, I’d love a different job, but that has been awfully tough to come by under the circumstances, and I probably won’t be making much of an effort until April.
Because we’re going away. Three weeks in London. None of you pricks come rob my house. This is our exit from two years of turbulence through a fantasy of stepping out of our lives for a bit and then back into whatever new equilibrium we have achieved. One week for my 50th, one week for hers, one week for a second honeymoon as we begin our new new life together. What else are you going to do with two years of accumulated unusable PTO and credit card points?
I need the hard reset. I need pub night writ large. I need to punch out of reality for a bit and see if I can get my head together before kicking off my sixth decade.
Let’s go for a ride.
maybe it’s the getting by that gets right underneath you
it’d swallow up your every step, boy, if it could
but maybe it’s the stuff it takes to get up in the morning
and put another day in, son
that keeps you standing where you should
so put another day in, son
and hold on till the getting’s good