A couple days before my summer birthday — the big one — my husband approached with an uncharacteristic seriousness: “Are you really okay with turning 50?”
“I mean, yeah,” I shrugged. “Can’t imagine it will feel much different than 49 and 365.”
The world, from the mailbox, begged to convince me otherwise.
First, an envelope from my mother: “Did you get your AARP card yet?” she winked. As if, I thought. I’m 50, not 65. Next, a message from a friend, suggesting it’s all downhill from here. Then, to my horror, an official-looking sleeve stamped “Notification of Member Benefits.” My invitation to join the venerable association of folks over 50 had indeed arrived.
I shot a wounded scowl at my husband. He grabbed his phone to capture the moment. “Priceless,” he chuckled.
And just like that, a new reality landed:
I am a quinquagenarian.
It’s hard to believe that vintage 1974 people have been around for — or for only — half a century. Leonardo DiCaprio. Victoria Beckham. Derek Jeter. Sarah Paulson. Nearly the entire cast of Saved by the Bell.
Et tu, Kelly Kapowski?!
Next calendar year, the babies born in 1975 who are still counting birthdays will join the club: Angelina Jolie. Tiger Woods. Kate Winslet. Chelsea Handler. 50 Cent. Dax Shepard.
Each of those people strikes me as older than I am, but math doesn’t lie. We’re all the same age as Blazing Saddles, as Jaws, as Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie. We were there when Nixon resigned and Saturday Night Live debuted; we pioneered Underoos and moved on up with The Jeffersons.
We Gen Xers remember vividly the years before televisions had remote controls and households had microwaves. Just kids then, we knew music before MTV and schools before mass shootings; watched government hearings about pubic hair on a Coke can and a stained blue dress in the White House; survived Y2K and 9/11. Now, as adults, we have T-shirts and children and stretch marks older than the iPhone. Our generation’s brains might be the only ones able to toggle seamlessly between analog and digital.
Newly minted 50-year-olds have spent five decades being innovative and resourceful and resilient and weird—and now we’re getting texts from CVS Pharmacy: “Let’s make a plan to get the Shingles vaccine.”
Shingles!
What a reminder of the way our 50-year-old bodies have changed, are changing, will change.
Age has speckled my arms brown and accordioned the skin of my decolletage. I can no longer see my eyebrows to pluck them. I get why old people wear readers on the tips of their (our?) noses. Smile lines have given way to the jaw of a marionette.
And, are those… jowls?
That’s just the part I see reflected in the mirror. Do not even get me started on the absolute atomic bomb that is perimenopause.
Despite the inarguable proof of midlife, I self-identify as cool — even if cool to me signals a serious lack of rizz to my teenage daughters. (It’s giving Grandma, they say to my no-show socks, outdated slang, and top sheet.) That may, in fact, be. But can Grandma Snapchat like this old bird?
Brené Brown described midlife as the time when “the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear: ‘I’m not screwing around.’” Nor should it. Nor should we. As Andy Rooney noted, life is like a roll of toilet paper. “The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.”
That’s why I’m viewing this time not as an end, but as the beginning of a beautiful reckoning — a stage of wild mental, emotional, and spiritual metamorphosis.
This moment of maturation offers the chance to reassess how best to allocate our most precious currencies — time, energy, attention, intention — and, in doing so, realign priorities with our values as they have evolved over time.
(Think of outgrowing a value the same way you outgrow a bra: first it fits, then it’s uncomfortable, suddenly you can’t breathe. What was designed to support now constricts. Trust me, you cannot live in a 32A when you’ve ripened into a 38DD.)
If we allow a graceful becoming in midlife, authenticity will flow more naturally.
Boundaries emerge more intuitively.
The insecurities and impetuousness of youth develop into steadiness, and we can find a sense of freedom from all the rules we have observed but did not write.
We can rebalance and repattern ourselves.
What’s more, we can unmuffle the voice of our souls and be who we are, truly, beneath the burdens of convention and Other People’s expectations.
The writer Anne Lamott put it best: “Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life — it has given me me.”
To celebrate the symbolic promise of 49 and 366 — which exists not just at 50 but every decade after, too — I am having some well-earned fun: I’m taking the tap class, never mind that my left foot won’t grasp the commands of rhythm. I’m getting (more) tattoos. I’m happily seeing myself with new eyes.
And, yes, I’ve gotten my shingles vaccine.