I was explaining to a friend the other week that, when the year started, I was all too aware that I’d be turning 50 soon. In January, it felt like something I was amazingly, unstoppably conscious of, as if there was a countdown in my head that I couldn’t stop listening to — a biological clock of some kind, if you will. This is the year, it told me, look at the number, this is the one where you hit that half-century mark, this is something you need to be conscious of at all points all year.
At some point, that entirely disappeared from my head. Life happened, and other things got in the way of me thinking about my birthday. (If you think about this year alone, I’ve been to multiple conventions, interviewed-for and got a promotion at work, and then had to adapt to that, in addition to everything else.) That is, really, how it’s supposed to be, I suspect; you take care of the everything that you have to as it’s happening and the larger anxiety about your birthday slips into the background. But here I am, just a week or so away from it happening now, and I’m wondering: should I have done more to celebrate, or even prepare for, turning 50?
There’s a practical answer to the preparation bit, at least; I almost certainly should have scheduled more doctors appointments, to make sure everything is in working order. (I am appallingly bad at that, in part because some subconscious part of me doesn’t want to know in case something is wrong. Ignorance is bliss, after all.) But otherwise, I find myself thinking about the self-conscious things I thought back in January about this being the year I learn a musical instrument, or publish zines, or whatever, to make a new mark on the world, and wondering when I was supposed to find time to do any of those things.
My 50th birthday will, I suspect, come and pass in a blur of deadlines and real world obligations, and then I’ll wonder what happened. (Well, I’ll probably wonder that after New York Comic Con, which is just a week or so later, and sure to take up all my brain in the meantime.) Somehow, that feels curiously fitting.