- I can’t explain why, but 51 feels like “the second half,” not that I believe for a second that I’ll make it to 100 years old. But I kept thinking that this birthday marked a shift into a different era or phase or something similarly melodramatic, not that I know what it actually could mean or truly believe that it’s actually a thing beyond being in my head. On the plus side, I’m not calling it “the downhill slide.” Well, not yet.
- It’s actually nice not to be 50 anymore. For the entirely of that year, I felt as if the year was somehow meaningful, or that I should be doing something special with it, and all I was doing was… living my life? It was the half-century mark and a round number and surely that had some kind of deeper meaning, and what was I doing? Well… working, and taking care of every day stuff, and seeing friends, and the usual. But shouldn’t I have been doing more, I thought to myself on an all-too-regular basis? (Not really, and with what time? And yet.) I look forward to not putting that odd internal pressure on myself.
- I do wonder if I’ll stop calling myself “old” so much this year. For some reason, I complained to friends — you know who you are — that I was “old” after turning 50, prompting them all to make faces and say things like “50 isn’t old” even though they were a decade or so away from it themselves. I get what they’re saying, and if I’m entirely honest, I don’t actually feel old, and yet for the last year, I’ve self-consciously been arguing the opposite and I’m not entirely sure why. Hopefully, that’ll fall away now.
- I almost forgot my birthday this year. Prep for New York — I leave tomorrow — and other things just got in the way, and so I didn’t really think about it much, to the annoyance of people who’d ask if I wanted anything in particular as a present. That was oddly lovely, and I’m wondering if it’s going to be a new tradition. (Not the reasons for forgetting, but the forgetting.)
In short: What a relief.