Something I’m all too aware of right now is that 2024 is the year I turn 50 years old. Ever since the year started, it’s been playing in the background of my head, as if something changed on January 1 and I started some kind of special anniversary year. Technically, that anniversary year began with my last birthday, of course, but this awareness of that big birthday didn’t dominate my subconscious until the new year; such neuroses are rarely logical or practical.
It’s not as if my brain really knows what to do with this half century information; I’m not planning anything grand to mark the occasion just yet, beyond finally taking my health more seriously — something that, let’s be honest, medical professionals and loved ones alike would have rather I started a decade earlier. Nonetheless, it’s a fact that just lies in the background, hoping for purpose and giving significance to whatever is happening around me. As I clean the house, it asks, perhaps this is a sign that you’re going to be more ordered for your 50th? I read more books, and it suggests that maybe you’re finally settling into this elder reading statesman thing. Really, I’m just trying to do whatever to make it through and have some fun in the process. Maybe that’s a notable thing in and of itself, who’s to say?
(Is the second-guessing everything also something that happens as you approach the half-century mark, I ask myself in some kind of parodic, more-serious-than-it-should be, metatextual moment of almost self-awareness. There’s a moment of falling down the rabbit hole, and I worry that I passed that some time back without even realizing. Alas.)
I think the problem is that, somewhere along the way, my head decided without conscious thought that 50 is a Big Deal that Has To Mean Something. I went through the same thing at 40 — a quiet existential crisis that resolved itself with a shrug long before the birthday actually arrived. The same might be true of my 50th, in the end; I hope so. There’s something overly exhausting about this feeling that absolutely everything in your life has some additional significance just because of what the calendar has to say, especially when the feeling of the day-to-day says something entirely different.