Aging in the Age of Corona

Tomorrow Today is my 39th birthday.

I’m excited to spend the next year in anticipation of 40 — I know a lot of women who fully grew into themselves in their 40s and continue to up their ass-kicking quotient as they go. I just hope I’m able to have a 40th birthday party the way god intended — drunk, in a bar, hugging everyone. I have the feeling this 40th trip around the sun will be nothing if not interesting. And also a little boring, probably. Hopefully.

Remember two months ago when I was musing on the merits of monogamy vs casually dating? So, then the universe was like, “well, we can take this problem off your plate.  How about instead of dating you sit in your bathtub and eat icing with a spoon?”

Still, I did not expect to be spending my birthday at home watching a cardinal build a nest outside of my home office (aka Rowan’s bedroom) window, but here we are and here we shall be tomorrow. My birthday has a habit of providing extra doses of trauma, so maybe the expectation of nothing will work out for the best.

I’ve been trying to write about this era for months. But everything I have to say seems like an inconsequential drop in the large bucket of trauma being served up all over the world and besides, the contents of the bucket are changing too frequently to even name. Every reaction feels either too dramatic or too restrained or, somehow, both at the same time. I spent the first month fighting reality. This is a tactic I frequently utilize in difficult situations and which has served me well precisely zero times. I finally pulled out my DBT notebook to refresh myself on some coping skills, especially in moments of self-made crisis. I even told my therapist about it, but made her promise not to say, “I’m proud of you.” She fucking said it anyhow. It’s like she knows I want nothing more than for people to be proud of me but also don’t want that blushing, imposter feeling of hearing someone say such things. Life would be easier if I could just ingest all compliments by accidentally overhearing people talking about me positively.

The second month brought a bit more perspective. Yet, anytime I find joy in these slower moments I somehow feel like I’m cheating on my past self. I feel like if I don’t hate every second of this that I am telling my past self that it wasn’t good enough. If I complain, I feel guilty because so many people have it worse. If I find silver linings, I feel like I’m ignoring all the very real suffering in the world right now.

We are all in a damned-if-we-do-damned-if-we-don’t sort of situation right now. Same ocean, different boat.

I’ll write more later, but for now, I just needed to write SOMETHING.