I turn 40 Next Week and My Brain is a Clip Show of the Last decade

April, come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May, she will stay
Resting in my arms again – Simon and Garfunkel

By May Day in North Carolina, you can safely dig warm homes for even the most fragile plant. The state bird is perching on the state flower; the over-saturated red of a cardinal next to the whites and pinks of the dogwoods.

May is my favorite month not only for its reprieve from winter and its fireworks of flowers but also because it’s my birth month. I love my birthday – a whole day where I can ask everyone to pay attention to me without shame or worries of being too much (theoretically).

Has the over-the-hill-themed 40th birthday gone away or just moved further down the line? I remember family friends turning 40 and suddenly it was funny to joke about their impending death. Cakes decorated like cemeteries and bundles of black balloons tied to black mugs with punchlines about the elderly. The cards always joked about blowing out the surfeit of candles on the cake — possibly a tradition that is over-the-hill in its own right, now that you could be blowing Coronavirus directly onto the icing.

My 30s have felt like a Sisyphean slog up that hill and honestly, I’m happy to walk back down for a while.

This is not the life I would have imagined at 40.

This is not the life I would have hoped for at 40.

My hopes and my imagination are two entirely different landscapes. I hoped for too much and expected too little.

I entered my 30s still feeling like I was being pulled along by life as it happened to me, the casual observer. What little I could give was running on the pure fumes of parenting a toddler and undiagnosed anxiety.

The last decade has been horrible.

The last decade has been amazing.

Both can be true. Both are true. This may be the biggest lesson of my 30s — the confusing dialectic nature of being human.

It would be easy to wallow in the deep puddle of all the shit the last decade has produced. And it would be so pretty to give you a litany of post-traumatic growth.

It would be real to say the two exist together.

Friends died. My dad died. I came closer to dying than I would have put on my “things to do before I turn 40” bucket list. My son was born two months early to save me from the aforementioned almost-death.

My marriage fell apart — though that sounds more kinetic than it was. Mostly it fell… un-together. I finally allowed myself to give up, and it is one of the hardest and most vital things I’ve ever done.

I think 30 was the self-awareness decade.  I learned so much that now I’m scared of what I still don’t know. But new words have surfaced to deal with that fear. Acceptance, shame, vulnerability (goddamn Brene Brown). Sometimes maybe some courage, though I still question the idea of strength when it is forced upon you. Although, I suppose nobody chooses to test their resilience.

Whatever finally spurred my decision to find a therapist in September of 2013 is the pivotal point of this decade. It’s the section break, rather than a simple new chapter.

At 32, I sat in a waiting room of a building that has since, literally, exploded and read a side table copy of National Geographic. I read the same lines about deep, dark caves over and over, waiting for my first therapy appointment. Waiting to figure out my own deep, dark caves with the help of a well-educated stranger.

Since she has a Ph.D. I spent months unsure if I should call her H— or Dr. T—, so I just avoided calling her anything at all. Because my anxiety rode too high to risk messing up, to risk overstepping a boundary, to risk feeling wrong. I was, after all, in therapy for reasons.

I say I hear a doubt, with the voice of true believing
And the promises to stay, and the footsteps that are leaving
And she says “Oh, ” I say, “What?” she says, “Exactly, ”
I say, “What, you think I’m angry
Does that mean you think I’m angry?”
She says “Look, you come here every week
With jigsaw pieces of your past
Its all on little soundbites and voices out of photographs – Dar Williams

Though I had briefly mentioned fears of OCD in my first appointment, I had carefully avoided the subject since, hoping she would read my mind or ask the exact questions needed to let me segue nicely into the whole, “here is a list of things that I think may be OCD.” I couldn’t bring it up myself because, again, what if I was wrong.

Of course, what with that whole being human thing, she’s not a mind reader (which I should probably be thankful for), so I spent months dancing around the edges of my fears.

When a therapist friend finally asked me to bring up OCD in therapy as a personal favor to her, I was stuck with the choice of letting down my friend or risking being wrong.

So, in May of 2014, I handed my therapist a typed list of examples of the OCD things I think and do. I imagined myself growing smaller and sinking into her couch cushions as she read it. Her eyes scanned to the bottom of the page and she simply said, “Yep. That’s OCD.” In those three words, she confirmed what I had long suspected and feared and hoped for. It wasn’t scary. It felt like freedom to have the words. It felt almost tangible and gave me a starting place to grow.

Along came recurrent MDD with a palimpsest of SAD, some vague anxiety NOS, PPD, PPA, a side platter of capital T Trauma, and recently, ADHD. Some have always been there, some have hitched a ride along the way.

I wish I could put all those letters after my name like H–’s Ph.D. Not for pity or attention, but rather because it has been a lot of hard work. At least, I like to believe I’ve worked hard.

She is both steadfast and human, sometimes annoyingly so. I mean, wouldn’t it be easier if she could just wave a magic wand? I think for a long time that’s really what I wanted — to uncover the magic that would fix me. Without that, I assumed she would find a reason to reject me, and for a while, I relentlessly tested that, albeit subconsciously. I sent her email after email with my million swirling thoughts, picturing her opening each one and then silently putting her head down on the table in defeat — maybe lightly banging her head in frustration, hashtag headdesk style.

If painters have their “blue period” then the years from 2015 to 2018 were my “email period.”

Many of my earliest published essays were birthed from the contents of my brain, shaken and stirred, and poured out into emails to her.

After Rowan was born prematurely in 2015, I wrote breathlessly, or whatever the written equivalent would be. I was prolific because everything inside me was wound so tight that there was no more room for the words to stay in my head. Writing was a release valve for my faulty mental pressure cooker.

Now, at 40, I say things like “major outlets” and “on spec” and I can almost call myself a writer with both a straight face and without adding qualifiers. Almost.

I always called my dad a writer. An author even. Back when I was little and the sum-total of his published work was one short story in a book and a handful of short stories in whatever you’d call the 1980s version of a ‘Zine. It’s not that I was wrong in my designation of my father as a writer, it’s more the disconnect that I’ve been published in the New York Times and Washington Post and still struggle with it. I’m not sure any amount of therapy will banish the shadow of imposter syndrome that follows me wherever I go.

So much of my writing is digging through my brain trying to make sense of it. I always hope to overturn a stone and find the taproot of all that makes me, me. To be able to tease apart the rootbound mess.

What I found is that without all the roots, the ones that carry the best of me would collapse. The whole garden is too intertwined to untangle. I think that’s where the whole radical acceptance thing comes back into play.

On March 28th, 2018, when I was 36, I told my then-husband I wanted to separate. That night, my dad died unexpectedly. This was the time when my brain shattered into a million tiny pieces that I did not know how to reassemble. I was crushed under the Sisyphean boulder. After months of twice-weekly therapy, 6 months in a DBT group, and a med change to Wellbutrin, I slowly crawled back out.

I spent 2018 and 2019 dating, until the pandemic derailed casual proximity. I had good dates and bad dates and good sex and bad sex and made great friends. Sometimes I was the bad date, such as my near-fling on my solo trip to Puerto Rico. Even the bad dates were funny, and for that I am lucky. Because I know what bad dates can mean for a woman.

I’ve had my heart maybe broken a couple of times, but also learned that sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between a broken heart and an injured ego.

I’ve learned that two people can love each other and still not be right. But, sometimes there’s a pandemic, and what is “right” shifts, if only for a short time. It turns out that the idea of a Mr. Right Now can be about more than sex. What would be ill-advised in the BeforeTimes and probably the AfterTimes has been exactly the adaptation I needed in the now. If not for the PandemicBoyfriend™ and his family, the last six months of my life would have been unbearably lonely. We know the ending will sting, but in the meantime, I’m learning what I deserve and can expect in a relationship. Honestly, as crazy as this whole temporary relationship seems, it’s been the source of a lot of healing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of loneliness as I exit my 30s.

The other day, Rowan told me I collect a lot of friends. I imagined my friends like Pokemon cards spread across a table, each with their own attributes. Each filling a specific niche of my need.

Until recently, I eschewed any fleeting thought of loneliness as something simply not possible. I’m an introvert with a whole card deck of friends, so loneliness was not on my radar. Not too long ago, I revisited an essay I once wrote about loneliness and realized that the reason I’ve never been able to finish it is that it hasn’t ended. The essay focused on that time after I left my marriage and my dad died as though that were a uniquely lonely period of my life.

And I have learned, over and over again, that fighting reality does not change reality. Being willfully not lonely doesn’t change how lonely I sometimes feel even when surrounded by people. There’s a reason every single time I do a values worksheet everything comes down to connection.

Squirrel!

The penultimate stand of my 30s is that I’ve finally started meds for the ADHD that I always kind of knew I had but never addressed for fear that I’m really just lazy. My friends have all been like, oh yeah, I thought you knew you had ADHD. It’s sort of obvious, Rhiannon. I’m only on day three of stimulants and I’m wondering if this is how the rest of the world feels? I can tune out all the extraneous noises. I think before I was hearing everything all at once? So my world was constant overstimulation. Basically, it’s not that I had too many mental tabs open, it’s that I had too many tabs open at once on the same screen at the same time and they were all auto-playing noises. Everything was competing for my attention simultaneously.

I see the mountain, the mountain comes to me,
I see the mountain and that is all I see. – Dave Carter

The final adventure of my 30s will be hiking to the top of Mt. Pisgah near Asheville. PandemicBoyfriend™ suggested it on a trip to the mountains months ago. Pisgah is a touchstone of my life and he couldn’t believe I’ve never climbed it. I’ve scattered or buried the ashes of my dog, cat, and dad at the Pisgah overlook. It’s reproduced in painting on my living room wall. My favorite tree in the world stands in the area between the overlook and the Blue Ridge Parkway. It feels like a constant in my life, having stood sentry over my 20s.

The symbolism of climbing an actual mountain to end this Sisyphean decade is just now hitting me.

Maybe my 40s is when I get to let go of the boulder and make my way back down.