existential hoo-hah…

Anne Lamott once wrote, “Now it was time for the existential hoo-hah of getting old.” Well, friends, I hope you’re ready for a whole crapload of existential hoo-hah. ‘Cause I’m getting old.

I recently celebrated a birthday. A milestone birthday. A brand new decade, one which I feel entirely too immature to have entered. That’s right – I’m 40.

I’m handling it better than I expected, better than I think everyone expected given that I didn’t do as well with turning 30. But that was more circumstantial than anything. I spent the majority of my 20’s in school – first college, then law school. I turned 29 a couple months after I passed the bar exam and officially became an attorney.

Then, three months before my 30th birthday, I fainted and my POTS symptoms started, but it would take another couple years before I was actually diagnosed. I spent my 30th birthday uncertain about my health and scared about my future. My fear wasn’t about the number – 30 is a perfectly good age. But I knew that I would never get my 20’s back, and I was mourning the loss of my youth. Had I known I was going to spend the rest of my life dealing with multiple illnesses and unable to do many of the things I want to do, I never would have spent so much time in school. Because now I’m stuck with a piece of paper, a misspent youth, and unfulfilled dreams.

This birthday felt somewhat reminiscent of that milestone 10 years ago, where a few months before my birthday, my health takes a drastic change. Except now I don’t mind that I’m getting older. I want to get older. I’m never going to regain that lost youth and I’m never going to be that definition of a 40 year old I had so long ago, back when 40 meant kids and promotions and so many other things that I don’t have. Now, I want to be the age that I feel, as if every pain and creak and stumble has been etched into my body by the sands of time, not fate and genetics. I want to have earned my pain through decades of misuse and neglect, the way all true adventurers do. I want to move along with the business of life at the same rate it is moving along with me.

Every birthday is a gift, because it means 1) each year I get closer to the age I feel, and 2) I’m still here – both causes for celebration in their own right.

And, like I wrote on Facebook, 40 has its perks:

Cheers to another year, friends.

Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.” ― Steve Maraboli

Apparently late July/early August was a popular time to give birth to chronically ill babies (I blame all the spiked egg nog our parents must have drank around the holidays), because a number of my chronically ill friends also recently celebrated birthdays. Check out Caz’s take on birthdays while chronically ill here: Birthdaying with Chronic Illness, Invisibly Ill

Smell ya later.
– Linds