I am forty! And I’m a single, childless, careerless, disabled, woman. A spinster. Nobody's significant other, nobody's adventure buddy, and nobody’s parent or guardian. I’m a disability pensioner, an economic burden, a leaner not a lifter. I am an aunt - but a geographically far away and mostly unknown one. I live on a planet with many catastrophic problems to be solved, and billions of beings who suffer, but I no longer volunteer or work anywhere. I don’t do much that’s productive or “useful” at all. I’m very slow, not very strong and have to carefully manage my limited energy. I have a bad back and am greying, wrinkling, spotting, sagging, lumpifying, and my BMI is too high. By some value-systems I am a total failure as an adult. Increasingly irrelevant to society. If I died in a car crash and I was not your friend or family, but a stranger you heard about on the news, you’d feel way less sad than if the victim was younger, more famously talented, or somebody’s mother or partner. (Admit it, it’s true
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I am fine, by the way. I’m being sardonic, (which may not be a good look). Although I won’t lie and say some things never make me sad, or I’ve never balked when looking at the chasm between my reality and “societal expectations for forty year old women” (such as career competency, secure partnership, motherhood), they don’t cut me critically deep. I’m not fishing for pity or validation here. I guess what I’m trying to do (clumsily), is criticize the values that our society is most loud about, yet not all people can embody. And even if they do, it is based on random luck more than anything.
I know it doesn’t actually matter that I no longer conform to what the loudest, flashiest aspects of society find valuable. These can also be shallow and short-lived. No one gets to keep their youth, beauty and strength forever. In the whole animal kingdom only killer whales and humans keep their post-menopausal females around, so evolution says aging, non-reproductive human women are important, even if fashion and the rest of the animal-kingdom doesn’t think so. And most importantly, I still like my life. I like being here on planet earth in this imperfect, but clever, breathing body.
I live a small, slow life with lots of naps. I appreciate beautiful things in nature. I read heaps of books that not many other people have time to read. I really love potatoes. I have friends. I live in my favorite place in the world, and lately I’ve been well enough to go for bush sits and outdoor swims. I provide intentional, blissful, belly rubs to dogs, and unintentional food for sparrows and rats in the garden. Quite a few pot plants depend on me to keep them alive. The only “adult” milestone I have been very-lucky enough to “achieve” is buying half a house. I try not to be a terrible landlady or housemate. I “still” live in a sharehouse, but I’m not the only person I know doing this over forty, and I actually think it’s a bit of an achievement, in flexibility, tolerance and communication.
I wouldn’t swap my life with anyone. Mostly because I wouldn’t want to land any poor sod with my life! Ha ha, but no, despite this dud deal of a body, despite multiple circumstances meaning my life is far from what my younger self imagined it would look like at 40, I know I’m still immensely privileged in many other ways. And I have enough goodness, I have enough meaning.
I hope I’m more generous, humble and less ignorant than when I was younger. I hope I can keep learning stuff. I hope the world as we know it doesn’t disintegrate into a total cataclysmic climate apocalypse before..... , well, ever. I hope humanity finds a cure for me/cfs, or at least finds out why the hell my body is like this now. I hope I still keep being okay even if we don’t. I hope humans keep being delightful and funny and sweet and silly, whatever happens in the world. And nature will always be improbable and wonderous, even if it were just algae, cockroaches, ravens, the steady rotations of the earth, the sunlight sparkles on the ocean, and the stars in the dark universe at night.
So. Forty cries of a black cockatoo, flying down over nipaluna/Hobart from kunanyi to you all. (Raaaaaaaa!)
