Follow the Love

Since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be 45. I think I imagined I’d be “old enough” then. I’d know what I was doing, who I was. Maybe I thought I’d be strong, no longer small enough to be hurt by the people I love.

The coolest is that in some ways that’s true. I’ve seen a new way of looking at love, seeing the source as infinite, and not dependent on how my mother, my lover, my friends see me. I’ve discovered ways of understanding them and myself with compassion, and so I’m really… somehow “ready” to be 45.

Not that I don’t still have moments of pain & forgetting. But I feel much more like I belong on this earth, like it’s “ok” for me to be here. I’m willing to give myself permission to exist. This is no small thing.

(I suppose almost no one knows how much I have struggled with self-loathing, with a sense that I don’t have a place in this world, that it would be better if I weren’t here. And those struggles aren’t all gone. I just have some handles to grab onto now, when they resurface.)

The question is, if I’m ready to be 45, what will I do with this new me? If I am ready to be who I am with enthusiasm, to take up space in this world, what will that look like?

I imagine that lots of folks might think of 45 as a late start, but it feels right to me. It’s sappy, cliche, but fits me perfectly right now: tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life.