Good morning,
What do you do when you’re about to turn 40? Ride a hot air balloon, skydive, dye your hair, get a tattoo? Or perhaps rather spend a long time thinking about the passage of time, looking at photos, reviewing moments, trying to understand what you felt at this moment that you have heard so much about: 40 years old, the famous crisis , middle age, “half of life.
Yes, you guessed it, in a few days the new decade will debut. I’m saying goodbye to my 30s and turning 40. I’m not having a crisis (I think), although birthdays always give me something to think and feel, this year will be even more so. I’m not young anymore, I think. And another Ana comes out and says: you weren’t young anymore, aunt. Yes, but less now, right? There’s no more excuses, hehe. On the other hand, do you have to be young for something? What a terrible mandate that of youth, as if the good thing in life was not precisely that this happened and that we lived it. As Carmen Martín Gaite wrote, “what is strange is living.”
I think I have reached the age of despair. Others arrive earlier. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it’s because of the years themselves, nor because of the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better cared for and more attractive than ever. It’s because of what we know. It’s not just that we know that love ends, that our children are stolen from us. It is rather that the barriers between our own situation and that of the rest of the world have collapsed despite everything, despite all the education received (…) I understand that then we arrive at the age of hope.
Jeanne Smiley
— The age of despair
But yes, being 40 means accepting that time passes, that Instagram is starting to show me ads for collagen and offering me firming treatments. Seeing how conversations about motherhood are speeding up around me makes the ticking sound louder than ever. It requires a certain balance and a feeling of satisfaction. This, I suppose, is one of the reasons for the so-called 40-life crisis: reviewing the list of “duties” you were supposed to have completed when you reached this year, whether or not to put the “check”. Those who did not live up to the clichés may feel like failures, those who did may feel unsatisfied. This is the worst thing about mandates, about well-constructed social “achievements”: getting married or having a partner, buying a house, having children, saying you’ve been to many different places of the world.
Here in the header I leave you some books that have accompanied me this decade.
In ‘The Age of Desolation’ (sixth floor), Jeanne Smiley traces a fiction which speaks of this “disarray” which tends to arrive at a given moment in this “middle ages”.
The autobiography under construction Deborah Levy (it has three volumes, one of which appears here, “The Cost of Living,” from Random House) It helped me to see a 50-year-old woman starting her life over.
One of the poems: “The Deer Leap” (Igitur), by Shannon Olds, to experience sorrow, as well as “The Beauty of the Husband”, by Anne Carson (Lumen).
“Look straight ahead” (Sixth Floor), by Vivian Gornick, and “Desire for roots” (Gallonero), by May Sarton, are books that I found myself reading, which gave me a certain calm, a certain understanding of things.
A classic to read about what is exceptional in life: “What is strange is living”, by Carmen Martín Gaite (Anagrama). And a new one that I loved from a thirty-something who looks back at the time when university ended and the working world began and there was a small crisis hovering over our heads: ‘The Rachel Factor’, by Caroline O’Donoghue (Asteroid Books).
You might be interested
- In Pikara, they interviewed Carmen Grau-Viladisaster management expert, researcher at Waseda University, Japan, following DANA: “Disasters often aggravate gender violence, and it must be avoided”
- Why did you continue with him? This is a typical question. Even if we think we know and are aware of gender-based violence, the clichés remain. In this roommy colleague Marta Borraz addresses the complex answer to this question.
- Trump won. The “brothers’ strategy” or “the macho vote” worked. I’m thinking here On what it entails: I think it achieves a “twinning” that makes men feel part of something bigger, makes them feel understood by others, who promise to care for them. them and their family.
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If you are already 40 years old – or 50 or 60 or 70 years old…-, I will receive with pleasure your stories, your crises and your sentences on why the best moment of life begins now 😉
A toast to the decade that is leaving and another to the one that is about to begin.
Anne
