Forty. Four. point. O. How did this happen? One minute I’m sneaking in an R-rated movie, the next my back hurts for no reason and I’m officially “too old for this shit.”

I can’t shake this feeling that life is somehow unfair. Like, we’re supposed to make life’s biggest decisions in our twenties: what career, what city, who we want to love, what kind of life to have, and then live with those decisions forever. Twenty is a cruel age to have to figure it all out. Society’s rulebook needs a serious rewrite. Why not get married later? Why not decide what to be when you’re actually grown up? Why can’t curiosity guide us instead of deadlines?

Now should be the time to figure things out. I think lived long enough to know better now. I had fun, I traveled, I loved and I lost. I feel like now it would be a good time to decide, to make the decisions we were too young to make in our twenties. What career actually fits after we tried a bunch of jobs, what city feels like home after you had time to travel around, who we really want to be with after you’ve been around the block once or twice.

They call it a midlife crisis. I call it common sense finally catching up.

Sometimes, I get that dark cloud over my head, and I wonder “what if”. And I think of the multiverse and all the lives I could’ve had. The question that creeps in: How do I forgive myself for all the things I didn’t become? All the dreams that fizzled, the versions of myself that never got a chance to take the stage. The boy I didn’t marry, the job I didn’t take, the thing I never studied, the trip I never made. Are those other versions of me better? Richer? Happier? Do they think the same about me?

Philosopher Alan Watts goes on to say that if you could dream every possible life you could have, within the infinite multiplicity of choices, eventually, you would dream the life you’re living right now and that’s about the most beautiful thing I ever heard: the notion that my life is a dream worth dreaming of.

There’s this line from I keep coming back to:

“You were not ever going to be young again. You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get, in every single moment, that you are right now as young as you’ll ever be again. And now. And now. And now and now and now.” Taffy Brodesser-Akner

And wow, does it sting and spark at the same time.

So yes, forty. My back hurts, my reflection occasionally surprises me, and my inner kid is still very much alive. Loud. Restless. Curious. Forty may have snuck up on me, but I refuse to feel trapped by it. There’s still so much left to explore, so much left to become, I still have so much life ahead of me. I can do with it whatever I want, change it if I feel like it. Make it even better, brighter, lighter, more. It’s a dream after all.