I used to love birthdays. I remember eagerly anticipating each one. As soon as I was a few months past one birthday, I’d start upping my age toward the next. For example, a few months after turning 12, I would have given my age as “12 and a half” or “almost 13.”
Back then, birthdays meant parties and gifts, not to mention new freedoms. Thirteen made you a teenager. Sixteen made you a driver. Eighteen made you a voter. And twenty-one made you a legal drinker. But after twenty-one, the birthdays only brought age. Sure, there were other milestones to reach, but they weren’t guaranteed. In fact, the chances of achieving some of them would only decrease with each additional birthday.
Then came my first difficult birthday: 27. I decided that I didn’t like my life’s direction, so I broke up with my then boyfriend, found a new boyfriend, and quit smoking. That seemed to make me feel better for a while. While I can’t say I enjoyed the subsequent birthdays, no one of them seemed too bad.
That is, until 40. Forty was my worst birthday to date. I had been able, to an extent, to ignore certain physical changes that come with age (wrinkles, gray hair, memory problems, etc.). Hitting 40 brought it all home. I felt old. I could not ignore that I was on the downhill, that I probably had less time left to live than what I had already lived, that if I hoped to do anything to distinguish myself from the masses, I had better do it soon. The number of tomorrows was not infinite. It was diminishing. Procrastination was not just a bad habit; it was a murderer of dreams.
Hence my forays into the writing market. Honestly, writing is not the big dream for me that it once was. And it hurts to be forty and starting out as a beginner at something. I hate being inept. I know how long it can take to master an art, and I doubt I have enough time and energy to properly invest in it.
Yet it is better to chase an old dream than to do nothing at all. It is better to be inept than to be inactive. It is better to be alive than not, so I guess I’d better just accept my age and adopt a new motto: grow old or die trying! And while I’m growing older every day, there are worse things I could do than to take my ever-expanding lifetime’s worth of experiences and try to turn them into stories.