On Turning 41

Forty-one arrived quietly. No crisis, no spiral, no list of things I should have accomplished by now. Just a calm morning and the small, almost strange realization that I am still here, and that I am okay. There were years when I wasn't sure either of those things would be true. So I've stopped taking the quiet for granted. This birthday didn't feel like getting older. It felt like proof.

I've lived enough for a few lifetimes, and I've left pieces of myself in a lot of places. What I have now, the thing I didn't have for a long time, is people. The right ones.

My friends carried me through every moment of the worst of it. I won't try to name what each of them did, because there's too much, and because love like that doesn't sort neatly into a list. They were simply there, again and again, in the ways that mattered and the ways I couldn't even ask for. If you've ever had people who stayed when staying was hard, you know there's no adequate thank you. You just spend the rest of your life trying to be that for someone else.

My family deserves more than a line, too. I caused them pain in the years I disappeared. I pulled away, I went quiet, I made choices that must have been agonizing to watch from the outside. And when I finally came back, they didn't reproach me. They didn't make me earn it. They welcomed me with open arms, and that welcome is part of what gave me the strength to leave him. You don't always realize, in the moment, that being received without judgment is its own kind of rescue. It was for me.

And then there's the love I live inside now. For most of my life I thought love looked like grand gestures, the flowers, the performance, the proof. What I have now is quieter and far more rare. He took the time to actually understand me, and then he loves me in the specific way I need to be loved, not the generic version. It's tailor-made. After years of love that hurt, this is the first time it's been calm. I didn't know love could feel like rest.

I think a lot about the woman I've become and the one I'm still becoming, because I'm not finished. I don't think we ever are. But there's a difference now in who I'm becoming for. For most of my life, I was shaping myself around someone else's approval, someone else's comfort, someone else's idea of who I should be. Now, for the first time, the becoming is mine. That's the part of 41 that feels like a gift.

So this is where I am. Forty-one, still here, loved well, and quietly proud of the woman who made it to this morning. That's more than enough.