I’m turning 44 this week. Most of the people I tell that to say, “Oh, you’re so young, you’re still just a baby!” But I gotta tell ya, it really snuck up on me. It seems impossible to be 44. I know it’s no big revelation or anything, but time is a weird, weird thing.
My 20s seemed to go on forever, and I swear the time expands as I get older. I will think back a particular time in my 20s, like the years that I first moved to Boston, and it will feel like that span of time must have lasted at least three or four years. And then I will do the time math and realize that it was barely 18 months. I think back on particular jobs I had in my 20s and think I worked there for years, but really it was maybe a year, at best. The period of time between 2001 and 2007 gets longer and longer every year. And it’s not just in retrospect. Time felt slow to me then, too.
But the period of time between 2013 and now? That happened in the blink of an eye. I definitely am still in my 30s, right? It’s like when you’re young, you’re on one of the hand carts on the railroad tracks, just pushing and pushing and not getting very far, and then suddenly, bam, you’re on a train with broken brakes barreling down the tracks toward…well, I’ll leave that one alone.
I also realized recently that when my parents were my age, I was TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD. When I graduated from college, they were only 41. And at that time, 40 seemed so old. But to me now? It seems like it would physically impossible for me to have a 25 year old, because I could not possibly be old enough for that. Like, I just turned 30 myself, right? Like, just a few years ago?
I know, I know, none of this is revelatory, time is weird, when you’re young time is slow and it speeds up as you age, blah blah.
I did find myself wondering whether having kids makes you feel more “your age,” though. I don’t have children, and while technically I suppose it’s still possible, it really isn’t. And I wonder, if I did, if I was responsible for a small person’s life, would I feel more like a grown-up? Because that’s really it, sometimes I don’t feel like I’m a grown-up. I’m a grown-up imposter. I play the part pretty well: I go to work and I’m productive and I’m “progressing” in my career, whatever that means. And we own a house that we keep mostly functioning, and we do things like have our furnace inspected and get the roof replaced and vacuum on a regular basis. We pay our bills on time and have savings and 401(k) plans and we even have pensions, which seems like a very old-fashioned thing.
But I still feel like I’m fumbling through life most of the time. I might have all the surface details worked out, but there are so many times when I still feel like an overly-emotional 25 year old who consistently makes dumb choices with no thoughts about the consequences. I still feel like I want to blow up my life and go work on a mega-yacht and party all the time like the kids on Below Deck. Although I know I would be really, really bad at working on a mega-yacht.
Is there a moment when I will start to feel like maybe I have figured things out? When I start making smarter choices all the time and not just some of the time? Other people tell me they think of me as someone reasonable and competent and successful, and I think, haha, that’s hilarious, you must not really know me that well. Will there be a time when I feel like the reasonable, competent, successful person other people see? I kind of feel like I’m running out of time to figure it out, because, you know, runaway train on the tracks now. Everything is speeding up.
According to the statistics, I’m about half-way through my life now. If I’m lucky. And I guess I just feel like I still haven’t figured out how to be the person I want to be. But maybe another way to think about this is that I’m only half-way through my life (if I’m lucky), and maybe it’s totally normal that I haven’t really figured it out yet.
I suppose time is going to do what it does. It’s always going to be weird. And maybe one day I’ll look back at my late 30s and 40s and think, man, that time seemed to last forever. Or maybe I just shouldn’t think about it so much.
Anyway, welcome to middle age. Is this when I should start buying the Oil of Olay?