Hello Friends! It’s been over five years since I posted my last installment of Fifty on Fifty. When I started the experiment, I thought I could write 50 essays in 50 weeks; it took 94, a Herculean effort that grew my writing and taught me that getting to 50 years is a blessing, not a curse. Fast forward, I’m in the back half of the decade and experiencing a new milestone:...
For fifty years, I believed that stuffing everything down, that being private and unknowable would earn me some kind of badge of honor. I thought I would rather die than reveal myself. But all that withholding ever did was leave me feeling isolated and perpetually lonely. It’s not like I knew any different. Secrecy and self-containment are part of my DNA. They course through my veins. Put it this way,...
One year when watching the New York City Marathon in Central Park, an elite runner collapsed in front of my husband (then boyfriend) and me just short of the 25-mile mark. We had made our way through the crowds over to the east side to watch the conclusion of the race–not the tape line finish, or the jubilant entry to the park, but the last uphill slog the runners have...
You never know when some stranger is going to tell you exactly what you need to hear. Offer a few sentences or a handful of words that cut through all the mess in your head, the ugly stuff you obsess over in the middle of the night, the things you can’t say out loud. I once believed these encounters were surreptitious and extraordinary–right place, right time and so forth. But...
I have almost no real memories left of my mother. She’s been gone exactly half my life. Like water passing over a stone year after year, the edges of her existence have become soft and hard to grab hold of. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to will a memory into being. I pick an event or a period in time and ask my brain to call it forward....
I ended up at a 5:30pm spin class the other day. Odd for me because I like to work out in the morning when the world is quiet, and most people are still in bed. Even more strange because 5:30pm is the witching hour, that sensitive and highly unpredictable time of day. Typically, I’m hauling kids between school and practices and tutors. Or I’m at home throwing dinner together, monitoring...
I am 45 weeks into this project. Ninety percent complete. I should be heady and elated over the prospect of being done, but that is not the case. Instead, I’m edgy and intense. As if the few thousand words remaining might not be enough for me to figure out the point of my experiment. Perhaps this is how an author feels when they’re nearing the end of a book–praying that...
Dear Sylvia, I don’t like writing letters, but given how you’ve been avoiding me lately, I feel I have no choice. I’m sure you’re thinking, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Avoiding what? How about we put the bullshit aside and choose the high road for once. Because I saw the look on your face at Whole Foods. The other day? Riding that pain-in-the-ass moving sidewalk down to...
I didn’t pursue acting because I wanted to become a star, or because I had signed up for all the plays in high school (there were no plays), or because the art form called to me. I became an actor to force my mouth open, which–due to personality or upbringing–was pretty much wired shut. My first instructor, a teacher from Ryerson University in Toronto, told me that if I wanted...
Forgiveness was a word batted around a lot when I was growing up. Mostly because the King James Bible–ever present in my life—taught that we should forgive people as much and as often as God forgives us. In the book of Matthew, Jesus said that amounts to “seventy seven times,” (the sum of which is widely debated, but ultimately means a ton). If someone steals your sheep, rapes your sister,...
There’s so much noise around turning 50. Does one deny being a half-century old? Embrace the achievement? Fight like the devil to turn back the clock? Without question, this age instigates a new chapter with bigger stakes and a growing sense of urgency. Given our youth-obsessed culture and my own compulsion to stay young, I wondered how honestly I could write about this milestone. Fifty on Fifty is my experiment.
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