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’ve been thinking a lot about my twenties. In particular, the drama. All those insatiable and untamable emotions hovering just beneath my skin, instantly accessible at the slightest provocation. Emotions that fueled over-the-top meltdowns filled with gut-wrenching pain and minute-long rants strung together with ingenious expletives. The meltdowns, in turn, producing crying so intense that my abs hurt for the next three days and I was forced to wear sunglasses...
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.
© 2024 · fiftyonfifty.com.
