I hadn’t expected it to be so happy. That’s the thing which came as a surprise. I thought that, inspired by happiness research, there was an inevitable downward curve facing those entering midlife, that the mental inevitably tracked the physical decline. But here I am to you approaching 43 and I am ever so surprised to find my 40s suiting me very well.
Perhaps it is just the logic of a good novel or a film, that the middle is where the juice is. The actors are locked into the performances, the dilemma of the story is clear, any number of different and differently satisfying endings remain imaginable. There hasn’t been the inevitable disappointment of there having to be a denouement, tho perhaps some of the initial questions of the story are by now boxed. We are at the moment of maximum intrigue, with perhaps the only disappointment being that there has to be an ending at all.
It is never a question of how old you are, but how alive you are at any given moment. You could theoretically achieve your deepest and greenest bloom in your senescence.
I am haunted of late by the image of my own skull. My own post-death skull, long since stripped of flesh, just lying about on some dirty ground. Probably next to my own clean ribcage and bones too. On a recent visit to the Saxon State Archaelogical Museum, I found myself staring at the bones and remains of long-dead prehistoric folks and thinking I’d be joining them in, in the grand scheme of things, the blink of an eye. It was such a nice day, and I had such good company, and it just seemed so absurd that feeling that all of this would be over soon. I felt so engaged with and happy in life; it felt that death should be a thousand years away.
Death too is something that I think about much less than I used to. Plus the way I think about it has grown different too – less fearful, more accepting and only more bemused. The two things go hand in hand; getting used to this whole life business and seeing how strange it is that the human thing, indeed that anything much at all, exists. I sometimes find myself looking at my hands and thinking how strange they are.
Perhaps my completed decades have given me something of a sense of assurance – that at the age of 42, I’ve now started to have had a bit of a life, meaning that if I were to keel over I wouldn’t have been entirely short-changed. (It has been something of a consolation too that, if I were to die at my still relatively young age, keeling over would likely be how it happened; sudden, spectacular, and hopefully into a bowl of trifle).
Plus within those tallied years I’ve done a lot of things which really mattered to me; I’ve (self-)published a novel, I’ve learnt a language or two to fluency, I’ve found good friends and lived the odd wild time too. I’ve known what it’s like to be really in love. Indeed, of all the outstanding things I’d have loved to have done in my life, only ‘Learn a musical instrument’ has thus far eluded me, and even then my mandolin glowers back at me from the corner of my room as I write, imploring me to have another bash.
My midlife contentment doesn’t just come from looking back. I’ve made some changes of late. I’ve moved city, stopped doing comedy, and begun the process of divorce. I’ve met someone new and important to me. My new phase is marked in a new circumstances and fresh or at least revived challenges.
Fundamentally, I’ve changed what I want; for the first time in my life, I am putting something else above my desire for artistic success. Being offered a decent full-time role and the prospect of professional development have opened up to me the opportunity to do something I’ve wanted for a long time – to live like a normy. To have colleagues and career prospects and a regular wage.
I’m surprised how well it suits me, this regular Joeing, and a part of me asks the question if I wouldn’t have thrived doing it years ago, not that I didn’t try. For the first time, I’m swimming with the currents, rather than trying to establish my own domain; it feels like the effort I put into breaking into London art scenes in my 30s would have made me a successful CEO elsewhere.
Still, it all wouldn’t have made for the cocktail of disappointment, sexual rejection and wistful humour which has seen this newsletter become a moderate if consistent success.