40 Turning on You.

Seventh birthday party, Chicago

“You could’ve done anything — if you’d wanted
And all your friends and family think that you’re lucky.
But the side of you they’ll never see
Is when you’re left alone with the memories
That hold your life together like
Glue.”

– “This is the Day” by The The

I’ve been feeling very itchy about things. Geographically, financially, in every way possible.

I don’t quite understand where life is. And it just feels like there’s a significant gap between where one thinks she’ll be approaching a certain age vs. where one is today. Where I am today.

Next month, I am turning 40.

In Judaism, 40 is the Age of Wisdom. Truthfully, I have never felt more foolish.

Of course, there is a lot to be grateful for: beautiful, talented people are at my side and my work – teaching, coaching and writing – is very meaningful. I show gratitude and do my part to reciprocate and pay it forward for all the goodness that is around me.

In fact, many have called me the eternal optimist, facing the tests of life with a can-do attitude and resilience that may have crushed others by now. I don’t know. I don’t walk in anyone else’s shoes and no one walks in mine.

Here’s what I do know:

The Secret doesn’t work for me. When I intend, things go opposite. When I let go, good things happen.

If the body is a temple, then at 40 it feels more like an ancient ruin. It’s awfully demanding and requires twice the work for half the results that I got when I was 30.

Having worked full time since I was 17, by now, I should have a significant nest egg. But I don’t.

In mid-2011, I realized that I spent two and half years in a depressive state that was triggered by a corporate layoff.  I had no idea how much of my identity was tied to being an executive.  Without a title, what was I? Who was I?

Fifteen years ago, all I wanted was to live on the beach, write books and be married. Yet I’ve spent the past decade and a half moving around and living on three of the five Great Lakes, snow blizzards and all.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately reflecting on the 90’s, a time when I began to navigate myself. We all make mistakes, by why do one’s own feel so much more deafening and fatalistic?

In June 1995, when I took my very last exam at DePaul University, I was driving home in my car and The The’s “This is The Day” came on the radio. As the lyrics and melody serenaded my soul and as I took the long way home back to suburbia, via Lake Shore Drive, and felt the breeze in my hair, I felt simultaneously relieved that the life of full-time school and full-time work would soon be cut down to just the latter and, also, a strange sense of paralyzed fear: This is it?

And, nearly seventeen years later, this same sting of reality echoes in my heart: Is this it?

True, lots of amazing things have happened in between, some initiated by me, some on their own accord. And during the past nearly six presidential elections that have transpired between now and then, a monumental amount of change occurred, both internal and external. The list, if written, will read like a plea for validation. As in, yeah, all those experiences and accomplishments feel pretty important and significant for that much time.

So what?

Today, as I sit in my newly moved-into apartment, after leaving a house that wasn’t affordable from three months into my mortgage, but one that I had miraculously sustained for two and a half years, and I look outside and see the quiet street, nestled just south of a big, beautiful lake, I wonder, again, Is this it?

Always being the dreamer – being the person with exceptionally high hopes and equal work ethic – approaching the four decade mark feels incredibly anti-climatic. It feels isolated. It makes me hungry. As in perpetually hungry.

I once said to someone, “Pain is the difference between what is and what we want it to be.”

I still believe in the dream, I’m just having a very tough time understanding its proximity.

Perhaps 40 does this to others, as well? I don’t know.

It was ten years ago that, on my 30th birthday, I spent the day in classes, taking multiple midterm exams, including statistics, which may as well as be engineering when it comes to my comprehension skills. This year, I will also be in class all day, this time teaching students, both undergrad and graduate.  Yet another coda to life’s many ironies.

The funny thing is that life has aligned in a good way: I help others achieve their goals. I have wonderful friends and am in a happy relationship. I love the view from my balcony and I see my family in Chicago for life’s big events. Many of these developments have really started to happen over the past two years, most only in the second half of 2011.

Life feels good. Life feels like a giant struggle.

And this is where the core of things really fold: if, when even at its happiest, life still feels this hard, then does it ever get easier?

Do things ever get lighter?

The heaviness of the past three years took a toll on me that was much bigger than I was aware of during the time of its happening. It was like the slow lobster effect, where tiny increments of what makes one whole slowly get taken away, but at such micro bits that one can’t even notice until a large vacuum exists.  And then suddenly you find yourself in a hall of doors and mirrors, having no idea what’s real, what’s an illusion and what’s worth walking thru; you simply know that the door behind you is no longer an option.

Corporate America, for me, was no longer an option. 60 hour work weeks. The politics. The pressure. The cost to my health and personal life. All of it ate away at me in ways I had grown so accustomed to over the two decades I spent there, that the part of me that was me in my core – the writer – had trapped herself in equating success with corporate stature, with rate of promotion and with perceived power.

I have no regrets. These were my lessons to learn.

And now, today, as I approach the fifth decade of life, I pray for that lightness: lightness in spirit, lightness in body, lightness in soul.

I hope 40 is kind to me. I hope it is kind to everyone it meets.

Mostly, I just hope.