Almost 49
How did this happen?
Was it just 20 years ago that I set out to write what ended up being my first book, The View from 29? In so many ways it feels like yesterday, and yet forever ago. The View was a serial fiction that I wrote almost entirely online — though the printed version had some chapters that were exclusive to the page.
In my 30s, I wrote an unpublished manuscript entitled, The View Askew. It was never given much light of day because after I finished the first draft, things that happened in the book eerily happened in real life. So I shelved it and took a venture into memoir writing, spending a week at the Yale Summer Writers Conference studying under Mishka Shubaly, whose writing I adore.
Writing on Medium has been my “out” to sitting down to pen something larger. And, frankly, I haven’t been too consistent here, either. Something I need to think about, perhaps (in the dirtiest of words) find balance with my other artistic endeavors. This is where I should cue a shameless plug for my Etsy shop, no?
So, back on script. Yes, I’m coming on another birthday this weekend. Let’s forget for a minute I’ve already purchased myself several “gifts” and made birthday donations to several charities, and a plumber who came out late on a Sunday to unclog my kitchen sink.
It just doesn’t feel real.
Sure, I’m in menopause. Maybe I have arthritis through my spine. But I feel like I should be around 32. Ok, maybe 37-but 49? Ehh. But age is just a number, I’ve heard said, and an anchor to the theory of linear time.
I feel almost like I did in my 29th year… let’s leave this decade with a bang. Though I suspect that this time around it will mean something very different. Because it is time, perhaps, for documentation of what the view from 49 looks like. I mean, Sex and the City got a reboot …just like that.
