I’m not sure at what point birthdays went from being eagerly anticipated to being feared and dreaded in equal measure. Tomorrow, emerging slowly out of seven months of illness, I will be turning thirty-five, which is officially (in my mind at least) the last year I can even pretend to be ‘young’. And so it feels like a sort of Reckoning. Everything I have done and not done glare out at me, and particularly everything that I have not managed to do or be that you are supposed to do or be by the age of thirty-five. I have been almost unwaveringly single, and unlike (what can feel like) every other person my age, I haven’t had any babies. For 361 days of the year, I’m quite happy with this situation, but an upcoming birthday can turn these two facts into a tidal wave of devastation that necessitates soul-searching sobs all over the sofa.
But what was that? There it is, an unexpected joy, slipping in almost imperceptibly. For the first time in my life, this year, I have a sofa. And this points to an even more glorious point: I have a flat. A wonderful, peaceful place where nobody can chastise me for stacking the drying-up dangerously high or leaving my shoes under the table. Here I can spill tea bountifully onto the armchair with every cup that I drink, relishing the dripstains as they appear, each a perfectly formed signal of Freedom.
People say that they feel the same at thirty-five as they did at twenty-five, but I cannot believe them. Even my face now intersperses the everlasting teenage spots with grandmotherly whiskers, and I related all too easily to a post I saw online (still haven’t kicked the habit of scrolling) that said, “Remember when you used to just lie in one position and stay there for ages? And now you have to turn yourself like a rotisserie chicken every fifteen minutes or a hip hurts…”
It's taken seven months of enforced quiet-living to understand quite how hard I have pushed myself in my life. The four years that I taught full-time in a primary school had me living in swinging extremes of high and low, with extreme stress and extreme sensory loads that make the number of physical aches and pains I now experience unsurprising. It took one term as a teacher for me to stop being ID’d at the supermarket, and at the end of that term I fainted with exhaustion in Paddington station before spending the first week of my Christmas holidays vomiting.
My body is shaky most of the time now, especially right in the top of my head, just where babies have a soft spot that pulses gently with a heartbeat. I am trying to retrain my nervous system into believing that groups of children need not be seen as a threat, but I have a way to go here. Half-hour sessions supporting groups in the woods are still followed by nightmares and the sense of my whole body quivering, which lasts for days afterwards. I cry easily in the days after these sessions, and have to work hard to settle into calm through rest, meditation, acupuncture, walks, and brilliant, cold-water swims.
But there it is again! - Just how lucky I am. I now live in a place that is so beautiful, so green, with hills and lakes and lambs that I speak to on a daily basis. I could not ask for a better, more healing spot.
So today, the day before my thirty-fifth birthday, I am countering the dread by creating for myself a huge sense of achievement. For the first time in a long time, I have cycled into town, gone into a café full of unknown people and noises, and bought myself a cup of tea and a croissant. And as a present to myself, I have bought a brand new pad of A4-lined paper. What could be better? Who knows, I might even get the old blog going again…
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