Turning 40, part 1:
What would your 10-, 20-, 30-year-old self say?
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
My husband David turns 40 on Sunday, and conversations about the next decade abound.
“Before we go there,” our couples coach said earlier this week, “let’s go back. Tell me about your 30s.”
This stopped us both in our tracks. Oh right. We were moving past our 30s before appreciating what they were to us. We started the conversation over, scooping up the last ten years and staring at them for a while.
We were moving past our 30s before appreciating what they were to us.
Our 30s have been about hard work and the long wait. Life has felt painfully slow and tense sometimes. “Foundation building,” David put it—with slow-drying concrete. The last decade consisted of our many-year debate on having kids (result: a 2.5-year-old daughter); our eight-year writing and editing experiment (result: my first book); our eight-year debate on moving to Denver (result: a 1.5-year rehab of our 100-year-old Denver house); and our three years working out a long parade of kinks on a cabin project (result: still in progress).
Reflecting on all this was helpful and lovely and got us to a vision of our 40s building on the foundation we laid in our 30s. But I found myself angsty for ways to make all this adulting talk more lively and fun. Which made me think of a letter I wrote from my teenage self to my adult self a few weeks ago, prompted by
’s amazing Letters from Love practice. I’ve thought sometimes about what I’d say to my younger self, but not what she would say to me. Reversing the question felt like wrapping my younger self in a hug instead of berating her for all she could have done better.I found myself angsty for ways to make all this adulting talk more lively and fun.
What would my younger self have to say to me now? She was happy I asked!
Me at 30: Somewhere inside you will always be a dancing queen. You don’t need to drink champagne to find her. All you need is to hold her hand.
Me at 20: Yes, you’ve always had these questions. Books didn’t save you because they answered them. Books saved you because they let you know other people had them too.
Me at 10: Sometimes you write and share and get a gold star. Sometimes people don’t understand; sometimes they say mean things. But remember that Muppets song that you helped sing on stage in fifth grade, the one that gave you chills?
If just one person believes in you
Deep enough and strong enough
Believes in you
Hard enough and long enough
Before you know it, someone else will think
“If he can do it, I can do it.”
One person is enough to be brave.