Hello,
What do you do when you are about to turn 40? Go up in a balloon, skydive, dye your hair, get a tattoo? Or perhaps, rather, spend a long time thinking about the passage of time, looking at photos, reviewing moments, trying to understand how you feel at this point that you have heard so much about: 40, the famous crisis, middle age, ‘half’ of life.
Yes, you guessed it, in a few days the new decade will premiere. I say goodbye to my thirties and I turn 40. I don’t have a crisis (I think), although if birthdays always give me something to think and feel, then this year’s even more so. I’m not young anymore, I think. And another Ana comes out to say: you WERE no longer young, aunt. Yes, but less now, right? There is no excuse anymore, hehe. On the other hand, is it necessary to be young for something? What a terrible mandate that of youth, as if the good thing in life were not precisely that it happens and we live it. As Carmen Martín Gaite wrote, “the strange thing is to live.”
I think I have reached the age of despair. Others arrive earlier. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it’s because of the years themselves, nor because of the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better cared for and more attractive than ever. It’s because of what we know. It’s not just that we know that love is ending, that our children are stolen from us. It is rather that the barriers between our own circumstances and those of the rest of the world have collapsed despite everything, despite all the education received (…) I understand that then we reach the age of hope.”
Jane Smiley
— The age of despair
But yes, turning 40 is accepting that time passes, that Instagram begins to show me collagen ads and suggest firming treatments. It’s seeing how conversations about motherhood accelerate around me, the ticking gets louder than ever. It’s taking some balance and feeling satisfied. That is, I suppose, one of the reasons for the so-called 40-life crisis: reviewing the list of ‘duties’ that you were supposed to have completed when you reached this year, whether or not to put the ‘check’. Those who have not fulfilled the clichés may feel like failures, those who have done so may feel dissatisfied. That’s the worst thing about mandates, about well-constructed social ‘achievements’: get married or have a partner, buy a house, have children, say you’ve been to many different places in the world.
There at the header I leave you some books that have accompanied me this decade.
In ‘The age of disconsolation’ (Sixth Floor), Jane Smiley traces a fiction that speaks of that ‘dismay’ that tends to arrive at some point in that ‘middle age’.
The autobiography in construction of Deborah Levy (it has three volumes, one appears there, ‘The Cost of Living’, from Random House) it helped me see a 50-year-old woman start her life over again.
One of the poems: ‘The Deer Leap’ (Igitur), by Shannon Olds, to experience heartbreak, also ‘The Beauty of the Husband’, by Anne Carson (Lumen).
‘Look straight ahead’ (Sixth Floor), by Vivian Gornick, and ‘Longing for roots’ (Gallonero), by May Sarton, are books that I have found myself reading, that have given me a certain calm, a certain understanding of things.
A classic to read about what is exceptional about living: ‘The strange thing is to live’, by Carmen Martín Gaite (Anagrama). And a novelty that I loved about a thirty-year-old who looks back at the time when university was ending and the world of work was beginning and there was a bit of a crisis hanging over our heads: ‘The Rachel Factor’, by Caroline O’ Donoghue (Asteroid Books).
You may be interested
- In Pikara they have interviewed Carmen Grau Vilaexpert in disaster management, researcher at Waseda University, Japan, following DANA: “Disasters often worsen gender violence, and it must be prevented”
- Why did you continue with him? It’s a typical question. No matter how much we believe we know and are aware of sexist violence, the clichés remain. In this piecemy colleague Marta Borraz addresses the complex answer to that question.
- Trump won. The ‘bro strategy’ or ‘the macho vote’ worked. I reflect here About what it entails: I think it achieves a ‘twinning’ that makes men feel part of something bigger, makes them feel understood by others, who promise them that they will look after them and their families.
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A toast to the decade that is leaving and another to the one that is about to begin.
Ann
#turn
