Flip the Script on Your 40’s and 50’s

Photo by Chang Ye on Unsplash

Day Sixty

Your 40’s and 50’s

Second Solar Return

“I have all the time and energy I need to accomplish everything I want to do.” Sue Patton Thoele, The woman’s book of soul.

When I turned 17 in high school, I finally felt like I could be myself. I was in school activities, had a community of friends and two different boyfriends who were each a special kind of fun. There was travel, activities and purpose with my classmates. I had survived moving 15 times while growing up and now, after two years of navigating a new school, I had a place where I felt like myself, where I belonged and felt at home. I describe it as feeling like I “landed in myself.”

Turning 40 was like that. After a tumultuous decade in my 30’s, my 40th birthday was a new beginning. I had survived so many plot twists with trauma, death, and illness. My body was strong again and I had dreams and hopes. A friend organized a luncheon at her home to celebrate my 40th birthday and to celebrate that I had survived an illness.

My husband and I bought a rundown house with three ceilings with water damage and twenty-seven boarded up windows. Graffiti on the walls. A gutted kitchen. Floors in need of refinishing. Built in 1910. My husband called it, “Andrea’s community house.” We lived in it while…