I turned forty-five the other day. This is wild because I remember turning fifteen with some amount of clarity. I do. And seventeen. I recall my twentieth spin around the sun, and then, thirty, and also, forty. And now, I’ve arrived (gracefully?) at forty-five. Age is truly a number but when that number is something you considered aged as a child, it’s a pretty wild experience.
I could wax poetically about all the outrageously impressive things people did later in life, but I imagine you’ve all seen that meme or read that article or post. I don’t need to do that. While I leave room for the possibility of really killing it in my second half of life on this planet, I don’t imagine I’m inventing a drug or breaking any record anytime soon. Again, if I do, fantastic, but it’s not on my to do list.
Thinking about this forty-fifth year on planet Earth, I contemplated a different kind of journey for myself. Not wholly different than the one I had now. What I mean to say is that I didn’t really spell out every second of my life in a way where I can compare where I am now versus what I envisioned for myself. Sure, at one point I thought I’d be married with a kid or two and perhaps a house, but that was always a loose thought and one that I hinged on the notion of certain things happening first (like, erm, meeting someone halfway normal).
Generally, I don’t really dedicate myself to five- or ten-year planning. I suppose I’ve never really seen the point, given the way that things seem to change on a dime. People come and go and the world around me is ever-changing, so setting forth a notion of what it’s all going to look like feels silly.
I did decide to carpe the diem in my forty-forth year of living and generally decided I would do the same this year. That said, I’m hoping to make that a regular gig, so I’m not sure it bears mentioning. However, I did also decide that I want to try and let go of things a little more gently than I have in the past.
Do I mean that I’m striving to morph into a cold person who doesn’t value connectivity and jumps ship at the first sign of trouble? Not at all. I mean, get real. That couldn’t be further from who I am as a human. What I mean is that when things start to go in a different direction than what I anticipated, I don’t cling so hard to the past or alternatively, my vision of what I wanted something to be.
What I’ve always struggled with is the notion that this automatically means that I’d be embracing what something turned into or turned out to be. It’s not that either. It doesn’t serve me to hold onto what something was, but similarly, it doesn’t feed me to just automatically latch on to the thing it’s become.
I suppose that is the messaging, right? We tell people that they should be flexible and move through changes in relationships and situations, but a big part of that is also the mostly unspoken sentiment that we should accept what something has changed into if we want to demonstrate ourselves to be compromising and flexible and reasonable.
Life has handed you a different path? Great! Live your best life within that new paradigm. Make the most of it. Turn those lemons into lemonade.
Here’s what I learned and it took me forty-five years (approximately): you can pass on the lemons. You can opt out of lemonade. You can decide that you feel more like an iced tea girlie in the moment and even if there is no iced tea available, you’d rather hold out for it. You’d rather set your intention and invest in iced tea supplies than wait to feel goodness towards the lemons. And maybe you never stumble upon iced tea. Maybe, just maybe, you just vibe with water for the rest of time. But you know what you didn’t do? Squeeze those fucking lemons and turn them into something you absolutely did not want.
I used to think I needed to turn those lemons into something I could drink because to not do so was an act of ingratitude and inflexibility. False. I think it’s important to figure out why you are resistant to a particular action and really evaluate the situation in its entirety, but that should not extend to you accepting something that you truly do not want.
And yet, people do it a lot around me and it’s hard to depart from what appears to be the social norm. To be clear, I am not talking about general compromise in relationships or life situations, at all. I’m talking about accepting a situation or a person because you feel like you have no other options.
A friend rejected me recently. I have literally no idea why. I asked, I’ve wracked my brain, and I even asked the opinion of a trusted third party. Nothing. I have some small understanding as to what might have upset the apple cart, but not to this level. I do feel pretty confident, not arrogantly so, that I could suck it up and just jump back in, pretending like nothing was wrong. And I have in the past, ten times over. One hundred times.
I didn’t.
I won’t.
This is the change. This is the hard part. This is where I decide that I’m just not a lemons person. I mean, I am, but not like that, not like THIS. I don’t have to be. And it’s hard, because I don’t want to be judged or criticized. Still, I’m doing it because it’s time. Because I turned forty-five, and it seems like the best time ever.
You know what? I’m not that afraid, either. I know it’s going to sting, but more than that- I know that it’s worth it. That I am. And that things won’t be perfect, but they’ll be better. Incrementally at first, and then, more than that, and then, more than that.
X
L.
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