Why Turning 42 is Awesome(er)

I wrote a post last year entitled, "Why Turning 41 is Awesome",  but I deleted it.  At the time, this was a relatively new blog without many followers, although someone I worked with was reading it, and it felt just a bit too personal a post for only this one acquaintance to read.

Now ya'll have seen photos of my messy house, got me liquored up in NYC, know my medical secrets, and still read my blog, so I have nothing to hide.  Here you go:  Why Turning 42 is Awesomer Than I Thought it Would Be:

I received a birthday card from an old friend this morning with a photo of the skyline of Florence, Italy.  She wrote, "Remember what you were doing 20 years ago today?"  Yes, I do:  I had just quit my job in Rome, and I was sitting in a restaurant in Florence with her, celebrating turning the ripe old age of 22.  I remember the food we ate (gnocchi), the wine we drank (chianti) and the name of the restaurant (Aqua al due).  I remember the hotel we stayed at on the Piazza della Signoria, that we stayed up that night playing a drinking game called Pigs with some other Canadian backpackers until the hotel owner told us to shut up.

It was great fun; I felt so worldly having travelled around Europe, speaking three languages, and I felt like I'd just passed through the most exciting phase of my life.  I had that naive notion that adulthood meant stability and a slowing-down of everything, as if my life would begin its inevitable deceleration and I was having my one great last adventure.  I pictured life like this, where the X axis is age and the Y axis is some quantitative measure of experiences:

I grabbed this from Bio-Rad.com rather than try to make my own, but note how the curve decelerates just before 30. Like I thought my life would.

But there was a whole hell of a lot I didn't know.  I didn't know that grownups have exciting lives too.  I didn't know that I would go back to grad school at 29 and change jobs.  I didn't know that I would do it again at 37.  I didn't know that I would do more travelling in my 30s and 40s than in my 20s.  I didn't know that "settling down" with a partner doesn't mean that the relationship never changes.  I didn't know that having kids would be so difficult and fun and frustrating and loveable and exhausting.  I didn't know that there was still so much to learn.  I didn't know that I would forever be looking back at my past self and wondering how I could have been so ignorant about things.

Here's to exponential growth with no plateau! 

 

ps:  Thanks for reading everybody. Your comments and advice mean a lot to me.  Just to show I've been doing some actual Real Life Sewing now that I'm feeling better, here's a taste of what I'm working on: