I have been waiting for this one.

I thought, “My life will begin at 40.”

I thought, “I will have it figured out by 40.”

I thought, “I will not dread 40.”

All and none of that is true.

As for 40 as beginning, it’s the arbitrary starting line we humans love. January 1st. Birthdays. Anniversaries. First days of sobriety. Conversions and baptisms and strange rituals that indicate to us that somehow everything before was a wash, and everything ahead will matter. It’s, of course, a discourtesy to ourselves and the diligence we spent of getting from one day to the next; nevermind a discourtesy to the others who helped us along the way. We cannot be where we are if we were not where we’d been.

And also.

I am sitting in a bed on a second floor of a glass house north of Quebec City, overlooking mountains and miles of dark pines sprouting from land caked with snow. I have a stack of books next to me, am between cups of coffee, and hear my Someone below clattering forks and scraping jars to bring me a breakfast of local croissants and accouterments so that I may write uninterrupted, after which he will also write. This is the culmination of my childhood dreams. In the fray of this moment, it may not appear that way– it’s endless emailing and hustling and moving things from one room to another, or one state to another, in and out and repeating. As a kid, I didn’t know about the latter– about the drivel of daily life; I knew only of the former– the dream that I would be a writer in a beautiful mountainous place thinking my thoughts and eating delicacies from foreign places. Even if that foreign place is only French Canada. I acknowledge that this is not my everyday, and that I did not just “land” here. It is, however, a beginning of a different sort. From this idealistic perch, I am able to see the culmination, the mountain in its various stages from the top and the bottom. It is a fabric loosely gathered of my life so far, and I am able to wrap these four decades around me in the semblance of a tunic, this birthday the sacred wreath for my head. It is a victory in many ways. And like most victors, the winning is merely the beginning of a new cycle of trying for the next crown. And so, I begin again.

The “have it figured out” is another matter. My frame of reference for this particular novelty was ambitiously set by books, obviously. First, by the characters in them, finding their true path or true love or true self by the end. As I grew and my reading became more dystopic, the standard was set by the writers themselves– I should have written a novel by now. Or put out my life’s greatest work. Or have some commercially lauded emblem with a working team behind me and a manager to coordinate my many speaking engagements or public appearances. That’s to say, “figuring it out” to me as a kid meant having utmost control of my own narrative wherein my career was a self run machine and my life latched into a a grid– even a self sketched one– and I would know what a 401K was.

Rather, my life feels floaty most of the time. I do not know what a 401K is. My “team” is my Someone and occasionally my dog, and my manager is myself. And I still use a paper calendar to the exasperation of most of my colleagues and friends.

There is no grid, and frankly no hooks in my life that would allow me to attach to one.

In the case of figuring it out, though, the first version– the one from books– was most accurate. At 40, I have found a true path. I have figured out how to make art for a living– even if that living keeps me tied to the road– while also allotting myself daily walks in the woods, time to write and cook, and a schedule that does not confine me (aside from my own over scheduling). Money is feast or famine, but friends are always abundant, and any good book ends with a gathering of friends rather than a pile of money. I have found my true love, Someone who creates alongside and hashes out the negotiations between my paper calendar and his digital one. And I have found my true self. Or rather, I didn’t ever lose her. I am resistant to call her “the child within,” because the child is not a child, she is just me. When I was a kid, I didn’t think of my whims and penchant for creating as “the child within.” So when I am doing those things, it is not a return to some place I can never go back to, but the ongoing, open studio session I have always been in. It is more accurate to say that the “grown up” is the disconnected oddity. I am more prone to recognizing that the thing I am doing– for instance writing in a glass house for my 40th birthday in Quebec– is a “very grown up thing” to do. My ability to see that lets me know that my true self is still who I know best, and the accomplishments and milestones are merely the projections of irrelevant societal standards. That much, I have certainly figured out. And that is more than sufficient.

And so finally, the dread. What I have been telling everyone I spoke to is, “I can’t wait til my forties.” And this, as seen above, is mostly true. But I knew I would not be sure of it until the day arrived– the day of my 40th birthday.

This morning the moon set just outside the windows, glowing like the morning sun behind silhouettes of trees. It was 5AM, and I chose to stay awake, listening to the sounds of a strange house, in the company of a familiar light from a celestial body, feeling the steady breathing of my Someone beside me. My whole life, for as long as I have been aware, I have found myself in these quiet, dark spaces, often in the middle of the night, vastly awake and unable to keep my mind from running. Accompanying these times is also an anxious dread– for my safety, for my loved ones’ safety, for death. I run the scales of what-if’s and worst case scenarios until I am depleted, and the fear itself fatigues me into sleep again.

This morning, there was peace. I tapped the wound to be sure, dissembling a few classic fear standards– car accidents, health– but I could not summon any monsters. I felt at home here, in my body, in my own life. Any imaginings could not change it. I may not yet have lived through the worst that I could create, but I also cannot live while creating the worst I could imagine. Maybe my 40s are, in fact, a truce.

There is also this: if I am to live to the age of any one of my four grandparents, I am already well over halfway to death. Seeing the glow of the moon and the slow shadows of the mountains pool in my view, this thought did bring a bit of dread. I tapped my Someone. He stirred and pushed himself up to one elbow. He didn’t ask me why I had woken him– he knows better by now. He simply looked out the window.

“Wow,” he said.

“What is this life?” I asked.

“What is this life,” he repeated, then wrapped himself around me with his back to the moon and his face toward me. If I have received all of this in only 40 years, I am no longer afraid to die. I may dread it as anyone dreads the end of a very good dream, of a vacation, of a perfect slice of cake. But I am not afraid. It has always served me well to keep going. I dread death, but certainly not my 40s. How could I dread it? I am just beginning to figure it out.