happy birthday to me.
forty. today. out loud, on the page, on the actual day — because if i don’t say it here, then where.
it’s the Big 40. not the little one. there is no little one — that’s the joke. forty shows up full size and doesn’t apologize for the room it takes. i used to think this number belonged to other people. dads. people with mortgages and a junk drawer that’s secretly just for chargers. and now here i am — the drawer, the number, a body that makes a little sound when i stand up off the floor. and somehow it doesn’t feel like the end of anything. it feels like the part of the song where the drums finally come in.
let me back up, though. forty doesn’t mean anything without the thirty-nine that paid for it.
twenty-year-old me would not believe we made it here. that kid was running on caffeine and certainty, convinced he had the whole map memorized. he didn’t have a map. nobody does — that’s the first thing the years teach you, slowly and then all at once: every single person you ever looked up to was also just guessing. they were just better dressed about it.
thirty was where it got real. thirty is where the bill comes due for everything your twenties put on credit — the late nights, the half-finished plans, the people you loved badly because nobody had taught you the other way yet. i spent a good chunk of that decade learning how to sit with myself without flinching. that’s not a glamorous project. nobody throws you a party for it. but it might be the most important thing i ever did.
i won’t pretend every year was kind. some of them tried me. a few landed real punches — the kind that change the way you stand for good. there are stretches i’m not going to lay out here, not today, the ones where i genuinely wasn’t sure the loverboy was making it out with his heart in one piece. some of you were there for those. you know. and the wild thing, looking back from up here, is that the heart did make it — dented, re-glued in a couple of places, but still beating like it never got the memo that it was supposed to harden by now.
because here’s what the name over the door has always meant. loverboy isn’t soft because he never got hurt. loverboy is soft on purpose. soft as a decision you have to keep making, every morning, especially the mornings it’d be easier not to. it took me the better part of forty years to understand that staying tender isn’t the thing that happens to you when you’re weak — it’s the most stubborn, bravest thing a person can keep choosing. that’s the one i’m proud of. quietly. that’s the achievement i’d actually hang on the wall.
so let me take inventory, since it’s the day for it. here’s what survived:
the part of me that texts back too fast. the part that believes people when they say they’ll show up. the part that gets embarrassingly, uncoolly excited about small things — the first good cup of tea of the morning, a song that finds me at the exact right second, someone I love laughing at something dumb I said. I kept the soft. I think that’s the whole win. you can lose almost anything and slowly build it back. that one you don’t get back once it’s gone — so I guarded it like it mattered. turns out it did.
and I didn’t get here alone, even in the years that felt like solitary confinement. there were people who stayed when staying wasn’t easy or rewarding or fun. people who saw the worst version and didn’t leave a review. i’m not naming names in a public journal — you know who you are — but understand that you’re written into this number whether you signed up for it or not. forty is partly yours.
so. what now. forty more, I hope — but slower this time. i’m officially done rushing the good parts to get to the next thing; the next thing was never as good as the part i rushed past. i want to be the kind of forty the twenty-year-old would’ve actually wanted to grow into. not impressive. not winning. just at peace, and still showing up with the heart out.
forty candles, one wish — and i’m keeping the wish. but you can probably guess the shape of it by now. more of this. slower. sweeter. softer where it counts.
happy birthday, loverboy. you made it. somehow, against a couple of solid odds, we made it.
Still.