The birthday post

Photos I meditate on as I write my memoir: First: age 0-10; Second: ages 11-20; Third: ages 21-30; Fourth: ages 51-60; Final: ages 61-69

I turn 69 next week. This birthday is hitting me hard, not because of the number – 69 is not the new 40; it’s just 69, and I am not shy about letting you know my age.

I think it’s because of my growing sense of uncertainty about what’s to come between now and when I turn 80. Who are these people who guarantee an outcome, who plant their feet so firmly in the soil of certainty? That’s not me anymore.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been deep into writing my memoir, working on a chapter that takes place between 2006 and 2016 – from age 50 to age 60. I’ve been so steeped in reliving that decade and its upheaval – it broke me – that I’m rattled now about the decade ahead. It feels similar. What will my 70s be like?

I have a series of photographs – one representing each decade – that I sometimes meditate on as I settle in to write. The first is from age 0-10, next is 11-20, then 21-30. Photos of my 30s and 40s don’t exist – I usually was the person behind the camera, and most of the photos were of the kids. But there’s a photo of me between ages 51 and 60, and one representing me from ages 61-69. Each photo is a leap, so much change in just 10 years. I’m a different person each time.

“When does the story of a woman’s life begin?” journalist and author Lyz Lenz wrote in her Substack post titled “The Lying Liars Who Lie.” “It’s not when she is born, but it is the moment she breaks. The moment she snaps. The moment she allows her anger to wash over her in a tsunami of fury.”

That last photo is the outcome of anger washing over me, anger I redirected into recovery, rebirth. I’m proud of the aesthetic (no Photoshop, no AI; just me in good lighting) but I’m prouder of the fact that the external is the physical representation of an internal metamorphosis.

There’s a phrase in the gym – “crushing it.” If you’re crushing it, it means you’re working out intensely, pushing yourself to the maximum, embracing the challenge. I crushed my 60s. I learned that I can endure. I learned what I was made of. Will it serve me into my seventh decade? I can’t answer that. All I know is that I will be tested by illness, deaths, the unforeseen revelations to come, shocks to the system from within and without, loss, change for sure. The timeline feels so much shorter now than it did when I was 60.