✨56✨

The year I found my worth

Some of the art I’ve bought in the past year

I turned 56 last month and didn’t think to write a post about it. Not because I think my birthday is so special to any of you, but more that my birthday has marked something seismic (or—dare I say it—cinematic) to me these past two years. Those posts are some of my favorites, mostly because they gave me the opportunity to pause, reflect, and try to get my arms around the chaos.

I suppose that’s how I know my life is settling into something more stable, by not even thinking to write a post about my birthday at all. But every birthday, I know now, deserves a pause and some reflection.

Of course, not every year can be like the year I turned 54, a year of such profound and thorough transformation that it would be impossible to overstate its ongoing effects to this day.

And not every year can be like the year I turned 55, which apparently required three essays to cover. The first one runs the gamut from a whole lot of sex and non-monogamy talk to hiring (and firing) divorce lawyers, crying in the Staples parking lot, and getting bit by a dog. The second installment is the cinematic one, the actual birthday one, the everything-I-still-can’t-believe-happened one. I wrote another one only a few days after my birthday, about traveling to Amsterdam after selling our house and signing the divorce papers, about getting to the other side of hell, basically. Despite that description, it’s still one of my favorite pieces.

Another piece that is now mine :) “The picture is not all rosy” by Francesca Capone [repped by Nationale in Portland, OR]

Each year has, with some distance, had a clear theme or overarching thrust (so to speak). 54 was S-E-X and, in thinking more about it, I believe 55 was LOSS. If I had to call it now I think the year leading up to 56 was WORTH. Worth professionally, worth within my community, worth financially, worth sexually or in relationships with men, worth as a parent and a provider, worth as a thinker and writer, worth as someone who gets to determine the rest of her life in consultation with precisely no one.