40

So now I'm forty.

And I got this unexpected nice thing out of it. See, I'm not twenty anymore. And I don't look twenty. And in recent years I would see myself in the mirror, or in a window unexpectedly, or in a photograph, and recoil. Are those my eye bags? Is that really my double chin? My smile lines? My potbelly? Fuck, this can't be. This mirror is lying. And I would try to, I don't know, straighten my shoulders or whatever…change the angle of my head so I couldn't see a wrinkle, and pretend that this made me look okay. But Christ. I looked terrible all the time. It made me sad.

And for some reason, when I turned forty, some switch flipped in my head. I look in the mirror now and I don't feel the need to pretend that I don't see what I see. Cause I'm not seeing a decayed twenty-year-old. I'm just seeing a perfectly normal forty-year-old. And that's perfectly fine.

I think I've stopped bemoaning how old I am for a young person, and am enjoying how young I am for an old person.