Today Is My 50th Birthday!
(And I decided to spend part of it in a café, writing this essay.)
It’s September 24th, and I turned 50 today.
50! That’s half a century, people!! Hard for me to believe, but it’s true. My life is more than halfway over. I mean, who knows, there have been a few centenarians1 in my family lineage. But probably, statistically speaking, I’m at least half way between my birth and my death.
I’m making a big hoopla about this one - a multi-week birthday extravaganza. Some people might want to hide this particular birthday, but not me. I keep thinking of people I’ve known who didn’t make it to 50… My cousin Dustin. My friend Helen from grad school, who died horseback riding in South Africa in her 30s. My husband’s college friend Miklos, who was in our wedding party. My high school friends Lance (whose sister I crossed paths with years later through our kids, and is now my good friend) and Gail. My dear friend’s younger brother, Will. And others… I am celebrating my 50th birthday with them in mind, knowing they’ll never be able to.
For weeks I’ve had a vision of spending a few hours of my birthday writing in my favorite neighborhood café, and I arranged my work schedule to make that happen. See, here’s the latte I’m drinking as I write this:
Writing this birthday essay is exactly what I want to be doing right now.
This big birthday really has me thinking about my life. My life so far has roughly spanned the last 25 years of the 1900s2 and the first 25 years of the 2000s. I was born in 1974, about a month after Nixon resigned, in the tail end of the Vietnam War. My mom thought it was a scary time in history to bring a new baby into the world - a feeling I can relate to in today’s complicated world. Do new parents always feel that way? That maybe the world is going to be too hard for your kids to handle?
I was born 29 years after World War II ended. Which always seemed like a very long time when I was a kid, but now it doesn’t seem so long. My parents are Baby Boomers, I’m solidly Generation X. Most of my childhood/teen memories were in the 1980s and early 1990s. The time of landline telephones, cassette tapes, and VCRs. Michael Jackson’s album Thriller was a big deal when it came out in 1982. We hairsprayed our bangs so they would stick up high above our foreheads.
My kids are obsessed with the 1980s because of Stranger Things, and I explain to them that, yes, the details are pretty accurate. Their fascination with the 80s reminds me how much the world has changed since then.
About half my lifetime ago was the turn of the millennium. Remember how afraid people were that the Y2K computer bugs would destroy everything that New Years Eve? Some bought generators and stocked up on water and food, just in case. I mostly remember being at a party in Boulder that night with some of my friends from high school and college. I was wearing a purple shirt and my hair looked good that night (I have pictures).
Not long after that, I watched the events of September 11th, 2001, from Williams James Hall at Harvard (where I was in graduate school at the time). That day felt to me like the end of an innocent, relatively stable era in America.
Ten years ago, when I turned 40, Obama was the president, and Covid didn’t exist yet. I didn’t get to have much hoopla for my 40th because I had a 4-week-old baby and a 2-year-old toddler. That toddler is now in middle school and taller than me. I had a different job then, and no idea that I would start a podcast or write two books.
A lot has happened in the world in the last ten years, of course. And during that decade, I’ve been steadily going through middle age, with plenty of adulthood responsibilities - work, parenting, marriage, aging parents, domestic chores, and so on.
Back in my 20s I went to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and spent hours staring at Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life paintings. They are huge, taking up an entire room in the museum. At that time, I was probably closest to the second painting, “Youth.” Now I suppose I’m in the third, “Manhood.”
Note the rapids, the dark skies in that third painting. It reminds me of the “U-Shaped Curve of Happiness” theory - how people generally report their lowest level of day-to-day happiness in their 40s. It fits my experience, with all the adulting I have to do every day. On the upside, midlife has been one of the most meaningful times of my life so far.
I’m curious (and more than a little scared) about what will happen in the world, and in my own little life, in the decades ahead. I like the vision of the calm waters ahead, as depicted in the fourth, “Old Age” painting, and am looking forward to the upswing of the U-Shaped Curve that’s right around the corner. But I’m sure I’ll miss many things from this era of my life one day. Which is why I’m sitting here in this café on my birthday, taking some time to appreciate this meaningful midlife moment.
My café time is coming to an end, so I’ll leave it at that. Thank you for indulging me by reading my birthday musings!
xo,
Debbie
P.S. Mark your calendar for October 2nd, when I’ll be releasing an episode of my podcast, Psychologists Off the Clock, on Midlife: From Crisis to Curiosity with my dear friend and colleague Meg McKelvie. We’ll also be releasing a list of “soul searching questions for midlife” that day as well!
I had to look up the spelling of the word centenarians, and in doing so I discovered that people in their 50s are called “quinquagenarians” - which I don’t know how to pronounce, but I am one as of today!
Last 25 years of the 1000s, actually, now that I think about it…
I’m a clinical psychologist, co-host of Psychologists Off the Clock, and author of the books ACT for Burnout and ACT Daily Journal. You can find me online at drdebbiesorensen.com.
Thanks for writing and sharing this. Today is my 50th birthday! All of this resonates for me and my experiences. Happy Birthday to us! :-)
Happy Belated Birthday Debbie!