Friday. Eight days.
November 14 is a Saturday. I did not know that until this week, which probably tells you something about how I have been thinking about the birthday. I had a goal attached to it, not a calendar. The goal was not about which day of the week it landed on. The goal was just: not in that job on that date.
Hit that in September.
I have been thinking about this for six months as a deadline. Specific, defensible, real: she will not be sitting in that job on her 50th birthday. It was the kind of goal I am good at, the kind with a named date and a clear condition and a way to know when you have cleared it. I cleared it on September 19. November 14 is now eight days away and it is just a Saturday.
I had a picture in my mind, sometime in April, of what 50 would feel like. I did not write about it at the time because writing it would have required me to look at it directly. The picture was something like: standing in a room I chose, with something underway, knowing what comes next. Settled.
That picture is very specific about what it is not, I realize now. What it is not: sitting in a performance review while someone explains that “the bar moved.” What it is not: accepting a November deliverable I will never present. What it is not: saying “fine” on Sunday phone calls for nineteen weeks.
What 50 looks like in my actual current life: coffee, a document with an unfinished sentence, an inbox that has been quiet for ten days, a Friday morning in the suburbs where I am self-employed and have been for six weeks. That is a very different picture from the one I had in April. I cannot tell you whether the difference is good or bad. I can tell you it is real, which the April version was not.
The inbox is still quiet. Five emails from October 26, the Marcus thread from October 21, the referral email from October 16. I checked all three this morning before making coffee. I am not going to send anything today. The contacts need to respond or not respond on their own timeline, which is true and also not satisfying.
My mother called last night. She asked what we are doing for the birthday. I said Doug has something planned, which is true, though he has not told me what. She asked if I am excited. I said yes, and I meant it, and I was surprised to mean it.
I expected to dread the number. I thought 49 going to 50 without having solved the problem would feel like failure, the way “meets expectations” felt like being handed something with both hands. It does not feel like failure. I am not sure what it feels like, not triumphant, something I do not have a clean word for yet. I have been self-employed for 48 days and can describe the view from inside that with some detail but cannot yet tell you what the shape looks like from the outside. I do not have a client. The sentence is still unfinished.
But I do not dread it. That is different from what I expected.
I went back this morning and read the first post. April 23. I wrote: “I want to not be in this job on my 50th birthday.”
That was the whole goal, in the first paragraph, stated plainly. Everything since then has been in service of that one condition. It is strange to have met it. Not resolution-strange. Just: huh, I did that. The way finishing a project feels, except the project was building a door and the question of what is on the other side is still open.
November 14 is a Saturday. It will come and go the way Saturdays do. There will be dinner and a cake and Max will appear long enough for the cake because he is 14 and that is what 14 looks like. I will turn 50. That will be true regardless of the sentence or the inbox or anything I do between now and then.
I have eight more days to find out what I actually think about that.