This is 50

I turned 50 this weekend. How is that possible? Just yesterday I was turning 30. I had planned to arrive at this date with a little more grace. Instead, it felt like the final stop in a midlife crisis that had been simmering on low heat for a few months and suddenly just came to a raging, uncontrollable boil.

After my dog, Freeway, died in April, I began seeing the fragility of things everywhere. It triggered unfamiliar anxiety in me. For the first time, my childlike optimism started to unravel. For most of my life it’s kept me bouncing around like a baby kangaroo, assuming there would always be another adventure, another garden, another business idea, another book to write, another, another, another. But his death knocked the wind out of me. And seeing the fragility in him made me begin to notice signs of it in myself. And I began asking lots of tough questions.

Will I ever get married? Am I too old to have children? Why on earth didn’t I have kids twenty years ago like my friends? Am I still handsome? Am I still sexy? Am I too old for another big life adventure? Is it too late for that? Why am I working so damn hard all the time? And now that I have many of the things I wished for, why don’t they make me as happy as I thought? These questions, and many more, have sent me to the therapist’s couch for the past couple of months.

In one of my previous books I wrote an entire chapter about how I wanted to age. I said I wanted to ripen like a peach or a plum—to become sweeter and juicier on the inside, and not worry if my skin got wrinkled and soft on the outside. I was very convinced about it. At 50, I’m not sure I believe my own fruit analogy anymore. I told my therapist, Andrew, that I had the desire to rip it all apart, throw in the towel, and move back to Australia. Or Italy. Because the things I’ve been chasing for 20 years no longer seemed to satisfy me in the same way. I was not getting sweeter on the inside. Actually the opposite

.

Andrew got up, walked over to his bookshelf, pulled down a book by Carl Jung and began reading aloud. In his essay The Stages of Life, Jung wrote about how strangely unprepared we are for the second half of our lives. He said we spend so much time educating young people to enter the world, but that knowledge gets them to their 30s. And then what? Where are the adult schools to prepare us for the rest of life?