How Little We Know of Ourselves

One of the nicest things about standing at the top of the hill is the excellent view of the path you’ve already walked. Forty is not old, but neither is it young. Instead, it’s a chance to take stock, to reflect and notice patterns. At 40, you can’t blame the rollcall of men who fail to commit without reviewing your tendency to pick unavailable suitors. You can’t dodge responsibility for a lack of tenacity or professional follow through – if you own 20 website domains, but you’re yet to start a business, the liability lies at your door. If you can’t drive, it’s not your parents’ fault (a tough break from a personal perspective). Post forty, it’s far harder to dodge accountability on nearly anything.

The less triggering aspect of the mid-life dynamic is the ways in which the red threads of your life reveal themselves. Things you weren’t aware of about yourself become self-evident. If you’ve made it this far in sound mind, there’s no denying your own history. And that can be both a surprise and a relief.

I’ve been so fortunate to have travelled the world with my different jobs. As a young woman I was the ‘have passport, will fly tomorrow’ kind of gal. Yet it is only this summer that the penny has really dropped that I’m a

My first trip to Italy was made strapped into a car seat from Munich, the city where I’d arrived earth-side eighteen months earlier in the chill of Alpine winter. That summer, my parents packed the secondhand Beemer my dad was driving at the time to the brim with nappies and playsuits and drove me south through the Brennerpass to Gardasee. While I have no memory of my first vacanza italiano, I still bear a memento - a ridged scar on the back of my scalp caused by a dramatic slip on terracotta tiles. My dad always maintains that he’d believed I’d died as my little body lay motionless on the floor of a communal shower by the sea, blood pooling around my head. The dash to the hospital was fraught, but kids bounce and before long I was back on the alphabetini, with no hard feelings.