As she approaches the major milestone, LotteJeffs has never felt less sure of herself. Is that OK, she wonders
All the 40th birthday parties I’ve been to recently have been impressive. It seems there’s an unwritten rule that by the time you’ve reached your fiftieth decade you should have the funds, the time and the know-how to organise a catered dinner or a private cocktail reception or a weekend country retreat. When you’re turning 21 it’s perfectly acceptable to casually invite a bunch of people to the pub.
My friend Claire works for a blue-chip company and turns 40 a few weeks before I do. I ask her if she feels like she has her sh*t together in the way we always thought we would by this age. ‘On the one hand I have got a beautiful, confident daughter,’ she says. ‘I’m in a great place in my career; and financially I’m secure. However, I still have days when I want to hide under my duvet and still have completely unreasonable temper tantrums, so I think it’s probably a work in progress.
I pretty much figured I was cooked in my twenties. I’d made big decisions about my career, my sexuality, the kind of person I was, where I wanted to live, how I wanted to look. And give or take a few shifts into parenthood, or a new job in a different industry, I have stuck to this version of myself for two decades.
What’s inspired me to raise the anchor on my self is the fact that, as a culture, over the past few years we have become less rigid in our discourse around identity. Unlike Jackie, who feels like a completely different person at 40, for me, there now exists a lexicon for a way of being that I have always probably been.
Likewise, when it comes to gender identity, a word now exists for a way I’ve always felt. Still, there must be a reason Janelle Monáe is one of the few famous over-35s to have come out as non-binary – perhaps we’ve lived too long with our pronouns to want to bother changing them now. Although I’m trying to challenge this instinct to diminish my feelings, it’s hard to allow myself, at 40, the validation that using the term ‘non-binary’ could offer if I embraced it.
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