I remember when my dad turned 40. In the middle of a collage of family photos that hangs in my childhood home, there is a picture of me and my dad that day in August 1991. We’re next to the counter in the old kitchen, Dad crouching next to me, his arm over my shoulder holding a generous helping of a very nice, very expensive whisky that, I suspect, was a gift from his dad.
I’m often unsure whether the memories of certain moments are real or simply constructions of events I’ve created in my mind from what’s shown in the photos. This isn’t one of them. I remember that photo being taken as clearly as I remember the day itself. I remember thinking that 40 felt really old, that it was as if my dad must have lived a thousand lifetimes, and yet had always been the same. When we’re children we can’t ever imagine our parents being younger, or being different in any other way.
My nine-year-old self was more right than I thought. I certainly feel as if I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes. Shakespeare’s seven ages of man feel like they’ve evolved into hundreds and I’ve been working through them all, often at the same time. Am I living the same ages as everyone else or are my experiences blindingly unique? As Forrest Gump once said, “I think, maybe it’s both?”
None of us at nine knows what’s in store, what might be and what will be. The people we’ll have met, the places we’ll have been, what chances we’ll have grasped or regrets we’ll have carried. All we know is that we have school in the morning and that, actually, I’m pretty hungry right now.
We never pause to think what we’ll be like when we get to 40. It’s probably safe to say that my ‘rents never let themselves dream of what my life would be like at 40, they just prayed that I would still have one.1
What should 40 feel like? What does everyone else feel like at 40? Older or younger than the candles on the cake? Reflective, joyous, somber, nostalgic, optimistic, grateful, delighted, fearful, disappointed?
What does 40 feel like to me? Grateful, nostalgic. Sad. Tough.
“Life has a funny way of creeping up on you when you think everything’s ok.”
Alanis Morisette, Ironic
When I was younger people used to say that I had an old head on young shoulders. It seemed pretty clear by the time I turned 18 that I’d been through more than most people would experience in three or four decades. If you counted it all up I’d probably spent a year or two of my life in hospital. I’d lost grandparents, which is common, and friends, which is not.
By the time I turned 23 I’d been to more funerals than my parents and by the time I was 25 I had new lungs and two more funerals under my belt. But I had also managed to carve out the beginnings of a creative career that held everything I ever wanted my imagination to be put to.
By the time I turned 30 I was deeply in love, about to get married, looking forward to a future that felt like it was only going to get better.
My Gramps once told me that the happiest time of his life had been the age of seven when he would run down the road at the end of school to help on the farm at the bottom of the lane. I never wanted to look back and say, “That was the best moment of my life.” I wanted always to be looking ahead, to know that tomorrow, the next day, the next month, the next year would be the best it’s ever been.
But everyone knows we don’t always get what we want.2
Over the next five years I left behind the career I loved for the security of a ‘proper job’ and tempered my creativity in exchange for the promise of leadership and advancement. Meaningful, fulfilling, impactful in wonderful ways, just different.
By the time I turned 35 I’d lost so many friends that I struggled to remember all of their names. I held a music and comedy gig to celebrate by birthday: displaying their names on a giant screen needed a smaller font than anyone should have to use.
The last five years have become progressively harder as physical and mental health have thrown up challenges that, at times, I didn’t think I would manage to endure. And two years of hiding from a virus that could kill me have made things worse and worse, pushing me further and further from the friends I need.
The last six months, as things with Covid cleared and clouded and cleared again, I’ve found myself looking back over all of these things and realising how grateful I should be to be here at all. How grateful I am to have had these extra fifteen years,3 but how hard it can be sometimes for me to properly feel the same gratitude that those around me display. That’s what depression does to you.
When I look at the world I see people living their best lives or complaining about why they can’t or aren’t. That’s what stops me reaching out when I need to. I don’t want to be ‘that guy’, complaining about things in every conversation, the person who piles their worries onto everyone else hoping it helps lighten their own load, the person who drags down every conversation with their wallowing self-pity. So I just stop talking.
I bottle it all up in the same way I always have. Maybe for different reasons than I have before, but outcomes don’t change just because the reasoning is different. I don’t want to reach out to friends because I’ve been quiet for so long that I can’t pick up the phone for the first time in forever and start telling them how hard things are.
I never stopped to imagine what 40 would feel like, but it would doubtless have bothered me to think it might feel like I do at this snapshot in time. I am not the person I want to be. I feel like a false version of me, someone who’s become incredibly adept at projecting a visage of positivity while hiding away like Frankenstein’s creature trying not to let anyone come across me in the woodshed.
“How can you tell me you’re lonely,
Ralph McTell, Streets of London
Or say for you that the sun don’t shine?”
How can I really complain, though? I’m surrounded by people who love me, value me and only want the best for me. It’s not like my life has seen poverty or real hardship, that it’s seen me estranged from loved ones or shunned by society. It hasn’t. In fact, I think part of the reason I have such difficulty at times is precisely because of how great life has been to me in the past. “You’ve got to get high before you taste the lows,” as Robbie Williams once wrote.
That’s the paradox, the conundrum, the quixotic puzzle that faces me at 40, because the life I’ve led is part of the life I’m living. We all know comparison is bad, implicitly if not always consciously. We all know that Instagram and TikTok are dangerous places because we’re only seeing people’s highlight reels not their behind the scenes. But we still do it. We can’t help it.
I can’t help looking back on what was and wishing it still is. But it’s not and it never will be. And fixing what’s ‘wrong’ would change what’s ‘right’. Everything we experience shapes us, makes us the person we are, the person we will become. We carry every moment with us and every moment wakes us.
Forty, then, feels like a sometimes painful nostalgia for the life I didn’t live and a delightful gratitude for the one I have and I am. Today I am 40 and tomorrow I will be 40 years and one day old and it’s another snapshot of time. Like each new photograph we take, each moment in time is slightly different, even if those differences may be imperceptible within those moments.
Whoever I thought I’d have met, wherever I thought I’d have been, whatever chances I have grasped or regrets I have carried, this is where I am at 40. This is the life I’m living, for however long I get to live it. Every day really is a gift and there are no returns for the present.
I doubt I’ll ever be able to stop myself looking back, but I strive never to lose sight of the fact that I can still look forward in hope that the best time of my life is not a decade ago, but tomorrow, the next day, the next month, the next year.
“We must be idealistic realists. Pure realists without dreams are a dime a dozen.”
Hayao Miyazaki