And birthdays have this annoying habit of making you think about your life a little more than usual. You start doing this completely unnecessary mental audit.
Where am I? What have I done? What’s next? Am I where I thought I would be? And wait… wasn’t I supposed to have figured all this out by now? 😂 Because somewhere in my younger brain, I think I had assumed that people in their 40s were proper adults. Well, they knew things!
They made sensible decisions. They understood finances. They knew what they wanted from life. They probably even opened instruction manuals before trying to assemble things. And now I’m here. Forty-five.
Still making plans. Still changing them. Still getting excited about new ideas. Still occasionally wondering what on earth I’m doing.
Surely all this adulting should count for something, right?
The funny part is that I have actually done quite a lot of very grown-up things
I have lived in three countries. I left India when I was young to study medicine in Mauritius. Yes, the same honeymooners’ paradise with turquoise water and postcard-perfect beaches. We medical students, however, lovingly called it “Kaala Paani ki sazaa.” 😂 Because apparently even paradise feels slightly different when you’re buried under anatomy books and exams.
Years later, life took me across countries again, this time to the US, where I met my husband and began building a life with him. Somewhere along the way, my career moved from medicine to research, and eventually to public health and epidemiology. I became a mother. I changed cities, jobs, plans, and probably made several versions of a five-year plan that life politely ignored.
And then I decided to do a PhD. That deserves its own paragraph simply because it took me almost ten years. At some point, it stopped feeling like higher education and started feeling like a long-term relationship. We had our ups and downs. There were several moments when I considered breaking up with it.
But somehow, we stayed together. 😂 Eventually, I finished. Medical degree + PhD. Technically, a double doctor. And yet, there was no ceremonial handing over of the Official Life Answer Key at graduation. Very disappointing, really.
The older I get, the more I suspect that most of us are improvising far more than we admit. We figure out one part of life, and then something else changes. You finally understand your career, and suddenly you’re thinking about what you actually want from work.
You learn how to parent a five-year-old, and then, very inconveniently, the five-year-old grows up. You establish a routine and life rearranges it.
You become comfortable at something and then decide, for reasons known only to yourself, to become a beginner at something completely new. And somehow, life keeps moving.
I still love making plans. My brain would probably create a spreadsheet for life if given the opportunity. I also know by now that life has absolutely no obligation to follow said spreadsheet. 😂
Strangely, I’m becoming more comfortable with that. Which brings me to this little experiment…
I’ve been thinking about all these random things lately. Getting older. Starting over. Comparison. Careers. Friendships. Motherhood. Fitness. Learning new things. Why we turn hobbies into achievement contests. Why our priorities change. Why our brains insist on overthinking perfectly ordinary situations. And instead of keeping all those conversations inside my head, I thought I might bring some of them here.
That’s how Still Figuring It Out at 40-Something came about.
This isn’t going to be my autobiography, and I certainly don’t have a collection of profound life lessons to dispense from the mountaintop. It’s simply a place for stories, observations, occasional plot twists and the things I’m noticing while living through this slightly strange, surprisingly interesting chapter called my 40s.
Some will be thoughtful. Some will probably be ridiculous. There will definitely be yapping. And maybe somewhere along the way, you’ll read or watch something and think: Wait… I do that too.
If that happens, I think we’re doing just fine. ❤️
Welcome to Episode 1. Apparently, we’re all still figuring it out.
SFO at 40 Episode 1
Comments