It's my birthday.

Reflections on aging and my "one wild and precious life."

I never really believed that I’d reach this age.

It’s not that I harbored long-held fantasies about dying young. Although death, including fear of a premature death, is something that regularly haunts me. Instead, I couldn’t quite imagine what life would look like at this age.

Forty. It’s the age my parents were during my first formative memories. To my young mind, they seemed unfathomably old. I remember counting my father’s forehead wrinkles at the dinner table and wondering what my own would look like when I was that age. He doesn’t look that bad, five-year-old Cristina mused. Maybe when I’m old, I’ll get lucky and have only a few forehead wrinkles, too.

I’ve always been a little obsessed with age and aging. As a teenage cancer survivor, I worried that the year I missed university for chemotherapy would cost me my career. I was already scared that I was losing time, that it was slipping away from me, and with it, my opportunities to do something meaningful. By age 20, I began studying the soft skin around my eyes, searching for signs of fine lines. I invested in expensive wrinkle creams before I graduated from university. In my dorm room, I drank antioxidant-rich green tea, infused with extra grape seed oil, hoping it would protect me from a second cancer battle and all signs of premature aging.

The author, at home in my natural state, days before turning 40.

A guidance counselor once told me she didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin until she reached the age of forty. I was horrified by that confession. But your life is basically over at forty, I thought. Everything worth doing must be done before that age.

Over the decades, I pressured myself to reach certain milestones. I promised myself I would do everything: travel the world, fall in love, build a fantastic career, be wild and successful, all before age 30. Then I could settle down without regrets. I never thought about what would come after that. Thirty was a terrifying milestone, the moment I would be judged for everything I hadn’t accomplished in my youth. Forty was nonexistent—a future so unreal that it wasn’t worth contemplating.

During those years between 20 and 30, I did many of the things I had set out to do. I traveled the world and fell in love. I got married and later divorced. I collected degrees. I went nearly everywhere. I was so wild. But I was never really satisfied with what I accomplished. I was ambitious and hungry and insecure. I never managed to convince myself that I was enough.

At 30, I pursued the perfect image of adulthood I had envisioned. I picked a place to settle down. I bought a house. I tried and failed to get pregnant. It wasn’t until age 36, when the man I was dating suddenly died, that I began to question why I was so fixated on this artificial version of “successful adulthood” I had constructed in my mind.

A great deal has happened over the past several years. I rediscovered parts of myself and changed my plans numerous times. I’m now 40, childless, and utterly free. I couldn’t be happier with how that turned out. I’m not sure if I believe that life always gives you what you need instead of what you want, but in this case, it did.

Now, I live in a city filled with people my age. We still go out dancing on the weekends and come home in the early morning hours. We invest our seemingly unlimited energy into hobbies and building community. I’m learning a new language. I’m planning my next adventure. I’m endlessly grateful for the time I have to invest in myself, my health, my creative projects, and my relationships. Often, though, it still doesn’t feel like enough. Time is, after all, our most finite resource.

Still, I look around at 40 and realize that the love I’m surrounded by is boundless. It’s unfathomable.

I am, like most people, still afraid of aging and dying. I don’t know if that will ever completely go away. I still hope I will write that book one day. I still have goals and items to cross off my bucket list. But I no longer feel pressure to prove anything to anyone, not even to myself. There’s no artificial timeline looming before me. This is it. This is adulthood. This is my life.

There’s something magical about reaching an age that you couldn’t previously imagine. The future is unwritten. It is limitless.

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One of the items on my bucket list is to build Lazo Magazine into something long-lasting and sustainable. But I need your help to do that. That’s why, for my birthday month, I am dropping the newsletter’s monthly subscription cost. If every free subscriber to this newsletter upgrades to just $2.50 per month (which costs less annually than one bottle of a good anti-aging cream), I could commission many more writers. Help an old lady out.

Lazo Magazine also has a Buy Me A Coffee Page, which allows you to make easy, one-off payments. ☕ I accept donations to Lazo in lieu of birthday gifts.