40. 40 years old.

It doesn’t even make sense as an age to me. It’s terribly cliched to say that “of course I don’t think of myself as 40” – but yeah, I don’t.

Part of it is that I haven’t felt like I fit my age for most of my life. When I was a kid, I didn’t fit with the other kids, always either to “little kid” like or too serious and adult-like. There was never any middle ground. Kids aren’t nearly as forgiving about endless fun facts or being reprimanded for “not doing it right” as kind adults are. In college, it was much the same, alternatively seen as too scared or overly responsible to get drunk. As an adult, I was regularly mistaken for a much younger person. As I waited for the bus, people asked me if I was a student at the local community college or even high school. Entering my 30s was the first time that it felt like there was some match-up between my chronological and mental age. Where the category I saw myself in and that everyone else saw me in had some overlap.

Part of it is how surreal the past few years have been. While there were far fewer drastic changes than in my early 30s – no babies, thank goodness – the chaos of COVID brought its own bizarre mix. I love planning – knowing what’s coming next, what the future will look like. The endless uncertainty of COVID brought all of that to a halt. Even though numbers have eased back drastically here, there’s still that unease of wondering if our plans will suddenly fall apart as they have so often in the past few years.

That’s certainly played out in my birthday celebrations. I used to have a big birthday party with all of my friends every year. We would cram as many people as we could in our small house, setting up folding chairs and squishing onto the couch. My husband would show off his culinary skills, making a bunch of appetizers and desserts. It was an excuse to see people that I hardly ever got to see otherwise.

The first year of COVID, I had a virtual party. We played Two Truths and a Lie and laughed a lot. It made the best of a crappy situation. Last year, I was still uncomfortable having a bunch of people in a room without masks. A virtual party just seemed – sad. By now, the people I used to see once a year or a couple times a year have either moved out of the area or aren’t part of my life in the same way anymore. Things have changed in ways I had little control over.

A big part of it is boring-ass mid-life crisis kind of nonsense. There’s a reason why many people think “where am I going with all of this?” at this time of life.

For me, this milestone happens to line up with having accomplished one of my biggest life goals three years ago. I am always, always going to be grateful for the fact that I could write a book and get it published. That there are literally thousands of copies of my book out there in the world, (hopefully) being read. That thousands of people have seen my message and potentially shifted their actions and stance towards the world. But it’s also time to move on. There are still chances for sales, but the peak is long since over.

So I’m at this point of “what’s next?” I don’t have another big goal on the horizon, although I wouldn’t discount it. It certainly isn’t another book for a variety of reasons. As for the future of my day job – it’s an understatement to say that changing jobs in the federal government is hard. For now, I have a lot of one-off activities – a talk here and there – but nothing consistent.

At the same time, I’m as desperate as ever to make a difference. I’ve always felt compelled to work for the greater good but when you have two kids in front of you and the future feels so uncertain, the urgency can be overwhelming.

I’m not the only one going through existential angst, of course. It almost seems cliche for a Millennial – even an “elder” one – to feel fed up with the state of the world and one’s place in it. I’m incredibly privileged to not have to deal with so many of the issues that other people of my generation deal with, like massive student debt or underemployment. But the climate crisis, slow movement on all areas of sustainability, overwhelming corporate power, continued attacks on LGBT people (especially trans folks), huge rises in costs without equivalent rises in pay, increasing gaps in the rich and poor, a rise in racism and anti-semiticism even in our supposedly liberal community – it’s a lot. None of these problems will just come and go, like the whims of weather. They’re problems that it will take long, hard work. Forward movement on them requires taking apart and remaking the systems into something better.

But in my reading and thinking about all of this, there’s a concept that keeps coming up: reciprocity. It’s the idea of sharing with each other, giving and receiving. Living in community with people who you can support and rely on.

It’s a major theme of Braiding Sweetgrass, where she talks about how Indigenous communities are often built on reciprocity, both within groups of people and between people and the rest of nature. It came up in reading the book Burnout, which is a feminist approach to tackling burnout. The authors say, “The cure for burnout is not self-care – it’s all of us caring for one another.” The idea of real community is key to an outreach activity for Earth Day I’m organizing at the local nature center. While the word was never mentioned, it was the feeling I got when I recently attended a neighborhood meeting for choosing new playground equipment for the park across the street for me.

Again and again – we need to all be in this together, for each other.

And that’s the key, isn’t it? To support each other and receive support. To work together, to collaborate, to talk through disagreements, to find common ground.

To build a better world together. It’s not something I can do by myself, nor can you. It will never be a perfect world – not even close. But all of us together may be able to steer us a little bit away from catastrophe. To make a good enough future. Or at least good enough for our children to build on. That’s a reassuring thought in entering middle age.