Turning 44 today. Decades on decades on decades on...
Midpoints. Turning 44.
Forty-four is a number with a seam down the middle for me, and I'm sitting directly on top of it, coffee going lukewarm, watching the seam do whatever seams do when no one's looking.
I'm sitting at my favorite coffee shop. It is 7:14am. I used to come here every Sunday to write until the pandemic broke that habit. I've never really picked it back up, but I'm here now, and I'm feeling contemplative.
I turn 44 today. 44 brings me to an interesting bookend. This time in college, I hadn't made it into grad school, and after applying to 40-some jobs across 11 states, I'd landed exactly one interview. The process itself was pretty great, minus getting lost between scheduled events at lunch (a labyrinth, in retrospect, that I had to wander before the Thing would have me).
Don't worry, all reading eye. I got the job.
I started that job exactly 22 years ago today, on my 22nd birthday. Today, 22 years hence, I'm still there though the tenor of it has shifted dramatically, and in genuinely great ways.
Twenty-two years to get in. Twenty-two years since. The math is clean in a way little else in life bothers to be; no rounding errors, no fudge factor, just a perfect equator running through this exact chair, this exact cup. Numbers this tidy are usually up to something...
Here's the part I keep circling, the way you circle a rock you already suspect has something living under it: the job didn't survive 22 years so much as it molted. Same name on the offer letter. Same company, new buildings around me, samesame office. But the thing I walked into at 22 as a lunch-lost lad, is not the thing I'm sitting inside of now. It grew new organs. It got better, which, if you've spent any time around institutions, you know is the unlikely outcome. Institutions are supposed to calcify. Mine kept becoming.
I say it because I've watched enough things β jobs, traditions, Sunday mornings in this very shop β die quietly of neglect to know survival isn't the default. The job has thrived alongside me, like we'd made a pact neither of us remembers signing.
The part that would truly unsettle 22-year-old me, more than any of the math: I like who I am now more than who I was then, and I mean that the way you mean it about a rough draft. He was assembling himself in real time grabbing at love, art, people, anything that might hold a shape. A kid running a sΓ©ance to summon his own personality, hoping something at all coherent showed up. Twenty was discovery. I found the raw materials: what I loved, who I loved, what I made and, quietly, I finally got the chemistry in my head sorted into something like correct.
That last one never makes the party toast, but it's the foundation everything else stands on. You can't hone a self you can't see clearly, and for a while I was looking at mine through smoke.
Thirty was honing. Whatever got summoned at 20 got sharpened, argued with, kept or cut. It's the decade I learn which parts of you were proto-foundation and which were just scaffolding I'd mistaken for structure.
Forty is stiller. And I'll admit (as one does, late on a birthday morning, to an audience of one caffeinated horror-blog) that stillness casts a shadow, and the shadow might be named Stagnation. When the thing in the mirror stops changing shape and just holds, some suspicious corner of my brain wonders if I've stopped growing or just stopped struggling. Not the same thing, but cold coffee at hand, they can feel identical.
But, dear eye: I love who's sitting in this chair. Not as like a birthday-post platitude but actually. I prefer this release to every prior one. And that's what would floor 22-year-old me hardest. He assumed, with the unearned confidence of someone who'd survived zero decades, that getting older could mean erosion. Wearing down. Settling.
Yet.
Here we are. Exactly half way through something. I don't know yet if 44 is a plateau or a pause. Maybe that's the honest place to leave it β not every seam needs stitching shut on the same day you notice it.