On Autumn & Change

some thoughts on turning 40 in December

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Autumn is upon us here in the midwest, even if the temps aren’t showing it. The leaves are changing. The leaves are falling. The sunlight is different. I love this season and I love the next one even more.

I turn 40 in December. This feels big for someone who never thought they would make it to 40. This feels big in the way that hitting each new number of a new decade does. I mostly feel okay about it. I’m not looking back to my 20s and 30s longingly. Those two decades were filled with the most trauma I’ve experienced. They were years where I consistently made myself small to make others comfortable. They were years of having sex and feeling like I wasn’t even in the room.

I have some concerns about aging, but I feel, at best, grateful, and at worst, indifferent to turning 40.

I’ve noticed for a while now that I seem to have disappeared to others when I walk down the street. The catcalls have subsided. My beauty, my sex appeal feels like it’s sunsetting. How much time do I have left, I wonder. It feels like I had a very short time of being desired.

This doesn’t feel bad, just different. As a neurodivergent woman, I don’t enjoy being perceived most of the time—especially by people I don’t know. This might sound strange since I’m perceived online by over 200K people. That feels very different, though. I can close the app whenever I want to. I can’t perceive people perceiving me like I can in person.

I feel my brain rotting from Instagram and Threads. I used to post selfies all of the time. In the last year, I’ve posted them much less. Maybe it’s the perimenopause of it all (I’m not sure if I’m there yet, but possibly), but I feel like I did when I hit puberty: unattractive, agitated, and weepy. I’m a cis bi femme woman who looks like her dad and that’s not exactly gender affirming for me. [My dad is a very handsome 77-year-old man, though!].

I feel the need to continue to wear makeup because it helps me feel more feminine. I feel the need to lose weight because I feel “too big,” “too much.” I have more of a belly and I know much of this is related to my eating to feel safe/grounded. It’s related to making up for when I couldn’t eat without feeling sick at sixteen. I have always felt “too much,” not just in weight, but in everything. I’ve felt “too little” in the identities I claim to inhabit, mostly that of being femme. I’ve felt like I’ve strained to be femme my entire life. Growing up, I was the only girl with curly hair that I knew and other girls didn’t want to play with it during story time. I didn’t always like wearing dresses or skirts—they had to be exceptionally comfortable and cozy. But I also very much was never a “tomboy.” Much of these feelings of being a “lesser” femme stemmed from being diagnosed with two learning disabilities as a kid. Having disabilities made me feel desexualized. I write in my book:

As I grew older, I continued to obsess over the idea that my nonvisible disabilities made me undesirable. At first, I understood it in terms of teacher/student relationships, and then I began to understand it in romantic/sexual terms. Anytime I had a crush on a boy, “disabled = non-desirable” ran through my head, taunting me. I had tried to “pass” as neurotypical, as non-disabled. I had tried often to neglect my own needs and accommodations. I had tried hard (and failed) to assimilate. This was an ultimate betrayal of myself. I didn’t like feeling like a sell-out. I didn’t like feeling like I was embarrassed to be disabled and neurodivergent. I felt loathsome for claiming a feminist identity when I was overly concerned with how cis, straight men were perceiving me.

and:

Did I now need to perform my disabilities in order for them to believe me? Did I need to perform my sexuality to make up for the fact that I was disabled? I became more confused.

I have unlearned much of this, but sometimes it creeps back in. I can’t rely on internalized ableism. I can’t rely on the looks I thought I had nor the looks I may still inhabit. I can’t rely on vanity to keep me grounded. Could I ever?

Perimenopause is often thought of as a “second puberty.” I feel like I’m on the cusp of becoming… something, someone that is new to me. It feels deeply uncomfortable and anxiety-producing. Turning 40 feels like that, too. But/and/also, what an amazing thing to have lived this long when many don’t get the chance.

The only certainty about change is that it will always happen and it often brings us gems we wouldn’t find otherwise. It feels like the ending of the Mary Oliver poem, “Sleeping in the Forest,” where she writes:

“By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.”

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