I'm the Birthday: And I'm on My Own Side at 45
I turn 45 today. 🥳
Let me start with the externals, because we are not going to pretend they don't count. I'm grayer, fatter, saggier, and (by every metric this society uses to score women) conventionally less attractive than I have ever been. As Evita said, don't cry for me. These are objective facts based on a rubric I didn't write. Let me cook. I'm not fishing for compliments.
I am also the most interesting, hilarious, peaceful, and joyful version of myself I have ever lived as. Both things sit next to each other in my mirror. Some days I oscillate between "come on xeomin, give me all you got" and what our good sis Tiffany Pollard had to say on the matter: "I don't give a f_c. Do I look like I give a f_c? Cause I don't." Often within the same hour.
For some inextricable reason, I had assumed that I would have arrived by 45. At what, exactly, I couldn't tell you. Some zenith of zen womanhood. Some radical self-acceptance with the receipts. Some serene wise-elder version of me who is unbothered by the EXTRA support bra aisle, untroubled by the slow disappearance of my 35-year-old skin, undisturbed by the mirror.
I am not her. I might never be.
What I have arrived at is something else, and it took me until this particular birthday to be able to name it cleanly:
I cannot be my own adversary and also love myself. I cannot be my own adversary and also succeed at the things that actually matter to me. The most important work of my adulthood, the thing that has actually moved my life, has been learning to stop being at odds with myself. Learning to be on my own side. Learning that I deserved to be, without anyone else's permission.
That is the report.
For most of my younger life, I was an extremely effective enforcer of a verdict against myself.
I thought marriage, or more precisely being chosen by a man, was the only thing that could legitimize me as a woman. I agreed, almost reflexively, with every critical word a person I admired or whose approval I wanted had to say about me. I worked out to exhaustion to stay a certain size. I was harsh and overly critical of the people I loved, because that is how I spoke to myself, and you cannot give what you do not have.
That last one is the one I still grieve. The harm I caused while I was at war with me is the hardest part of this report to publish. I do not get to take it back. What I can do is tell the truth about where it came from, so other women might recognize the shape of it sooner than I did.
I was waiting for permission to exist as I was. From my father. From my brother. From men I had loved. From religious leaders. From a chorus of voices, some named and some atmospheric, who I had decided got to vote on me before I did.
Black women are trained for this. Trained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Trained by respectability politics. Trained by churches that preach the helpmeet model while running on our unpaid labor. Trained by the "Black don't crack" mythology, which promises to compliment us into compliance. Trained by every man with an opinion and a platform telling us what kind of woman gets to be loved, and on what terms. Womanhood under these confines is indeed a scheme that Todd set up, or as my mama would say, a “trick bag”.
It’s a structure we didn’t create. But we are the ones inside it, and one of the cruelest features of the trick bag is that the system asks us to be its most reliable enforcers against ourselves.
I was that, for a long time. And the reason this 45th birthday feels different from the ones before it is not that I have escaped the trick bag. I don’t know how anyone completely does. The reason is that I have, step by step, stopped enforcing it from the inside.
My steps, in no particular order…. because that is how they happened:
When I started individual therapy.
When I started family therapy with my children, which is its own kind of mirror.
When I wrote for a wellness publication…and shared all my business smh 🤦🏽♀️.
When I started meditating regularly.
When I finished my certified yoga teacher training while working and parenting and feeling like I was held together with rubber bands.
When I got my LCSW and bought a house in the same twelve-month stretch, which I do not recommend doing simultaneously and would do again.
When I started my practice.
When I got my ADHD diagnosis and started grieving and being relieved at the same time.
When I made parenting choices that felt impossible and made them anyway.
When I started deconstructing the Christianity I was raised in, even though the threat of hell still had me in a choke-hold, and my people kept and keep trying to proselytize me.
None of those was the single moment I stopped being my own adversary. It’s been an ongoing culmination of intentionally and compassionately befriending myself. And still, self-flagellation still raises its head; I am not going to lie to you and say it doesn't. But each step allowed me to recognize when I was at odds with myself, name it, and refuse to keep doing its work for it. Awareness without permission to do anything about it is just another kind of suffering. Awareness, with permission, is movement.
This is the part my heart hopes every Black woman reading this can hear and receive: you do not need permission. Not from your father. Not from your brother. Not from the men who loved you and the men who didn't. Not from the pulpit. Not from the chorus. Not from the size of clothes or the number on the scale. Not from the version of your mother who lives in your head, even if she loved you well. The permission to be on your own side does not get issued. You take it. And then you keep taking it, because the world will keep asking you to hand it back.
So what does 45 look like, from here?
I miss my 35-year-old resilient skin. I love my gray and want more platinum strands. (Side note to the beauty supply industry: quality gray bundles are too hard to find. I digress.) I find comfort in the glimpses of my GranLena, Granny, and Mama in my mirror, which is one of the only places I get to see them now. My GranLena could have really spared me this perimenopausal ample bosom. I am vacillating about all of it on a regular schedule.
I am also less crippled by the male gaze than 25-year-old me ever imagined I could be. I no longer mistake other people's assessments of my appearance for facts about my worth. I have proven myself capable in ways 30-year-old me could not have predicted. The peace I have surpasses the peace I had at 35 by leaps and bounds. It’s not transcendence. It is mileage. And it is most of what living buys you, when you stop spending it on enforcing somebody else's verdict against you.
The truth I have actually arrived at, the one I rest in when I rest in anything: what people observe in and consume of me is the most fickle and fleeting part of my existence. The mirror tells me about today. It does not tell me who I am.
I have not arrived at the wise-elder zenith. I have arrived at the version of me (through many bumps and bruises) who is on her own side. Who knows, she deserved to be all along. Who is still learning, and still willing.
So, Happy Birthday to me. I am the Birthday… and YOU are too! No permission needed!🎂
If any of this lands, I would love to hear what road you're walking. What permissions you stopped waiting for. Where you've started, in steps, to stop being your own adversary. The comments are open. Bring your truth.
And if you want support on your own journey to being and staying on your own side, the Nuanced Healing Community is built for it. You'll get the Nuanced NUS letter, meditations, workbooks, book clubs, and all that healing shit. I write when I have something real to say. I am not interested in your inbox for the wrong reasons.
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