Chaotic Good Begins at 40

If you see me on OnlyFans, no you didn't.

Guys, it’s happened.

I’m 40.

I am now speaking to you from the Great Beyond, aka The Other Side, aka The Abyss. Can you see me? You are but vague and blurry shapes to me now; like looking at life through an impossibly thin slice of raw potato. I have gone boldly where I assume some women have gone before, though I wouldn’t know, I’ve never heard of any or met even one. It is upon me. I have done been got. I am trapped under a house that fell from the sky with only my withered, smoking boots left to remember me by. Can you even hear me?! It’s me, oh Cathy, I’ve come home, I’m - so co-o-o-old, let me in-a-your window-o-o-oh…

…is what I thought I’d be feeling right now if our fucked up culture is anything to go by.

Bridget Jones was deemed past her prime at 34. In When Harry Met Sally, a 32-year-old Sally Albright, played by a 27-year-old Meg Ryan, sobs, “And I’m gonna be forty! Some day…it's just sitting there like some big dead end!” And in the lead up to my birthday, whenever I told people I was about to turn The Big 4-0, they would all react in the exact same way, clutching their necks, eyes bulging in horror “My God?! But- you don’t LOOK forty?!!!”

…leaving me to wonder, “What the hell happens at 40?!” Should I expect my skin to suddenly contract and splinter like a busted iPhone? Or perhaps, at the stroke of midnight, one eye falls out and just hangs there on my cheek for the rest of my life so as to indicate the turn. Forty Becomes Her.

Our perception of age makes little sense, and varies depending on who you speak to, and the context you’re in. Sure, age is just a number but it's also in the eye of the beholder.

For my last month in Austin, I sublet a room in a house with recent college graduates. “This was an odd choice for a 39-year-old” I regularly thought to myself, lying in bed, eyes masked, ears stuffed, as a house party raged until 4am just outside my bedroom door.

When I told my new roommates that I was turning 40, they said they genuinely thought I was about 27. Twenty-seven! But then, when you’re 21, everyone is kind of 27 and there are very few ages after that. There is 21, then 27 (so cool!) then a vague mist, then your parents’ age, your grandparents’ age, then death, then Shakespeare, then the Big Bang.

Despite the age difference, we had so much in common and I adored living there. And after the relative isolation of three months on a ranch, it was just what I needed. In the evenings, my roommates and I would watch reruns of GIRLS, and the show affected me in the same way it did when it first watched it, twelve years ago. “Yes!” I thought, looking to my roomies “Very relatable! This is so US! Four gals chaotically and hilariously stumbling through life just like Lena Dunham & Co! We don’t know what we want to be but it’s OK, we’re still young! All will be revealed!” Then I’d snap out of it and realize I was watching GIRLS with actual girls; people who were five years old when Obama took office and I started my first job in TV.

My age regularly crept up on me like that in a way that I found quite comical. In a Santa Fe coffee shop, I exchanged life stories for an hour with a man in his sixties. He told me about his passion for making sculptures from old farming equipment and I told him about my adventures driving across America. After he left, I thought to myself how I must’ve brightened his day; a perky, precocious wood nymph gracing him with my youthful spirit and sparkling company.

Then it dawned on me that, to him, I was literally just a middle-aged woman he was talking to about scrap metal art. I was seated at a table eating a meatless grain bowl, so had little opportunity to show him my nymphy ways, and nothing says middle-age like eating a meal that’s 90% buckwheat and actually enjoying it. And I have been described as many things in my medium-length life, but never “perky”. And I’ve done cocaine!

Age also goes no way in describing the fullness of a person who has many different people, of many different ages, living inside them. We hear a lot about the inner child, but what about the inner pensioner?

There are parts of me that have always been old, curmudgeonly even. I was an incredibly cynical and world-weary tween whose favorite album was Radiohead’s OK Computer; a dystopian record that can best be described as “songs for suicidal communist robots” And my whole life, I’ve been plagued with mysterious back issues, trapped nerves, and sciatica up the wazoo. “Sorry, Katy can’t come out and play today, she’s covered her entire body in tiger balm and is lying down listening to her scary beep-bop music.”

But despite all the things I understood about aging, I found myself feeling really bummed in the lead up to my birthday. It turns out I did believe in the dead end and I felt it looming. Time was running out to really do something with my life. I was taking stock and coming up with empty hands.

So, I was surprised to find myself feeling totally elated, practically ecstatic, on the other side of 40. I felt dangerously well and worried it might be a symptom of an undiagnosed brain tumor that meant I had only days left to live.

If I approached 40 under the cosh of a terrifying countdown, then on the other side was a summit from which I could see only expansion, ease, and time. The major life milestones had been and gone; some achieved, some not, and none of it mattered. A house did not fall from the sky. I did not vanish in a puff of smoke.

I had been telling myself that if I hadn’t achieved my dreams by 40, then they were never going to happen. But now, rather than seeing my aspirations as a bucket list for a dying ingénue, they stand as a gauntlet thrown down for the woman I have become. I have never felt more myself and at home in the arena of my own life.

And mixed up in all that womanly self-possession is a childlike playfulness; a regression back to the goofy, animal-loving kid who wore oversized Shaq O’Neal t-shirts. 40 is the new 11! It's unselfconscious. It's Cowabunga! It's “Eat my shorts!”

It's chaotic and it's good.

As proof that a woman can still have worrying levels of hope after 40, here are just a few of the dreams I’m still holding onto.

LEFT: 10 year-old who’s never seen a game of basketball wearing an XXL Shaq O’Neal tee. RIGHT: 40-year-old in an XL Michael Bolton shirt from a tour she never attended.

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Start an OnlyFans

Is there a market for a woman who’s nice to you and listens to how your day was: The Encouraging British Girlfriend Experience ™? It’ll be sexier and flirtier than therapy, but I’m still not 100% sure I’ll show my tits. Perhaps that’ll be a carrot I’ll dangle (figuratively) to draw people in. Maybe I’ll just flash one when you hit a certain subscription tier. Either way, the service is me listening to you talk for hours, ensuring you feel loved, supported, and flirted with, no matter what you tell me. Isn't that all anyone needs? Wouldn’t there be less war if I did this?

OK, but I must maintain my anonymity; less for shame reasons and more for stalker reasons- oh, and there will be stalkers! Because I would have encouraged them, you see - that's literally the service.

Maybe I should just show them my tits, might be simpler. Might be nice to let the old dogs out while they're still relatively fresh and, dare I say, perky? Maybe I’ll wait to retire my boobs until my 50th birthday, whispering, “Off we go Lassies” as I tuck them into my waistband and pop on a XXXL Hard Rock Cafe T-Shirt.

Even if the solution isn’t OnlyFans, I want to find more ways to celebrate (and monetize?) my great body and even greater listening skills. Plus, I really do believe that sex workers are the only thing standing between us and WW3.

Learn to Skateboard

Seems like something young people do, people with a whole life, or at least a few summers, ahead of them to spend in casts. It would definitely be weird to wear a cast at 40, who would sign it - my super?

Until recent years, skateboarding has felt a little like an exclusive boys club, which is why I opted for blades as a kid. The sense I had was that boys are just built for skateboarding because they like barreling into the unknown at high speed and don’t have qualms about mortal wounds. I hate to be gendered about these things but most young men are absolute maniacs.

Case in point: at my brother's recent wedding, my 3-year-old nephew, George, narrowly avoided decapitation due to excessive rambunctiousness. All the adults had been giving him our undivided attention, cooing and cheering at his wobbly spins and half formed cartwheels, so, like any child whose brain is still half juice, he felt emboldened to up the ante. In a Jackass style stunt, and with the superhuman strength of a man on crack, this kid pulled a giant concrete birdbath off its pedestal narrowly missing his head and busting open his lip in the process. All this because we’d been clapping too long. 

On second thoughts, I should hold off the OnlyFans, seems men are getting dangerous levels of encouragement from day one.

In the mid-90s, I would accompany my brother to the skate park, me in my “blades”, and him on a skateboard. My brother was, and still is, an excellent skateboarder. A Boardie. A Wheel-Wanderer. A Half-Pipe-Harry, if you will. Bobbing and weaving, and swerving and derving, as Rail Heads are want to do. He moved like a graceful swallow swooping up into the air before disappearing into man-made valleys. He was like one of those chimpanzees they gave roller skates and cigarettes to in the 50s.

But me in my blades? I was not good. I’d cling gingerly to the chain link fence - which is hard to do in a nonchalant way but I think I pulled off - every now and then attempting to cover a little ground before being magnetized back to the sidelines. I don't think I allowed myself to fall even once; I’ve always been a chronic perfectionist who took a long time to realize that you can't become an expert without first looking like an amateur.

But here’s where I was bold, here’s where I took risks:

FASHUN.

While I may have spent most of the time clinging, lurching, and sometimes just sitting there in my socks, know that I did so wearing giant pink corduroy flares. They were dark green when I bought them at the charity shop, before I bleached them and dyed them pink in the bath. Do you know how much effort that is for an 11-year-old? There are so many stages during which to give up. The charity shop: smelly, gross, dead people things, almost never anything cool in there for an 11 year old. The bleaching in the bath: from where did I get the bleach? What was the negotiation like with Mum? And where was I getting inspiration for this look in the year 1995? Elton John? Eddie the Eagle?

It was an outfit that screamed “Look at me in my pink flares and blades!” a look that perpetually threatened that I was about to do something mega. Little did the world know that simply being was my frickin’ stunt!

I learnt to fall later in life when I moved to NYC. I exposed myself (figuratively), and took more creative risks publicly. Some things worked, some didn't. But my wish from 40 onwards is that I fall more- so long as a bit of gusto, bravery and pizazz come before it. I’m hoping to move to California next year and there's a woman out there who teaches skateboarding. A lot of her clients look my age.

Ride a Horse Across a Beach at Sunset

Me being a former horse girl is the most basic and predictable thing about me. I’m blonde, white, and middle class. I even have a mane and a long face like a horse; God makes no mistakes!

To say I was a horse girl doesn’t even begin to come close to how beguiled I was by these creatures. I took riding lessons and volunteered at the local stables on the weekends, narrowly missing being kicked in the head as I gleefully scooped manure from the giant behinds of animals I’m pretty sure hated me. I subscribed to Horse & Pony magazine, read all the Black Beauty books, then read all the copy-cat titles like Jet Majestic or Very Dark Handsome. My half of the bedroom I shared with my sister was covered in images of my four legged idols, as were my pillows, my bedspread, and TV tray. Horses were my Beatles, man!

A girl taking a crazed and sudden interest in giant, skittish beasts is actually a totally normal stage of human development. It goes: boob crazy, toy crazy, horse crazy, boy/girl crazy, party crazy, wine o’clock, coffee crazy, nap crazy, crazy, then death. And then, there are confusing crossover periods when half the posters on your wall are horses and the other half are boys, and you’re genuinely hoping that an Old English Shire horse asks you to the prom.

Horse riding is crazy because it’s all you (and the horse of course, but if you fall off he’ll be fine. His situation would have actually improved.) But when it’s just you (and the horse) forging fast through open air, no seatbelt, no training wheels, there’s nothing like it. What an unlikely friendship to have grown between the descendants of apes and slightly smaller horses with weirder feet! I love that it feels so ancient, that so many humans (and horses) have come before me. Riding is a great way to feel connected to my ancestors and be part of a continuing human (and horse) story. It's a rare feeling that’s harder to replicate when you’re stuck in traffic behind the wheel of a Honda Accord.

I think the general vibe of this goal is that I want to feel closer to nature, connected to something bigger than me, and I want to feel free.

Christmas morning 1994. Trust that these posters also cover the ceiling. The horse head cushion in the bed is a nice little nod to The Godfather.

Surprise All My Friends by Playing Honky Tonk Piano in a Hotel Lobby

Where is the hotel lobby? Why are all my friends there? How will I suddenly know how to play piano? Difficulty level through the roof on this one, but this has always been a dream of mine.

And to be clear, I don't want to learn the piano for life; the goal is to learn just one song really well and literally blow the socks and roller blades off everyone in the hotel lobby. The goal is to surprise and delight with my secret skills. In its essence, it's the feeling that someone underestimated you, nay, didn't even consider you, and you went and did something that exceeded their non-existent expectations.

At 40, this feeling is harder to come by. I’m past my wunderkind years; the bright young thing is now just a thing and I’m supposedly in master territory. If I met a 40-year-old who told me they could play piano really well I’d be like “OK yeah, that tracks, you’ve had a lot of time on this earth to practice that”. But if a 3-year-old did? Now you have my attention.

If my nephew George did it he’d lift the piano over his head.

I tried banjo last year and while it got close to impressing people, the look they had while watching me stumble through twelve seconds of Boil That Cabbage Down was more one of overcompensating encouragement, much like you’d give a 3-year-old showing you a cartwheel he literally just did eighteen cartwheels ago.

Another concerning element is my music concentration face. It's terrifying. It's unfortunate. It's hard to recover from. The only thing it really suits is an aggressive drum solo which is going to kill the mood in a hotel lobby.

The madness of adulthood is realizing how much you don't know whilst having to cosplay someone who really knows a lot. My wish for the years ahead is that I’ll continue to stay curious and try things simply because they surprise and delight, even if I don’t end up mastering them.

Join the Helpers

In the absence of children I feel a growing need to be of service, to have my talents used in ways that don’t just serve OnlyFans and confused friends in hotel lobbies.

This past year of watching a live-streamed genocide has changed me. It’s destroyed my faith in the people who are supposed to represent me and the systems set up to protect the things I care about. Add in apocalyptic climate events, and it can sometimes feel like the most pointless and selfish thing to have is a dream.

In times of seemingly insurmountable strife, people often quote Fred Rogers who encouraged us to “look for the helpers” so, in my fortieth year I sought out the company of people who had also been activated by Palestine. I’ve taken myself to community gatherings, educational workshops, and protests in the streets of Austin and New York, and rather than feeling isolated and out of place, I have felt a deep belonging and safety chanting in a crowd of a thousand strangers. These were spaces where we could publicly express our love for the collective, a space where all ego and personal ambitions dissolve. I highly recommend it - and I’ve done ecstacy!

My hope for the next forty years is that I create more culture than I consume. That I build and maintain community and mutual aid networks. I hope that I resist despair and do not become cynical and glib in the face of annihilation. That I don’t just look for the helpers, I become one.

Although this comes last, it is far more important than anything else on the list because my survival, and the survival of everything I know and love, depends on it.

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We have come to know the symptoms of a midlife crisis well, and perhaps this list is just my tit-flashing, honky-tonk, skateboarding version of that. But I think we’ve got these mad dashes for tattoos and Ferraris all wrong; these aren’t one last stab at youth, but a spectacular reinsertion of oneself back into life. To return to a place where we were more goofy, more fun, more free.

To celebrate my actual 40th birthday, I went to a cabin upstate with a small group of friends and had a magical, almost spiritual time that I will not be able to do justice to in the final paragraphs of this essay. All you need to know is there was a disco ball, a commitment ceremony, and I now have five husbands who are all women.

But one of the most special moments of my life will forever be watching my friends walk out onto the deck with my birthday cake to Enya’s Only Time blasting out into the woods and the dark universe beyond.

I was high on an edible and laughing like a hyena.

I was perky. I was wild. I was 11-years-old.

Who can say where the road goes?
Where the day flows?
Only time
And who can say if your love grows
As your heart chose?
Only time

Who knows? Only time
Who knows? Only time

Yes Enya, you’re right; we are all gonna die. And the only way to get there is through Time or Tragedy. The universe is very democratic like that.

Humans, we do be aging. If we’re lucky, all we have is time (and tits) under our belt.