“Tell me why you’re here,” the friendly podiatrist fiddled around on his desk before sinking onto his stool.
“Well, I might have a bunion,” I told him.
“Oh no,” he said, pulling up my x-rays on his tablet. “You have two bunions.”
I put my head in my hands.
In my twenties, I remember thinking, “When am I going to feel like an adult?” It took a crazy long for me to actually feel like I wasn’t a child cosplaying as a grown-up. I think it was when The Kid first came home. I already had a college degree, a husband, a house, and a full-time job, but it took someone entrusting me with another human for me to think, “Hmmm. Maybe I’m an adult now.”
I would say that now the lingering question is “When am I going to feel old?” but that answer has shimmied into my life all on its own, with no prodding from me. It was small things at first like someone using the word ‘cunty’ as a positive or a young woman showing me a digital camera she’d bought off TikTok as a retro trend—the same digital camera I owned twenty years ago. Now, bunions? Good Lord. Not yet, life. I’m not ready.
This year, I’ve been working in therapy on trying to embrace the “both/and” philosophy. I freaking love when things are either/or, black and white, so clear cut that there’s no question what is right and what is wrong. But, life is so rarely that way. We exist in shades of gray and pink and green and blue. Black and white are just two hues out of many.
I’ve been working on finishing up my book, trying to get all the chapters in presentable condition so I can do the final edits and be done with the thing. I love this book, but I’m tired of it. On my birthday last year, I wrote about my final experience of the project—a living funeral and death meditation. Last week, I changed up the conclusion of that chapter and realized that I should let the truth of death—the fact of that someday I will end—color my life. Not in a morbid way, but in a motivational one. I write,
“What if death were like a kindly grandmother, whispering to me that I have one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver once wrote?
“Enjoy this moment,” death might murmur, before I put down my phone and feel the breath in my lungs. “Be honest,” she might urge me, as I make peace with others and myself while I still have the time. “Go on and live,” she might advise while she herds me out into the crowded, colorful street of life. With death as my constant companion, maybe I will be brave and free and fully alive.”
The ultimate both/and.
Last night, on my 41st birthday, I went to White Rock Lake by myself and watched the sunset. Just me and the sun as she sank below the horizon. I really wanted to celebrate my birthday with a ritual, some way to mark the slow march of time with meaning and purpose. I brought my journal and reflected on this past year, which was a tough one, and thought a lot about this quote by James Baldwin that currently sits at the end of my book.
“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice into the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin
As I closed out my fortieth year on earth, listening to the pelicans bellow and the geese honk as they settled in for the night, I thought about life and death and bunions.
A perfect way to end the year.
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