On Turning Sixty
Today I am sixty. I guess by any standard, it’s a significant milestone. If life is a game, this marks the start of the third period. Maybe I’ll get some overtime. Maybe the game will get called early for rain. It’s hard not to be aware that the finish line is drawing nearer and I know I’m mixing my sports metaphors but I’m sixty. I can do whatever the hell I want. A week ago, at a surprise pre-birthday dinner, a friend handed me a pink, feathered tiara that read “Oh Shit, I’m 60.” I humored the group and put it on but took it off just as quickly. The sentiment just didn’t fit.
My fifties were transformative. I began the decade deep in the blinding storm that was my marriage, unable to see my hand before my face. My forties had left me lost to myself, to my friends, to my family. I had no idea how to find my way out. Didn’t even know there was an “out.” But the skies began to clear in my fifties. I found a wonderful therapist who gently led my gaze to the things I’d been too afraid to see. I started working out regularly, voraciously, with a trainer who would become a friend, building the strength I needed to push myself out of the altered reality in which I’d been living. I began speaking aloud the dissatisfaction I had swallowed in search of an elusive peace. I accepted the truth that I would not find happiness inside my marriage. By my decade’s mid-point, I had freed myself.
At fifty-five, I began building a new life of my own design. I reinvested in friendships long dormant and found a tribe patiently waiting for my arrival. I challenged myself with adventure and travel, eagerly flying into the unfamiliar. I inked my first tattoo, a leaf of the Bodhi Tree to symbolize my path to enlightenment, and quickly followed it with three more, each one chronicling a milestone on my journey. I gifted myself a new name, leaving behind both my maiden and married names to craft something all my own. To plant my own flag in the earth I was cultivating.
I focused on family, repairing relationships wounded by marital shrapnel. My mother and I fell in love again, leaving behind the hurts and accusations that weighed us down. My sister and I get to be sisters again, free of the complicated overhang of my marriage. There’s a lightness to family gatherings that used to tie me in knots for days. And my children. Oh, how my relationships with my children have flourished, grounded, as they are, in the now-spoken truth of our shared experience.
And I wrote. I took a mid-pandemic Zoom writing class and just kept writing. I wrote the heartache of my marriage. I wrote the struggles of my childhood. I wrote the joy of my new life. Where I used to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, and often from myself, I now shouted them from the rooftops, publishing deeply personal stories in literary journals. Reading them aloud from the stage. I refuse to be alone with my truth anymore.
The blueprint for my new life rests on three key questions: Is it teaching me something? Is it helping me grow? Is it bringing me joy? Looking through that lens, I made the decision to close an outstanding and rewarding legal career. I loved being a lawyer and a leader and was at the top of my game, but my learning curve had ebbed. My joy had muted. After thirty-five years as an attorney I was ready to flex different muscles. I found an amazing community of creatives in The Spark File and began to reimagine my identity as an artist, a writer, a storyteller, a poet.
And so fifty-five years after entering kindergarten I am going back to school. In less than a month I will be a full-time student at Sarah Lawrence College on my way to earning a Master of Fine Arts in Writing. I’ve begun work on a novel that tells the story of my remarkable grandmother and the inter-generational impact of her early childhood trauma. I’m ready to write my next chapter.
In less than five years, I have radically transformed not just the circumstances of my life but who I am. And now I get to begin my sixties, my first full decade as Beth Holly, living a life of my own creation. A life filled with the people, places and things that are helping me to grow and bringing me joy. I couldn’t have gotten to my sixties without going through my forties and I am grateful for every hard moment I endured because it has made me into the amazing woman I have become. I am my own inspiration and I can’t wait to see what I will achieve in the decade to come.
This is no “oh shit” moment. Bring it on.
