Last week while posting a photo to my Instagram story of my finger pointing to a specific passage in a Baldwin book, I noticed ridgy vertical lines running down my nail.
Google promptly informed me I’m getting old. Thanks, Googs!
Not surprising considering that, as of today, I’m a month out from my 40th birthday.
I texted a friend a screenshot of my Google search results. Having had her 40th birthday earlier this year, she told me she’d made the exact same Google-based revelation a couple days earlier.
Again, I updated my Instagram story, this time with a screenshot of our text exchange layered atop my Google findings. Another friend DM’d me. She said she’d actually gone to the dermatologist for this exact same issue and had had the pleasure of shelling out a co-pay to be told what I’d learned for free, “She literally said it’s just middle age lol.” The doc advised she keep her nails short and moisturized.
Google suggested similarly, which is why I ordered a 24-pack of white gloves off the Internet and now go to bed looking like Mickey Mouse every night.
I slather my hands in hand cream, making certain to rub each nail and massage my cuticles while I’m at it. Then I slide on my gloves, which I inevitably pull off in my sleep. Turns out, I don’t like sleeping with my hands covered up at bedtime anymore than babies do. Fortunately, the moisturizer has long soaked in by the time the gloves come off.
The other night, my middle sister sent me a text message moments after I’d slipped my gloves on and I had to pull one off — dramatically plucking each finger loose — in order to unlock my phone and respond.
Beauty might not always be pain, but it’s certainly high maintenance.
Mere days into this routine, my hands are softer, my cuticles less dry and my nails? Still ridgy!!!
This has become one of my earliest lessons of middle age: sometimes you have to make peace with The Mid.
Sometimes, your changes will only net you moderate improvements, never to again meet the baseline you set in your youth. And sometimes, they won’t garner you any results at all — welcome to your new status quo!
Nails might be a small thing to contribute 1,000 words to, but I think why I’m hung up on them is because it was a surprise of aging — I anticipated the fussy feet and choosing bed over the club and gray hairs everywhere, but I hadn’t thought about even my nails becoming a reminder that the Grim Reaper is moving me up on his guest list.
But let's take a breath, The Mid isn’t The End, it’s quite literally the middle. And while my vanity might be lining up a bunch of Ls in this final half of my life, there are several aspects of middle age that are anything but middling.
I approach this next decade with valid anxieties about perimenopause and my malnourished retirement fund, but it’s nothing like the fears that tore through the years leading up to 30. Our culture had me scared out of my mind to be a woman crossing that threshold unwed, moderately unaccomplished and uncertain about my path in life. I made — at what the time felt like — a reckless decision to leave my career (and my company car) to go to grad school for a creative writing MFA. I had a lot of time to think about my life choices while waiting on the bus in the oppressive heat of the desert. But now, I can see how that leap of faith a decade ago put in place the writing career that I now cherish.
So what will 40 bring? I think about the many women in my life who I admire whose lives didn’t slow down and shrink in middle age and only got larger and more daring with each ensuing decade. I can have that too. Forty doesn’t just have to be ridgy nails, plummeting estrogen and achy feet, it could also be filled with possibility.
If my nails insist on giving away my age, why continue to strive for — what have always been — unachievable beauty standards? I could go full tilt in the other direction and turn something fun like painting my nails into a necessary cover up but LOL WHO HAS THE TIME FOR SUCH NONSENSE AT THIS AGE? Not me (I’m too busy wearing white gloves to bed!). In a way, for a life long perfectionist, knowing I’m on the other side of my “peak” is freeing.
My 8-year-old niece is a dabbler. She likes to try a lot of things but isn’t committed to any particular hobby or skill. My sister says it’s become harder to enroll her in extracurriculars because by this age sports and other activities have become competitive and not so welcoming to newbies. That’s not the case at 40. A gift of middle age, like knowing I can’t secure flawless beauty, is also accepting limitations in other areas. I could — but I would never — take up running and know that at this age there’s no expectation that I’m going to be setting any records. It’s good enough to just do it. I’m free to learn an instrument without any concerns of becoming a prodigy — child or otherwise. I drew this MID art. It’s far from perfect but it was fun and I like it well enough and what more can I ask for from my underdeveloped art skills? Not much. I’m free to try new things and to fail at all the things because at this age the mediocrity is built-in — how comforting.
So on a related note, I’m finally launching this newsletter — after four years of sitting on this domain. This will be a community for documenting my journey into middle age, explore what it means to be mid-career (what’s it like when you’re no longer a rookie but not yet a pro?) and as a place to put my feelings about living through the messy middle of the end of an empire.
I’ll also periodically share thoughts about what I’m reading, on-goings in my life and commentary on current events. You can expect a new installment every Wednesday at noon — Get it? Mid-week, mid-day with MInDa!
So go on ahead and subscribe and share this newsletter with your group chat, so they can sign up too!