In January this year, I started thinking seriously about throwing a 40th birthday party. It was, quite frankly, a terrifying prospect. There was a very strong likelihood that I would officially enter middle while living with my parents (mainly because they had wifi), being single and corrosively cynical about relationships, working 16 hour days on a start up business without taking home a salary, and driving a car borrowed from my grandmother.
This wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind. Ten years ago, I imagined turning 40 in that vague way one does when the future is something that forms like a star being birthed in the Crab Nebula. I assumed, sort of, that I’d be married, possibly with a child, and writing best sellers for a living. I’d be famous – but not too famous – successful and rich. And happy, because I’d have everything I wanted.
As it turned out, none of this happened. Instead, I evolved from my role as the over-achieving academic star into a new niche within the family ecosystem: the sad aunt prone to bursting into tears while glugging wine at family functions. The two most important relationships in my life were with Twitter and my imaginary disapproving husband, Tim Noakes, who judged me every time I ate carbs. I was a fat failure and I hated myself.
By the time I actually did celebrate turning 40 at the end of August, I was married, living with my adoring husband (who says I was never a fat failure) and earning a decent salary. I’d just flown in from a trip to London from the new client whose business I’d played a pivotal role in winning. I have two stepdaughters and a whole lot of new in-laws. The title of this piece is the hashtag I used for the invitation to the party at the local country club. #SoMuchAmaze, a description of just how astounding this year has been.
In terms of the surprises it has thrown my way, 2014 has been about on par with 2008, 2009, 2012 and 2013. 2011 was a bit of an exception, because I spent that year in something of a holding pattern, though it ranked with the others in terms of Not Going to Plan.
January 18, 2008, was when it all started going really, really wrong. That was the day my mother-in-law died suddenly in our kitchen from heart arrhythmia. Two months later, I got a job offer in Australia. In the first week of May, I moved to Sydney and lived alone for seven months while my husband, an only child, wound up his mother’s estate. In November that year, I was made redundant. The following April, I returned to South Africa. My marriage, already taking strain, hit the rocks the moment I landed.
At the end of September, we agreed to get divorced, and six weeks later, the deed was done. At the beginning of 2010, I was told to resign or take a pay cut and spent two years expecting to be retrenched. That’s when the severe anxiety attacks started and I became a walking pharmacy.
I also had a cancer scare, got really thin, unfriended a man on Facebook for breaking my heart, turned into an accidental cougar and had a fling with a guy 15 years my junior, discovered I was no longer head of my department after accidentally seeing a Powerpoint slide I wasn’t meant to while strolling past a glass-walled boardroom, became a social media brand ambassador and drove luxury SUVs, for free, for two years, started a career as an artist, painting in lipstick, quit my job to freelance, wrote blog posts like “Seven reasons to never have sex again, ever” and “Why I retired from men”, ate like there was no tomorrow, was designated a Cosmo Twitter Queen, started an agency with friends I’d met at work, gave away insane amounts of money to friends and charity, did a TEDx talk, twerked with IT sales managers at The Baron on Main, almost got bought out before the investor backed out, six months after that, agreeing to close our agency and start a new division for the employers I’d left two and a half years before. A month after that, we pitched on a big piece of new business, three weeks after that found out we’d won it, and a week after that, I headed to London.
The details could fill a rather dystopian version of Eat Pray Love. Tweet Paint (Self) Loathe, I suppose could call it. (I won’t.)
February 13 2014 was another important date. A friend I’d known for a few years asked me out on a non-Valentine’s date; he put a ring on my finger on March 30, and we eloped on August 9. A narrative that rested primarily around being unhappy had been turned on its head to the degree that many people who follow me on Twitter and Facebook assumed I had made the whole thing up. Nobody could do a 180 turn like that… surely?
Apparently I can.
So here I stand, six years later, somewhat breathless. Here’s the thing with change. It, well, changes you.
Today, I am not the person I was on the day my mother-in-law died. For one thing, I became allergic to owning anything. I’d packed my things in boxes and divested myself of stuff when I moved to Australia. When I came back, my Carroll Boyes cake forks and Mr Price bowls stayed in boxes and I lived in spaces I burrowed into the lives of others: my grandmother, my parents, a boyfriend. Driving luxury cars free of charge for two years completely rejigged my perception of ownership. I became profoundly cynical about everything: work, relationships, the possibility of things ever getting better. The notion of any kind of commitment was an anathema.
My sense of self imploded. I defined myself as a total failure, and my inner voice became a hectoring bully from which there was no escape. I doubted everything I’d ever believed in: myself, my abilities, my reputation.
Then there was the chronic stress and anxiety. Stress is very bad for memory, and so is the treatment for stress, and now I find myself frighteningly muddle-headed and forgetful. I am still “clever” in the way that I used to be, but there has been a shift. I have lost a part of myself to those years as a post-divorce zombie, a part I will never get back.
My priorities have changed. I am a lot less afraid of losing everything. I am more conscious of the importance of little things, and value experiences and memories far more than possessions. I was a petty, passive and resentful wife during my first marriage, and I will never make that mistake again. “I will never take you for granted,” I vowed to my husband when we got married on that unseasonably damp winter day, and every morning I marvel at astoundingly lucky I am to wake up next to him.
* Sarah Britten is a writer, painter, strategist and portfolio careerist. Follow her on Twitter at @Anatinus or visit her website at www.sarahbrittenart.com
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