In 47 days I’m turning 40, a milestone that’s been stalking me for the better part of the past year – a shadowy presence in the dark corners of my mind and in moments when I’m alone and vulnerable.

I remember my parents turning 40, feted with black balloons and snarky cards about being over the hill. My father received a cane from his close circle of friends; my mother swore in slightly frantic tones that she still felt 29.

Forty has received a spiffy new makeover since then, but I still find myself approaching this thug of a birthday with slow steps, a white flag, and soothing words: “I come in peace.” Or at least I’m trying to. 

A couple years ago my granddad turned 90, a milestone we celebrated with an open house at my aunt’s place, a fishing-themed sheet cake, and my Uncle Kelsey’s beloved relish tray. My granddad, a lover of both holding court and pickled okra, was in heaven.  

When I spied my granddad alone in the corner of my aunt’s dining room during the party, a quiet moment amidst the reunion and revelry, I sat down next to him and asked what he’d learned in his nine decades of life. Surely this man who’d survived World War II, single-handedly beaten an alcohol addiction, and started and run his own business for most of his life had picked up some hard-won wisdom along the way.

He thought for a moment, then said, “Well, make sure you save your money.” As if sensing my disappointment that this wasn’t some profound secret to life, he continued, “And know that all men are animals.” He proceeded to illustrate this latter point with an anecdote from early in his marriage to my grandmother that I’m still trying to forget.

This odd little moment with my granddad has been playing through my mind recently, like a commercial jingle you just can’t get out of your head. I’m approaching an age when I feel like I should Know Something, be able to spout off some life lessons like I was looking for from my granddad. Perhaps knowing what I have to show for myself and my forty journeys around the sun will help me make peace with this age. I’ve certainly been painfully aware of what I don’t have to show for myself.

So I’ve been mentally retracing my steps, searching for what I know must be right here. Like a woman who’s lost her keys, turning over everything in sight, listening for the familiar jingling, the joy and reassurance of the finding.  

When I was a young girl, my family owned a light blue 1979 Chevy Nova that my sister Shelley nicknamed Cassie (as in Cassie Nova). That was back in the days when the front seat was a bench. So whenever our family of four piled into the car with my grandparents, I sat in the middle of that front bench. My father and grandfather’s seatbelt buckles would dig into my hips and I’d have to fight the cool air blasting from the dashboard from going straight up my skirt.

My mom, grandma, and sister would be having special girl time in the back seat, but because I was the youngest and smallest in our family, I sat in the smallest spot. I fit in and accommodated. I gave deference to my elders. I put others’ comfort before my own. And that’s pretty much how I approached life.

Because of this small, contortionist way of living much of my girlhood, by the time I got to my twenties, I was ripe for a lot of self-discovery. Thankfully, blessedly, that’s exactly how much of my first decade of adulthood unfolded.

Several months after my graduation, my family drove from our home in Kansas to my college town, helped me gather all my belongings in a rented orange truck, and escorted me to my new home in the Chicago suburbs. In between unpacking boxes and making trips to the store for paper towels and under-bed storage bins, we ventured to nearby Chicago. Standing before a pointillist painting at the Art Institute – my sister gazing at a Degas in the corner of the room, my parents meandering into the next hallway – I realized we were here in this city, in this museum because of me. I’d just expanded the geography of our family. Me.

When they drove away several days later, I felt lonely, small, terrified. And liberated. I’d just been given a blank slate, my own state – and my job on the editorial staff of a women’s magazine was helping me find my own voice. I interviewed authors and musicians, writing their stories with carefully crafted words. Then I started writing my own stories in a singles column on our website. I plucked these tales from my life experiences and arranged them just so for a growing number of readers, sometimes redeeming painful events in the connections they created with other hurting strangers. I started learning that the broken places in our life are much more of an invitation for deep friendships with others than the picture of perfection I’d been striving to project for years.

Most days I pulled into the parking lot of the brown brick office building where I learned these important lessons and got to play with words all day, practically giggling to myself that this was my life’s work. And they were paying me to do it.   

If my girlhood years were a car ride, my twenties were a plane flight. Work trips took me to L.A. and Dallas, Dublin and Sydney. A close friend married a man in the military who got stationed at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. They invited me for visits to their three-flat off the base, tucked in a sleepy town I couldn’t pronounce. In their little white Jetta we drove to castles and cathedrals, to restaurants that had been operating since before America was discovered, to nearby France for a day trip of flea market shopping. 

I marveled that the world was so much bigger and more enticing than I’d ever imagined. I felt something deep inside me stir, a love of the unexpected comfort and camaraderie of strangers, a returning home with new eyes. And a realization that I was braver and more adventurous than I’d ever known.            

By the time I reached my 30^th birthday, I’d just signed a contract to write my first book, had just settled into my first solo home, and had stamps from 11 different countries in my passport. When I reflected on my first decade of adulthood, it mostly sparkled like a big, rich discovery. 

I don’t recall how far into my thirties I got before I realized something had shifted. The sparkle had dulled. The discovery had given way to something darker.

The travel continued, but took me to tougher places. In Bulgaria I saw the big bland buildings of communism and the ever-present signs of mafia activity – shiny new luxury cars driven by broad-shouldered men – the power that rushed into the vacuum when the communist regime fell. In Cambodia I stood in the barracks of what had been a concentration camp during Pol Pot’s reign, saw the tiny concrete cells and the devices of torture that stole the prisoners’ dignity and their lives. In room after room there were black and white headshots of the people who had once been prisoners there, a deranged bit of accounting for the lives Pol Pot’s men were about to snuff out. Staring at face after face, seeing the defeat or confusion or horror in their eyes, I was overcome and had to walk out into the courtyard and sit on the uneven stone steps, weeping for the inhumanity that took place on the other side of the planet during my quiet, happy childhood.

I showed up to work one Tuesday morning and in an impromptu meeting in our nondescript conference room was told our magazine was folding and our staff was getting laid off. I was getting laid off, after 15 years at that job. That following Friday I walked out of the office for the last time, carrying an overgrown potted ivy, two framed pictures of my smiling family, and a stack of magazines with my writing in them. What followed was a harrowing year of unemployment, sending out resumes every week, going on occasional interviews, and grieving that my industry, my beloved world of writing, would never be the same.

The biggest disappointment was the fact that I was walking through these tough times alone. I felt a searing ache for the husband and children I thought I’d have by then, an odd missing for people I’d never met – and wondered if I ever would. I’d always thought this production I’m in would be a big funny play or a fanciful musical. But so far it’s turned out to be a one-woman show. And I’ve learned there’s a lot of pressure on that one woman to be profound and engaging, to fill up the stage with her presence and her meaningful words. And that can be downright exhausting.

The hardest part has been hanging onto hope, knowing that any day I could wake up and meet my great guy and squaring that with all the yesterdays when I didn’t. Mustering the hope to sit across another restaurant table from another single man, wondering what might unfold, and eventually feeling the familiar disappointment when we’re not a good fit. Trying to stay positive and open while secretly hating all the happy young couples who make it look so damn easy.

But being raised a nice girl, I didn’t have the words for any of this angst. And I didn’t want anyone’s pity. So I wrote and traveled and made the most of the freedoms of singlehood, pushing down the tide of disappointment and anger – until I couldn’t anymore.

The tipping point was the weekend of my thirty-fifth birthday, when a guy I’d met at a conference and had been communicating with for months drove all the way from Florida to my Chicagoland home to spend my birthday weekend with me. We ate tapas in a brightly painted bistro, saw a musical in our fancy dress-up clothes, stared at the same pointillist and Degas masterpieces I’d first spied with my family years before, enjoyed a leisurely walk under a cloudless sky along sparkly Lake Michigan. And then he told me he’d never really been interested in romance with me. After he left, I felt duped, older, alone.

And angry.

The floodgates now opened, I stayed pretty irate for a few years. Angry at all the men who’d disappointed me in one way or another. Angry at the great experiences in my life I haven’t shared with a special someone. Angry at the pitying looks and well-meaning advice. Angry that my possibility of becoming a mom is getting slimmer by the day. Angry at myself for letting this all get to me. Angry at God, at internet dating commercials, and my granddad for constantly telling me to “keep kissing those frogs.” 

At turns the anger felt overwhelming, unnecessary, embarrassing, and empowering. It worked its way into my writing, making my columns more honest – and sparking moving responses from others who resonated with the anger. It worked its way into my relationships, sometimes hurting my friends with unexpected caustic words and sometimes helping me set better boundaries as I learned to stand up for myself.

And eventually, recently in fact, it sickened me. I got exhausted of my bad mood. So I unclenched a bit, let go of my tight grip on my anger, trying to make room for something else. Something lighter. Again I felt a stirring deep within me, a new hunger for joy and hope. I began looking for them everywhere, realizing along the way that the search in itself was profound and healing.

Recently before the start of a movie, I found one of those moments of joy. I’d just eaten a delicious meal at the Thai restaurant in my neighborhood, one of my favorite haunts, with one of my favorite people, my longtime friend Kathryn. Then we’d walked up the block to meet two more friends before darting into a vintage movie theater to see a foreign film about some French monks caught up in Algeria’s civil war. My full belly, the row of friends in the creaky seats beside me, the quaintness of my neighborhood, the promise of a well spun story on the screen before us all swirled together in a delightful elixir of joy. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and breathed in the delicious moment of contentment, a feeling all the sweeter for its recent absence. 

In these final months before forty, I’ve sensed a new word emerging – replacing the discovery and disappointment of the past. Or, more accurately, linking them. The word and. The concept that I can be angry and happy, full of longing and contentment, grief and gratitude. Somehow these disparate things can coexist, be equally true.            

So I find myself feeling old – and more comfortable in my own skin. At times singleness feels suffocating – and wondrously unfettered. I think I had to go through both decades to get to this place, let the pendulum swing to both extremes before finding a better rhythm. As I approach my fifth decade of living, I’m trying my best to embrace the and.           

Because life is a discovery and a disappointment. And when you can live in the reality of both those truths, you’ve finally gotten to the good part.