I am now 50 years old. 

Things have not unfolded the way I planned or would have liked for this “big” birthday. The gifts I am receiving include hard lessons in surrendering control, expectation and entitlement. I see how the values of our smooth, shiny, superficial western modernity have left me wildly ill-equipped to navigate the grief and pain of this world (a world steeped in the very same value-systems, cosmovisions and ontologies). Over the past week, I’ve been offered repeated opportunities to abide with profound sadness and a sense of existential dread that just will not go away. Let’s face it: the fantasies of being separate, individualized cogs in the productivity machine of late-stage capitalism are crumbling; the illusions we’ve been led to believe about what constitutes success and what leads to happiness are rapidly disintegrating. To be passing into menopause and experiencing the emotional and hormonal storms of this life-stage at the same time that the world is facing such violent upheaval, destruction, rage and oppression is almost too much for my system to handle. I’m on the brink of a huge rupture. Or maybe I’m already in it.

Even before the latest crisis some days back, I was already feeling stretched-too-thin, maybe brittle is an apt description. I was beyond exhausted and untethered… drowning in the oh-so-familiar story of too-much-to-do. In the early days of this strange year of two thousand and twenty-four I contemplated how I might like to spend my fiftieth birthday. I felt a deep longing to be alone. I didn’t really wish to travel, but to be at home… home, alone. But things evolved and eventually I came up with the plan to spend time with my parents in my hometown and then a few days in a tiny cabin with my beloved Yeyo in Southern Utah. Due to a very scary medical emergency here in Oaxaca, those plans didn’t work out and I am back home today, with a worried husband and a house full of guests & their pets. My heart is fearful, disappointed and fraught with a sense of doom that I cannot fully grasp or understand. I am tired. Not an hour passes without tears. Everything makes me cry. 

Returning from travel can be a stressful experience for me and the circumstances of this homecoming made things more challenging. Shortly after I arrived, I got caught up in a current of resentment brought on by the myriad tasks I feel I must perform to keep our house clean, ordered and functional. I hate that I feel this way. It often leads to tension because my partner believes that this frustration is a sign that the last place in the world I want to be is at home with him. While this isn’t true, I do struggle with overwhelm. Rather than just getting on with my day, I thought: what might be underneath my desire for everything to be perfect in my home and the feeling that there’s never enough time to get everything done? I came back to the issue of control. Because life has handed us so many massive lessons in letting go these past six years, I wonder if my OCD hasn’t worsened because the domestic realm feels like one of the few places I may still have control. Maybe when I realize that even in the most mundane realms, we never “arrive” to a place of perfect cleanliness and order, I’ll also be able to accept and surrender to the fact that disorder, entropy and dirt are the tricksters that always dance with my anal retentive desires for perfectly tidy spaces. For now, maybe this is just a way of self-soothing in the midst of so many other chaotic and terrible circumstances that have swirled around and whipped us off our feet in the past many moons. And maybe it’s okay to seek solace in the minutiae of daily chores. 

The threshold I am at here seems to be a very pronounced invitation to learn about falling apart… and about REALLY falling apart. Falling apart in a way that I am never “coming back from.” I see the way that things are markedly distinct from the way that I imagined them on this supposedly significant day. Some inner child of mine – maybe the five-year-old – is in the midst of a total tantrum, screaming: “I don’t want ANYTHING for my birthday! Just leave me alone! I don’t want your facebook message or your cake or your presents.” I am aware of the way that my upbringing and family life have unconsciously fed a sense of entitlement around birthdays. I was raised to believe that March 26th is a moment for celebrating this incredibly special individual called Aerin. I’ve always believed it was my right to decide how I spend it and with whom. Today, I see how many larger forces are at play here… agencies greater than my small desire to feel appreciated, loved and lifted up for these 24 hours. What is the price I pay for believing I have control over my choices? Do I want to spend my birthday with the people randomly staying at our house right now? No. But this experience of living is not about using our will to try to shape everything in a way that makes us feel comfortable or safe. Too much energy has been wasted on this kind of futile effort to force reality to conform to what we believe it should be. And… I also don’t want to have to pretend to be happy and content with life today as a “good hostess.” 

So what is this rite of passage really about – this weird space on the edge of uncertainty, surgery, recovery, hormone-insanity, climate collapse, political implosions and yet more uncertainty? As I move into the time of late autumn and even the beginning of the winter of my life, what is being asked of me? From what I can tell, it’s about allowing feelings to arise and about staying very present in those feelings. It sounds like nothing. It sounds trite. It sounds like something I’ve said here a million fucking times before. But this time… it feels different. It’s different because the things I’m feeling are entirely new to me. I’ve never felt this level of confusion, descent and despair. Not even when our full-term baby died inside my womb. Not even when my mother-in-law suddenly passed away six months later. Not even during the pandemic. Not even through the three subsequent miscarriages. Not even during several major and seemingly unrepairable relational ruptures in my life.

Something is changing in me. And it is scary as FUCK! I want to run screaming in the familiar direction of feeling frustrated and overwhelmed by domestic tasks and an impossible to-do list, or fall into a numbed out stupor before an inane Netflix series while wrapped up in fleecy baby blankets that have never known the skin of a child. I want to self-soothe by telling myself that it’s going to get better, that I won’t always feel this way (which, of course, I will not). But something is changing in me and I will not try to escape from these feelings as uncomfortable and unfamiliar as they are. I will just keep letting the tears fall from me… I will keep rolling myself into a little ball and moaning and groaning… I will keep talking about how it feels to whoever is open to listening. 

I think this might be what it means to start to grow “old” (whatever the hell that means) during the crumpling, devastating time of the “anthropocene.” Honestly, I’ve been totally freaked out about turning 50. Of course, there’s all of our weird youth-obsessed social crapola which I normally wouldn’t feel so susceptible to, but there’s something about menopause and fertility and my “failure” to mother living children that makes this whole birthday situation more fraught than it might otherwise be. Even though I’ve let go and let go and let go… this is really it. I’m not bleeding. I’m not ovulating. I’m not having a baby. (Maybe this seems obvious to the whole world except some little tiny part of me that was maybe unconsciously clinging to hope even though the rest of my grown-up self was like: yeah, of course, I get it… I’ve accepted this.) All of this was true before I started feeling this extreme fragility and sensitivity to the world around us, before my partner had a medical emergency and before I returned to my childhood home and aging parents for a few days

Modernity socializes us to believe…

that we have full agency over our lives and…

what happens “to us” is somehow a result of the decisions we make and…

that those decisions are made based on values that we autonomously deem important or meaningful… 

even though often these values have been stealthily sculpted and shaped by our wack-a-doodle society that doesn’t really understand what soulful or wholehearted living feels like…

It’s high time we acknowledge that we are not in charge. The world is so much wyrder than our minds and hearts – colored by colonization and the poverty of modernity – can begin to fathom. 

I was fortunate enough to get to hear Francis Weller – one of my guides through the landscapes of grief and sorrow – before I jumped on that plane last week. While it was hard for my shocked system to take in the talk, a few ideas entered through the soft places that had been opened by the terrible news. There was a part about the practices we can engage in as a way of connecting at the soul-level to navigate these times. The very first practice was about cultivating self-compassion. And this is where I land now in the story of thresholds, fallings apart, surrendering and breaking down: how can I love my”self” more?* How can I be in a way that feels each emotion, each physical sensation? What can I do to trust that the disappointment, the fear of the unknown and the existential dread all have wisdom? How do I allow them to take up the space they need? How can I move through this terrifying breakdown of what I thought I was and what I thought I wanted while continuing to cultivate radical self-acceptance and compassion for the feelings, ways of being and many shadows that move through me?

Painting by Natasha Terry. Photos by Slam! Rose Johnson, Mitzi & Aerin Dunford and Lissy Vomacka. Cake by Craig Dunford.

* I am using quotes around the word self here because the notion of the separate self is so deeply embedded within the project of western white modernity; I’m not even sure I know what a “self” is or if such a thing even exists.