Fifty Years Is Not Something I Want to Fight
your (slightly different) Monday Morning Happiness Prompt 🧡
In a few months’ time, I’ll turn fifty.
Somewhere around this week fifty years ago, without anyone knowing it, my life quietly began.
And that thought has being coming and going in my mind a lot this week.
Not because turning fifty feels frightening.
Quite the opposite, in fact - it’s feeling… extraordinary.
For all the conversations we have about ageing, anti-ageing, looking younger and pretending birthdays somehow don’t matter, I’ve found myself feeling something very different.
Gratitude.
Not because life has always been easy.
It hasn’t.
Like all of us, there have been chapters I would never have chosen.
There have been moments that stretched me, changed me and left their footprints on who I am.
But somehow, underneath all of that, there is this quiet awareness that life itself is an astonishing gift.
I think about one of my cousins, who never had the chance to grow older.
I think about another whose life has been shaped by profound and complex needs.
I think about all the women I walk alongside who are struggling with their fertility journeys.
I think about those who have lost pregnancies, lost their children, and lost hope in a goal they never thought would be difficult.
And I realise that reaching fifty isn’t something I want to resist.
It’s something I want to honour.
Not with a huge party.
Not by pretending I love every wrinkle or every hormonal wobble (and of those, there are many!)
Not by putting pressure on myself to make these coming months bigger, better or more meaningful than any other.
Just with respect.
Respect for this body that has carried me through half a century.
For the people, pets and places I’ve loved.
For the mistakes I’ve made.
For the things I’ve survived.
For the laughter I can still hear when I think about certain days.
For every version of myself that somehow brought me here.
There is something wonderfully freeing about reaching a point where I no longer want to spend precious energy arguing with time.
The lines around my eyes tell stories.
My body has changed because life changes us.
My priorities have softened.
My definition of success looks nothing like it did twenty years ago.
I quite like this woman I’m becoming.
She worries less about impressing people.
She cares more about meaningful conversations.
She knows that happiness rarely arrives with fireworks.
It arrives in cups of good coffee in the garden.
In dogs who are delighted to see you.
In friends who know the whole story.
In music that makes you sing.
In a body that still carries you through the world, even if it occasionally asks for a slower pace than it once did.
Perhaps that’s what midlife is really giving me.
Not a smaller life.
A more spacious one.
A life where I no longer feel quite so compelled to chase someone else’s idea of what success, beauty or womanhood should look like.
A life where I can simply ask myself what feels joyful?
What feels true?
What deserves my energy?
As I find myself quietly approaching fifty, I don’t feel the need to celebrate because I’ve somehow reached a milestone, or even the finish line.
I want to celebrate because I was lucky enough to begin the race at all.
And that feels like something worth pausing for.
So perhaps this week’s reflection isn’t really about birthdays.
It’s simply this: if you paused today and looked back with gentleness rather than criticism, what might you thank your life for?
Not because everything has been perfect.
But because, despite everything, you’re still here.
Still growing.
Still learning.
Still becoming.
And I think that’s rather beautiful 🧡
