38

I'm not great at selfies, but I feel like I should start posts with a photo of me, so here it is!

My birthday is September 25th, and it’s hard to believe that’s already next month. I wrote a fairly reflective blog post at the beginning of 2024, but I’m feeling reflective again, this time about how being 38 years old has been.

The TL;DR is that 38 has been the best year of my life, hands down. It’s kind of astounding that it took 38 years to have a year this good, but I’m extremely grateful that it’s happened. There have been so many monumentally good things about this year of my life. To say I’m grateful for the joy this year has brought would be an understatement.

Work

I think the first thing I want to talk about is my job. I wrote in a post on here a while ago that I wouldn’t be writing about work much, but I’m going to break my own rules here. I left my last job right before my birthday. That company was incredible in terms of its ethics and the way it treated its employees. But it was a “high performing” job, where I was a Project Manager at a web development company. I felt like I couldn’t keep up with the amount of work I had. I was constantly worried about work, and any time anyone outside of work asked me how I was doing, the first thing I would talk about was work. The company was fully remote, and had a Slack channel specifically for its LGBTQIA+ employees, and was - on paper - everything that most people my age want in a job. But the pressure was unsustainable for me, and I burned out hard.

I decided to make a shift in the kind of work I was going to do. I started applying for office administrative work - secretary work - and found a posting on Indeed for the job I ended up taking. It mentioned secretarial work, but also mentioned providing support (via phones and tickets) to customers who were using the software that my now-employer created. Having done some coding myself and feeling pretty capable when it comes to technology and software, I applied. I was amazed by the people I met - they were so down-to-earth, so normal, so kind. I’ve mentioned to some people in my life that my last job mostly employed people from New England (before the company went remote they were based in Boston), and my new job was all based in Ohio with Ohioans, and there was such a significant difference due to the typical Midwestern attitude of the people who interviewed me. I was ecstatic when - after the interview process - I was offered this job. It’s a hybrid position, so there is some in-person time included in the work (although not much!), but I actually ended up loving the chance to meet my coworkers and spend time with them in-person, and also to be able to work from home most of the time.

The software we support is for graduate medical education - for residents and fellows at teaching hospitals - and the people I most interact with at those institutions are the coordinators of these programs. Shortly after I started, my boss explained it to me like a middle or high school - you’ve got your students (residents and fellows), your teachers (faculty/attendings), your principal (program director), and then you’ve got your school secretaries (program coordinators). I think it’s a fairly universal experience that the secretary at your school had to keep track of everything that was going on at school, and was the most invested in the students, and knew where everyone had to be at all time, and was kind of the heart of the operation. That’s what program coordinators do in graduate medical education, and - like school secretaries - they’re generally the most overworked and underappreciated people in the system. So having the opportunity to help these coordinators get through their days, lighten their load a bit, and treat them with respect and dignity and appreciation REALLY appealed to me. And it turns out, it’s been great! I love talking to the coordinators, and they generally really appreciate the help we give them. I also love my coworkers. There is no LGBTQIA+ Slack channel, and if anything the employees skew a little more towards the conservative side, but they are so kind and normal and welcoming and supportive. I would so much rather work with people who are authentic and respectful and warm-hearted than work at a place where people feel distant, even if they do have a generally more progressive leaning attitude. My boss at my job is - hands down - the best boss I’ve ever had. I’m making a fair bit less than I was making at my last job, and I have not regretted it for even a half a second. I love the work I do, I love being able to be done with work at 5:00, and I love actually - for the first time in my life - having a work/life balance.

So starting at this job 4 days after my birthday kind of set the tone for the rest of the year, and that’s why it felt like it was the appropriate first thing to write about. But it’s certainly not the only reason 38 has been the best year of my life.

Therapy

A profoundly important part of why 38 has been such a good year is the work I’ve done with my therapist, Miranda. I’ve been in therapy for over 20 years with various practitioners, and early on after turning 37, I started working with Miranda after my last therapist - to put it bluntly - dumped me. Miranda helped me realize that I have ADHD, and I got diagnosed towards the end of being 37. Shortly after turning 38, Miranda connected me with a psychiatrist who specializes in ADHD, and I started taking Adderall. That medication has been life-altering in the most positive way. My mood is so much more stable, I’m able to focus and be productive, I’m so much calmer, it takes a lot more to happen for me to feel overwhelmed, and it’s generally just been such a positive change for me. Miranda also has ADHD, and so she saw a lot of herself in me, and was able to provide me with the care I had been missing for so long.

Miranda also has a way about her that I haven’t experienced with any other therapist, and the best word I can use for it is “intuition”. I’ve worked with a ton of therapists in my life, and most of them have been so careful and deliberate in what they say or how they conduct themselves during therapy. There’s a lot of merit to that approach, obviously, as therapy can be a very sensitive thing and the therapist has to be sure that they’re not doing further harm in what they say or how they conduct themselves. But Miranda just has incredible intuition. She doesn’t seem to get too bogged down in saying the right thing, she just seems to trust her gut and she has not once said or done anything that felt inappropriate or wrong. There have been times when something has started to slip out of her mouth before she realizes (did I mention she has ADHD?) and she’ll try to stop it, and when I press her to say what she was about to say, it always ends up being the best part of the therapy session and the thing I walk away from our appointments being most glad was said.

I think the most profound thing about working with Miranda is being truly seen for the first time in therapy. Miranda suggested the idea of autism as something that might apply to me. I worked with people with autism for a very long time and thought I knew exactly what it looked like and how it presented, and thought it couldn’t possibly apply to me. I wrote about the start of the autism conversation in my last blog post, but there have been developments in that journey since the previous post, and it has had such an incredibly positive impact on me. The work I’ve done with Miranda has helped me have so much more compassion for myself than I ever had before. I am able to look at myself and my history and realize that I am not broken the way I thought I was all my life. I am different, and my brain works in a very specific way, and my emotions work in a very specific way, but I am not broken, and that is an amazing thing to realize about myself. Miranda has truly taken the time to see me in a way that almost no one else ever has before, and being seen by her has helped me to understand and love myself so much more. It’s kind of sad that I didn’t have this kind of breakthrough until now, but it’s a big reason - maybe the primary reason - that being 38 has been so powerful.

Emotions

I don’t want to say too much about what I’ve worked on in therapy. This is, after all, a public blog, and I have to be aware that anyone could find this blog at any time. I eluded to progress in the one area of therapy in the last section, but something I want to specifically call out here is that the progress I’ve made has put me much more in touch with my emotions. I had a tendency to try to tamper my emotions for most of my life. I always knew I had big feelings, and I was called “too sensitive” a lot as a kid. As I got older, I tried to suppress my sensitivity, even if internally I was feeling the big feelings I had felt all along.

Because of the work I’ve done in therapy, I’m not so afraid to feel my big feelings anymore. This has been confusing for some people in my life, because - for example - I do let myself get angry, which is an emotion I had previously completely shut down. Allowing myself to get angry and realize that it’s not going to be the end of the world if I feel anger has been a really positive thing. When things frustrate or irritate me, I now allow myself to acknowledge that instead of pretending I’m not feeling it.

Another emotion I’ve allowed myself to experience is unadulterated joy. When something makes me really happy, I allow myself to bask in that happiness. I’m not afraid to be silly if it feels like what I want to be. Instead of being embarrassed by happiness, I just let myself be happy, however that manifests. I’m laughing more than I ever have before.

38 has been the year where I have realized that big feelings are okay, and I’m not going to get swallowed whole by the big feelings I have, and that there’s a freedom in allowing myself to feel the big feelings that I’ve always had instead of trying to shut them down whenever they come up.

Boundaries

38 has been the year where I realized the importance of boundaries. Of course, people have been talking about boundaries forever, but I honestly kind of thought “boundaries” was a bad word. “What do you mean you want to close off part of yourself to me?” I would think.

But the thing is, I’ve realized that I’m not entitled to every part of the people in my life, and - maybe more importantly - the people in my life are not entitled to every part of me. I have one fairly new friendship I’m thinking of where a boundary was established by this friend pretty early on. I remember bristling at the idea of it, but eventually came around to it. Later, with that same friend, I established a strong boundary. What surprised me was that the boundaries ended up making the friendship stronger, and “boundaries” stopped being a dirty word to me.

I’ve recently had to set some firm boundaries in my life with other important people. This has come from me realizing that I can’t endlessly give, that it’s okay to say “no” sometimes to protect my peace, and that my health - mental, physical, emotional - has value, and doesn’t always need to be trampled upon for the sake of others. I’ve come to understand “boundaries” as the opposite of a bad word, but rather a really good, healthy word. It’s funny that it took me getting to the age of 38 to realize that, but I’m really glad that I finally did.

Sobriety

I’ve always liked beer. Okay, scratch that - I love beer. In November of last year, I realized that maybe I loved beer too much. I was starting to get concerned about how much I was drinking. I decided to start tracking my drinking mid-way through November using an app a friend suggested to me. Even the act of starting to track my drinking was an acknowledgment that it was becoming an issue, and that it probably was a good idea to track it. In November, I decided ahead of time that I was going to do the Dry January challenge (where you don’t drink at all for the month of January). This, of course, led to me feeling like I needed to get my drinking in as much as I could in December, and boy did I!

By the end of January, I felt clearer-headed, more energetic, and more at peace than I had in a long time, maybe years. I decided I was going to continue tracking my drinking going forward. The app I use gamifies sobriety, so that you get a little celebration in the app every time you have a “dry day”. It also marks off the calendar with yellow coloring on dry days, light gray coloring on “drank as planned days” (which I interpreted to mean “days when I only had one beer”), and dark gray coloring on “drank” days. The app also counts days in a row without drinking as a “dry streak”. This app became super motivating for me - I wanted to have as long a dry streak as I could, and I wanted any days where I consumed alcohol to be light gray, and I started counting dark gray days as days when I lost the game.

I had a fairly long dry streak until mid-July, then we went on a vacation and I went a little overboard. Afterwards, I felt awful, run down, unfocused, and tired. I decided to go for another dry streak, and went 26 days dry until a particularly stressful day earlier this month and had a beer. Even just the one beer was enough to make me feel lousy.

After I left detox for Xanax (mentioned in a previous post), I was told that alcohol hits the same part of the brain that Xanax does. I had withdrawal symptoms from Xanax between doses while I was on it. I continued to drink daily after getting out of detox, and I’m pretty sure the alcohol consumption delayed my full recovery. That day in July where I went overboard resulted in me experiencing withdrawal symptoms as well, which confirmed for me that alcohol was absolutely hitting the same part of my brain that Xanax did. It also brought home for me the fact that I don’t want to mess with that part of my brain anymore.

The final confirmation that sobriety is the right choice for me was having just one beer on August 9th. Drinking as a coping mechanism - as I did that day due to stress - has always seemed like a bad idea to me, and I had slight withdrawal symptoms after having just one beer. Why would I want to mess with that again?

So, at 38 years old, I’ve decided to be sober. I will no longer be a person who drinks alcohol, and I feel so much relief and peace and pride in that decision. I never hit rock bottom with alcohol the way a lot of alcoholics do, and I don’t think I would even classify myself as an alcoholic, but knowing that I will have a happier, healthier life without alcohol feels like a really great conclusion to come to, and I love that - from now on - every day of my life will be a yellow day in the app. This kind of clarity and strength of will is another reason why 38 is the best year of life so far.

Friendships

38 has also been the best year of my life when it comes to friendships. I think having a clearer sense of who I am and the ability to communicate what feels right and important to me has made all of my relationships stronger and healthier. Some people go through life without feeling like they have a best friend or someone they can truly confide in. At 38 years old, I am able to count 5 people who I consider to be my best friends, which feels like an unbelievable thing to be able to say. All 5 of these people are friends in whom I can confide, who I don’t feel like I have to hide any part of myself from, and who I know would do anything for me. It feels like a gigantic gift to have that in my life, and I don’t know how I got so lucky.

I’m not going to talk about all 5 of those best friends, but I do want to talk specifically about one of those people. Her name is Bethany. We met at a job we both had in 2011-2012. I was still pretty new to living in Ohio, and Bethany and I worked at the same place but not in the same classroom, so we didn’t interact too much. We became Facebook friends, and I left that job, and Bethany moved to Tennessee shortly after I left the job. I am so incredibly glad we became Facebook friends, because we started commenting on each other’s posts, then started messaging each other, then exchanged numbers and started texting, and it grew into the most rewarding, life-giving friendship of my life.

I could get into the whole history of my friendship with Bethany, but this post is about being 38, so I’ll focus on my friendship with Bethany at this time in my life. Bethany and I - even this many years into our friendship - are constantly discovering parallels between us. One of the defining characteristics of our friendship is that we have had so many life experiences that are parallel to each other, the most significant being that we both lost our dads to cancer around the same time. We shared our grief with each other and felt like we had someone who understood what the other was going through. We recently had a conversation about our dads and how they both loved raspberries. I said to her, “I think I was introduced to raspberry jam long before I ever had grape jelly because it was all my dad would buy,” and she said that she had the exact same experience. There are all these little funny coincidences where we feel the exact same way about things, we have lived through eerily similar things, and we understand each other in a profound way. For me, I feel Bethany understands me in a way that no one else does.

At 38 years old, having a friendship with someone like Bethany is astounding. Our friendship has helped me grow as a human being, and our friendship has matured as we have gotten older. We cheer each other on as we face new challenges and accomplish things that at one point seemed unaccomplishable. And as I have come to learn about and understand myself in a new way, Bethany is my biggest encourager and is the first person I want to tell about the things I’m learning. I couldn’t have ever anticipated having a friendship like this, and at 38 years old, it feels pretty remarkable to have these kinds of friends in my life.

Marriage

My first date with my husband Russ was Election Night 2004. We officially started dating on April 12, 2005. At the time I’m writing this post, I have spent half of my life with Russ. The first two years of our relationship were long distance, and I would say the first 10 years of our relationship were mostly defined by the challenges we faced. Russ used to work for Roman Catholic churches, so when we decided to get married, we knew we couldn’t have a legal document saying that Russ was married to another man if he wanted to keep his job. We lived in Massachusetts when we decided to get married, so we technically could have had a legal wedding at the time, but because of Russ’s job, we couldn’t. Our first wedding - affectionately called Wedding 1.0, and the wedding we consider to be our actual wedding - was not a legal wedding. We got legally married (Wedding 2.0) in 2015 after Marriage Equality became law of the land and Russ had moved to his current employer (an employer that didn’t have the same restrictions on who you can spend your life with). Even after we got legally married, when a part of me felt like everything was going to magically fall into place, there was still a ton of work to do.

Now here we are, 19 years into our relationship, and it FINALLY feels like all the work has paid off. My marriage with Russ this year has been the kind of relationship I only imagined people could have. I think of our relationship as characterized by continued growth, joy, compromise, dedication, and being each other’s favorite person. Being 38 has been the best year in my life to be Russ’s spouse. I think a big part of that is that I finally understand and know myself in a way I never did before, so I can be more transparent, more expressive, and more authentic with Russ on a daily basis.

But I think another big part of it is that Russ is being more open, transparent, and authentic than he’s ever been before. I’ve thrown a lot of big changes and adjustments at him over the past couple of years, and he’s handled it so well and rolled with it like a champ. He’s also doing the work to get to know and understand himself better and live more authentically, and so we’re both bringing our most unfiltered, authentic selves to our marriage in a way I don’t know that we ever have before.

There’s certainly more that can be said, but, once again, this is a public blog, so I’m going to leave it at that. I’ll just say that the way my marriage is going this year is another reason why 38 has been so great, and I’m really glad we’ve finally gotten to this place.

Conclusion (finally!)

Russ and I are on vacation right now for a long weekend, and my goal was to write a blog post after having gone several months without writing. I’ve had lots of ideas for posts, and didn’t know where I was going to end up. It turns out I (unknowingly) decided to just write all of the blog posts as one gigantic post. I started writing this post yesterday morning, and I’ve come back to it in spurts several times over the past couple of days, and just now reread the whole thing. I typically don’t know exactly what I’m going to say when I write, and I don’t spend a lot of time editing a post after I’ve written it.

So now I’m looking at this post and realizing that, like the last post, it’s extremely long. I won’t lie, there’s a part of me that wants to break this post up into shorter posts, but I also know that I won’t get an opportunity to write the way this vacation has allowed me to, so I might as well put it all out there. If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for taking the time to read.

The bottom line is, I’m really glad that - after MANY years characterized by depression, angst, confusing health issues, trauma, shame, and what felt like tirelessly working to be better without evidence that things would get better - being 38 has been undoubtedly the best year of my life. I look back on most of the sections of this post and think, “gosh, I really wish I could have gotten to that place a lot sooner”, but instead of dwelling on that, I’m going to just be grateful that it finally has all happened.

I hope - if you haven’t already - that you have a year in your life that’s as great as 38 has been for mine.