2025, Year of Middle Age

As the year dwindles and it’s dark at 3:30 in the afternoon, I have been thinking about how I’ll remember 2025. It was a tough year in many ways—Mark had surgery twice and got laid off, a good friend passed away, my writing faltered, and many people in my life struggled in various ways. But in other ways it was a good, steady year—there were so many times I got to reach out and be with people I care about and they reached out to me, Mark bounced back easily in both health and employment, and sometimes it even felt like I had a little breathing space to think, well, what’s the best thing to do now.

In 2025, I felt thoroughly middle-aged. I felt patient and forbearing and a tad condescending when younger people made impetuous decisions or rash judgments, my knees hurt, I thought a lot of people died too soon and also felt a number of things weren’t worth getting worked up about because someday I myself will someday be dead. I found it mildly prurient when people my own age sexually objectified younger people, by which I mean people in their 20s. I felt as if I were born married, and also possibly born with a complex moisturizing routine and an interest in strength training and a preference for short poetic novels and a desire to text my friends anything interesting that occurs to me and also my $40/month vitamin habit. How can I ever not have been this?

I made some new friends this year, which is a delight and very challenging to do in middle age—not only is it hard for me to will myself to make the overture, many people actually don’t want any new friends at this phase of life, even if they are willing to admit I am a lovely person. Nevertheless I have been trying to show care and show up and show myself in my best light—I have had a few good results, although more often people are just willing to admit I am a lovely person but we are not going to hang out. Also some pre-existing friends fell away for a while—I don’t always know why. Life being as luckily long as it is, I know that sometimes friends cycle back around, so even if folks have disappeared for a bit, I have hope they might come back. This is an interesting way age has made me more hopeful. Better news, in 2025 a few friends who had moved far away came BACK, which was thrilling and validated all my “never leave Toronto” lifestyle choices—I just stay here waiting and people come to me. It’s great (or it was great in 2025; often it isn’t).

I also made an enemy this year, which surprised me—someone who genuinely despises me and isn’t shy about saying so. I assume there have been others, over the years, but they were polite about it. It always keeps a girl guessing when a conversation is nonspecifically unpleasant—are people distracted, or bored, or in a bad mood for non-me-related reasons, or do they really not like me? This person doesn’t leave me to wonder! I keep feeling like something is going to happen, there will be some sort of crisis and climax to this story, but maybe there won’t be—sometimes people just hate someone forever, the end. I am being a little glib but I am not extremely happy about this. Nevertheless, one of my big criteria for liking someone is them liking me, so—I dislike my enemy too.

I read a lot this year, which I always do, but I think books are starting to constitute a larger part of my personality. It’s getting to a point where someone asks how I am and I tell them about what I am reading, as if that is my mood—often it is. My reading projects and experiments, themed with writing projects, teaching projects, book clubs, friends’ recommendations, have helped me not to become the narrow, closed-minded person middle-age seems to want me to be—I am having a harder time resisting the urge to state my opinions as facts as I age. Reading books is one of the best ways I know to be gently dislodged from my own opinions.

Writing was so hard this year, and everything big I tried to do seem precarious or annoying or terrible. I got back into short stories, which I have been enjoying but are not easier than writing a novel. They are possibly more expedient because one can fail faster—it’s quicker to notice if a story is not working than a novel. “Fail quickly” is advice I got at business conference and I sort of love it. Although I have been writing very slowly and taking lots of breaks, I have not seriously considered giving up, because how would i entertain myself? I do not like enough television shows to have most of my evenings free. It came up at a discussion among writers recently, how did you know writing would be your thing and although I gave a different answer at the time, I think from the vantage point of my current age, the answer is that I write for my own pleasure. I very much want to publish another book and I do work towards that goal, but the act of writing, of struggling to make the words cohere in a way that gives to others this thing that before only I knew, that is the fun part. Even that is too lofty a description—I like to put the words together, to make them fit, the way other people do jigsaw puzzles—I feel the «snic» when it is right. And that is what I want, even if I cannot convince anyone else to read it.

I love writing the newsletter for this reason, just putting together my thoughts as well as I can, for whoever might want to read them. And these little dialogues are of course the most fun part.

MS (making chocolate fudge)
RR (wanders naked through the kitchen—editor’s note, I was looking for my phone, which contained the ebook of Patricia Lockwood’s wondrous Priestdaddy, which I wanted to read in the bath, in case you were wondering, which Mark unequivocally was not)
MS (chopping up a pound of butter into tiny tiny bits and putting them into a liquid two-cup measure)
RR (finds phone in living room, crosses back through kitchen, pauses): How’s it…going?
MS: …fine, fine. Does this look like a cup to you?
RR (gestures to be given the remainder of the pound of butter, points to the markings on the side that indicate 1 cup, ½ cup, ¼ cup, etc.) See, here is how you tell, you can just cut off the amount you need?
MS (nodding, but not getting it, looking from the remaining block to his cup of little chunks) So, do I have a cup?
RR: Look at what’s left, see, this part is a cup and you’ve cut half of it, so no, you don’t have a cup. Cut the rest of it, to this line, and then you’ll have a cup.
MS (brightening with understanding) Oh, great, thanks! (one-arm hugs her, then looks down curiously with the new realization that RR is not wearing clothes)