Letting Go of Heartaches at 40

It’s two weeks before I turn forty, and I woke before the sun’s rays lit the surrounding world. Something in me was restless, not in the usual way. My soul was awakening, and I could feel it.

I made my tea and sat on my bed, swallowing all the emotions that had been moving through my heart and soul from the night before into this new morning. Forty. In fourteen days, I would turn forty. The number felt heavy when I heard it, like a suitcase packed for someone else. Inside were old birthdays, long-lost loves and friends, and the jobs I had performed over the past twenty years.

Where was I now, and what was the future holding? So many doors had closed softly while others had slammed shut.

I had imagined turning forty very differently. I thought it was the age when you were finished, when old age began to settle in. But now I felt the opposite. It felt like a beginning, a reawakening, when I finally started to understand things about myself and about life. I was free from robotic conditioning—or so I believed—free from binding myself to marriage, to one soul I barely knew.

Forty looked like a place where love stayed, but only now could I see that it wasn’t. It was always presented as a time when careers made sense, and everyone knew how to fold a fitted sheet. But was any of that true? Was my career stable, or was the sheet still too loose to ever really fit?

Heartaches—people who had left in hopes of brighter futures, friendships that dissolved without a fight but ended abruptly; dreams that expired politely while I was busy surviving.

I carried these experiences up my sleeve. Sometimes their weight felt unbearable; other times it felt light. None of it was beautiful, but it was proof that I had lived. People praise the twenties as if you’re supposed to have everything figured out by then, but you don’t. You’re just demonstrating and experimenting with the freedom of choice life has offered you.

You can remember without reliving. That’s what I felt.

Forty didn’t seem like an ending; it felt like an awakening. I no longer had to audition to be considered a friend. I didn’t have to reread chapters of my life where my story felt stuck. Life kept moving forward, as it always does. There is no stopping it.

I lifted my hands toward the sky. It was time for me to forgive myself, for I had not known any better. I forgave myself for staying too long where I should have left, for not knowing then what I know now, for mistaking almost-love for real love. I couldn’t be so hungry for love that it cost me my soul’s peace.

As these thoughts passed through my mind, the sun began to rise. Even the sun had an important place to be. Light filled my bedroom and touched the floor, and then my face.

Forty was a time for stronger love, for quieter friendships, for a life that was not performed but lived.

I remember my mom turning forty; it was such a monumental occasion. And now here I was. It felt as if my twenties and thirties had zipped by. I picked up my cup of tea. For the first time, I didn’t wish I were younger. I was happy where I was, and I was happy forty was two weeks away.

There were times, though, when these past experiences felt like mirrors, showing me where I was still unhealed. I couldn’t rush things into being what I wanted them to be. Everything in my life was a chapter. Nothing was a mistake, even if it broke me open—open enough to understand what life was about.

Opening old doors and trying to fix things wasn’t loyalty. Remembering what didn’t work out was simply reliving the past. I had to put the past down, because my future mattered more than holding on to what had already gone.

I had to release people who didn’t understand me, release outcomes that would never arrive, and release the fantasy that things might bloom in some other way.

I had to let myself off the hook, and I had to do it now. I had to let others off the hook as well. Life, as imperfect as it was, had to feel lighter. Forty couldn’t hand me certainty, but it could hand me peace.