The culture has no category for this.
Not the beginning category. That one is for the young, for the people who are starting things for the first time, for the first job and the first apartment and the first serious love, for the people whose beginning is legible to the cultural imagination as a beginning and is given the appropriate narrative, the opening chapter feeling, the sense that everything ahead is still possible.
There is no equivalent narrative for a woman at fifty-seven who is beginning.
Who is writing for the first time in a way that is not for anyone’s curriculum. Who is walking to the water in the morning not for her health, though it is good for her health, but because the water is where she goes when she needs to think and she is finally giving herself enough mornings at the water to actually think. Who is signing up for the ceramics class not to be productive or to add something to a resume but to know what her hands can do when they are not holding something that belongs to someone else.
I am at the beginning of something and I do not have a name for it.
I am trying to resist the pressure to name it, which is the pressure of someone who has spent a career in institutions that require things to be named before they can be funded, before they can be taken seriously, before they can be allowed to exist in the official record. This does not need to be in the official record. This can be a thing that happens, a turning toward, a slow and genuine reorientation of a life that has always been pointed in the direction of what was needed and is now being pointed, carefully, gently, with great tenderness for the woman who has been doing the pointing, in the direction of what is wanted.
What is wanted is more mornings at the water.
What is wanted is the writing and the ceramics and the long dinner with the people I love and the second cup of coffee and the book I read without checking the time. What is wanted is the rest of it, the whole unmapped territory of the rest of it, and I am fifty-seven years old and I am standing at the edge of it and I am not afraid.
I am ready. Finally, actually, ready.
