I did not expect to feel proud.
Surprised, maybe. Relieved, in the way you are relieved when something large has passed and you are on the other side of it, intact, still recognizably yourself. Possibly philosophical, because sixty is the kind of number that arrives with the expectation of philosophy, that asks you to take stock, to sit with the mathematics of a life and determine whether the addition outweighs the subtraction, whether what you have become is worth what it cost to become it.
But proud. That one surprised me.
Not proud of the accomplishments, though I have some, not proud of the career or the credentials or the things that appear in the official record. Proud of the surviving. Proud of the getting back up, year after year, from things that knocked me down, from the contract years and the burnout and the grief and the relationships that hurt and the versions of myself I had to outgrow and the mourning of each of those versions, which is its own kind of grief, the grief of the self that had to be left in order for the next self to arrive.
Sixty years.
Sixty years in this particular body, this body that has its opinions about stairs and wakes at three and has been through the fire and come out warm rather than burned. Sixty years in this particular life, which was not the life I planned when I was twenty and did not know yet that unplanned lives are often better than planned ones, that the detours are usually where the real things happen, that the gap between what you intended and what you got is where the person you actually are was built.
I had a small party. Just the people I actually wanted to be in a room with.
That was new. That is something I know at sixty that I did not know at thirty, the particular value of a room that contains only the people you would choose if you were allowed to choose honestly, without obligation or history or the feeling that the list should be longer because a larger list looks like a more successful life. My list is not long. My room was the right size. The night was the right length. I laughed until I was tired and went home.
Sixty. I am here. I am proud to be here. I intend to make something of what is left.
