On Turning 50

Tomorrow I turn 50.

It’s a number that seems to make people uncomfortable. The reactions range from sympathy to jokes to the occasional whisper of decline, irrelevance, invisibility. But I keep wondering… who decided that? Who decided that a number (simply the count of how many times the earth has circled the sun since we arrived) should carry emotional instructions?

Think about it. How does anyone know they are supposed to feel one way or another about the number of days they have been alive? That meaning was handed to us somewhere along the way. We absorbed it from jokes, advertisements, movies, and comments people make when birthdays come around. But numbers themselves are neutral. Fifty is no more inherently tragic than thirty-seven. Or forty-two. Or nineteen. They are just markers in time. We could just as easily have been taught that fifty is a magical threshold. A rare milestone. A moment that deserves reverence. Half a century of living, learning, surviving, adapting, changing. Instead, many of us were taught to brace ourselves for it.

I have heard people say, “When women turn 50, the world discards them.” What a terrible thing to say. And an even worse lie to believe. Yesterday someone told me, “No one wants to turn 50.”

I do. Why wouldn’t I?

To reach fifty means that my body and brain have carried me through decades of living, through heartbreaks endured, lessons learned, dreams revised, and countless ordinary days that accumulated into a life. My life.

How strange and remarkable it is to even be here at all. We rarely stop to marvel at that. Our bodies perform staggering work every day to keep us alive. Hearts beating more than 100,000 times a day. Lungs drawing breath after breath seemingly without effort. Brains solving millions of problems we never even notice. And yet we treat these miraculous systems as if they should perform like elite athletes forever, without care, patience, or gratitude.

Then a birthday comes around and instead of awe, we reach for anxiety. We measure ourselves against outdated, age-old narratives that insist certain numbers signal decline or irrelevance. But those narratives are inventions. Stories someone made up long ago and passed down until they started to sound like truth.

They are not truth.

The truth is that turning fifty is not the closing act of a life. For many of us, it is the beginning of a far more intentional one. At fifty, you know who you are. You know which voices to ignore. You know which fears were never worth carrying in the first place. You stop performing for approval and start building a life that actually reflects what matters to you. In other words, you finally get to begin.

So tomorrow I will turn fifty. And instead of treating that number like a warning sign, I will treat it like what it really is: a marker of endurance, curiosity, and survival. A reminder that I am still here, finding new ridiculous things to get myself involved in on this random planet turning circles in the sky.

And if the world expects me to shrink at this age, it may be surprised to find that I am only getting started.