I turn 32 this Saturday. My 31st birthday was the beginning of the most difficult year of my life thus far and I feel ambivalent about getting older. 32 sounds, to me, very very adult. An age where women should have husbands and homes and children and careers. I have a boat and a generally good attitude and an ex-husband and a boyfriend and depression and seasickness and half a career and too many handbags and a sense of adventure. But I also feel very very young. Sometimes I go to sleep at night and think that I will wake up 25 again, living in my tiny walk up apartment on Leroy Street. Is that magical thinking? Or is it a normal part of living a life full of change, to not quite ever believe that you’re in the place you are or that you’ve been all of the places you’ve been before?
I don’t know the answer.
Last year, before my birthday, I started receiving very scary messages online. Someone who obviously lived near my house in Idaho started threatening me. They posted my home address on TikTok lives. They commented and sent messages to me on Instagram from various accounts. They said I needed to “watch out” and that they were coming for me. I was terrified. I went to the police station and filed a report. I was sometimes home alone for days at a time while my then husband traveled for work. I signed up for private shooting and gun safety classes and went to the first one on my 31st birthday.