There’s something about standing at this threshold that feels different from the birthdays before it. It’s not just another year older. It feels like a crossing a doorway.
When I look back, I see her.
The addict. The alcoholic. The party girl who laughed too loud and lived too fast.
The promiscuous one, scattering pieces of herself in places where she never truly belonged.
I see the girl who was deeply traumatized, carrying the wounds of both mother and father, who didn’t know how to love, didn’t know how to receive, didn’t know how to be in this world.
And I know that many people still remember me as her.
Sometimes I wonder is that all they see when my name comes to mind?
But I also know this: she is not who I am today.
And yet, she is part of me. She is part of the becoming.
For so long, I wanted to erase her, to prove I had outgrown her, to make sure nobody ever associated me with her again. But at 40, I don’t feel that urgency anymore. At 40, I understand that she carried me here. She endured. She survived. She kept breathing when life gave her every reason not to.
Now, I can hold her with compassion.
Now, I can honour her as the doorway into the life I live today.
Now, I can lay her down gently, because she was never meant to be the whole story.
Forty feels like a turning point in the deepest sense.
It is the age where I no longer need to measure my worth by how others see me.
It is the age where wisdom has replaced self-doubt, and presence has replaced performance.
It is the age where I can stand in my body, in my choices, in my truth, and say: this is me.
I don’t have to outrun the past.
I don’t have to be defined by it either.
I can carry it with reverence, knowing it has shaped me but does not confine me.
At 40, I step forward as a woman who has lived many lives already
and who is ready for the lives yet to come.
And maybe that’s the gift of this age: not youth, not perfection, not certainty but integration. The weaving together of everything I have been and everything I am becoming.
Reflection for You
What versions of yourself do others still remember and how do you remember them?
What part of you is ready to be honoured, thanked, and laid down, so that you can step more fully into who you are today?
