I refuse to get old why am I telling you this?

What 37 can bring you

• Perspective, if you look at it the right way.

• A three-inch white hair that grows out of your temple overnight. Overnight.

• Ideas, so many ideas, that will burn in the back of your head for days, weeks, months, years, waiting for you to feed the dog and clear your desk and load the last dish and answer the last email and sing the last bedtime song and fold the last towel until you feel the last bubble of the day’s energy pop somewhere inside your chest, near your heart, every evening. The ideas will wait for you. Won’t they?

• Time. Just kidding! Thirty-seven will not bring you time. Thirty-seven will take it from you in painfully gouged chunks.

• Melasma. What were you thinking with those long turns in the tanning bed?

• Irrational anger at the face in the mirror for not being the face you see in pictures that were taken ten years ago.

• Slow and uncomfortable epiphanies about how hard you have always worked to subvert your own needs to control and/or manage the emotions of everyone around you. And how that shit is absolutely not an okay strategy for parenting or wifing.

• A level of done-ness with the aforementioned way of existing that will help clear a path for a different type of you. (A good therapist can help with this.)

• A baseline level of happiness that you have not known before, that makes all the other stuff navigable. (This is related to the first bullet.)