There is no knowing whether it is a sign of the anxiety I feel about my fortieth year, whether I have only now made myself ready, or whether it is truly indifference: for about four years, when anyone asks my age, I say 40. Three years ago, in a job I had just begun, I told a young man of thirty (who, like all his fellow men, felt very mature, quite apart from his age) that I was 40. His reply, "ah, I had never thought women of 40 would look like you", lays out rather clearly why women are so caught up in growing older, and still I have always tried to set myself outside these crises of age. I think I have managed it at least far enough to keep up appearances.
In fact, since the age of 35, which Tarancı called the middle of the road, it is as if the savour of life has grown keener still, and so to fear the taking on of years does not look very meaningful. Even so, it is true that cornerstones such as 30, 40 and 50 incline a person to pause for a breath, to think, and to draw up an account.
The fortieth year I had been preparing for over five years arrived, as if to confirm the almost unchanging rule of life, by catching me again at my least prepared point, and in such a way as to raze the ground I had been building under myself for all these years. First, corporate life gave way to freelance work and to part-time teaching, and my routines were levelled. Then, when I was expecting nothing of the kind, another heart, a "really" new one, began to beat inside me. One month after I take in the world's fortieth turn around the sun, I hope to hold my son Can in my arms. I am wrapped in excitement, anxiety, fear, curiosity, responsibility, and many more feelings that have no name. If you had asked me last year, I would have been planning to crown my fortieth birthday with a wild party. Yesterday a friend I love very much, while wishing me a happy birthday, said, "your life will change a great deal, but at least your search for meaning in life will almost come to an end." Those words brought me face to face with how hard I have strained, ever since the years in which I could define myself, to make my life mean something. It might even be said that the search is not particular to me, and that, as a masochistic trait of my generation, it is the basic difference that sets us apart from our parents. Probably each of us, measured against our mother and father and with the spirit of the age also at work, stands one step higher on Maslow's pyramid. Is it not exactly for this reason that it has become ordinary for the modern person to pick at themselves without ceasing, to try to self-actualise in pursuit of an endless happiness, and to take a thousand and one teachings of the old world into the post-truth age?
Looking back over my last twenty years, with a sense of time grown heavier in parallel with a body that is growing heavier, I can say that I love life, my life, in all of it. I am grateful to those who came and went, to every friend, to the loves and the partings, to each person who cut a notch and let a little light leak into my heart. A new love is waiting for me now, one with whom I will share my life, what I have gathered, and my heart. A thousand and one questions are in my head, a thousand and one curiosities. Will my new companion love the sea, and dancing, as much as I do? Will he like to step on wet sand? Will he be afraid of the swing? Will he be more curious about birds, or about flowers? When will he learn to sing? Who will he fall in love with first? For the rest of my life I wait, impatient, for the gift that will wrap me round from one curiosity to the next.
I thank, on this occasion, all the friends and acquaintances who celebrated my birthday, who were beside me, who had surprises for me, who let me feel that I am loved, that I am thought of, that I am missed. The meaning of life is hidden in meaningful relationships. I am glad of you.