I'm gonna be 40...someday!

But unlike Sally, that someday is next year.

Last Friday, I turned 39 years old. I kept thinking about this scene from When Harry Met Sally:

Sally is going to be 40 in eight years, as Harry points out. I, however, will be 40 in one year… “and it’s just sitting there like this big dead end.”

I don’t actually have negative feelings about being 40. I have plenty of friends who are 40, and it doesn’t seem particularly old to me…but it does seem firmly adult. Like, when I was 36 I would sometimes wonder if I was mid-thirties or late-thirties. Well, there’s no denying that 39 is the latest of the thirties. And after that, I’m just a full-on adult. Never mind that I already have a husband, a child, a career, a mortgage, and other various signals of adulthood. This is it! I’m fully in my adult life!

I do, embarrassingly, kind of assign a lot of value to my birthdays. As much as I love New Year’s resolutions, I really love a birthday goal. Having a May birthday feels, in many ways, like a resolution re-do. I’m someone who likes reflection and goal-setting and looking forward. I have a lot of journals and I just keep buying more. A birthday seems like a particularly auspicious day to really take stock of your life and figure out if you’re on the right track.

I have a history of making life-changing decisions on my birthday. In 2022, my birthday was the lowest mental health point I’ve had in recent memory. I recently looked back on my pictures from that day and saw a bouquet of flowers Cat sent me, a cake my mom made that said “Happy birthday, Kerry” in purple icing…all markers of someone who is loved! But I wasn’t in a place to feel that love. We were coming out of the pandemic and I felt extremely isolated and bad. The next day I woke up and decided I had to start exercising and socializing more.

I’m not saying exercise and socializing cured my depression…but okay, I am saying that a little bit! This isn’t a blanket statement. I’m not saying it will fix whatever problems you have in your own life. But I am saying that, for me, movement and socializing fix a good 80 percent of my problems, if not more. This is why I’m so fanatical about my workouts and why I won’t cancel my social plans, even if I don’t feel like leaving the house at that moment. I do not feel the way I did in 2022 anymore, thank God. My doctor (the one I like, not that one that tried to sell me her book) told me that regular exercise can have the same effect as an SSRI for mild depression symptoms and I truly do believe that¹. I have a full (for me, an introvert!) social life and I exercise daily, and these are two habits I will keep up forever.

I kept up the exercise habit and in 2023, shortly after my birthday, I discovered the Peloton app. The rest, as you unfortunately know, is history, if history is just me talking about how life-changing that app was for me. It makes exercise easy and fun, it features just about any kind of movement you could want, and it’s encouraging and empowering in a way I didn’t even know was possible. Do you know how many times I’ve cathartically cried during a Peloton workout? Literally too many for me to count!

In 2024, I had my last alcoholic drinks on my birthday, although I didn’t know it at the time. I’d had a nagging feeling for several months that alcohol wasn’t really helping me, and that it may have been hurting me. This might sound silly, because I was never a huge drinker. But I did love a strong cocktail, and when I was out at a party or a wedding I loved drinking. There was nothing better than the feeling of reading a book with a glass of red wine in hand (even now, typing this, I’m feeling the longing to do that again!).

But what I did not love was the way alcohol made me feel afterwards. I don’t get physical hangovers, but I do get gnarly emotional ones. Alcohol heightened my anxiety to levels that were nearly unmanageable. It made me irritable and it gave me bad dreams. I snapped at my family and hated myself. The day after drinking, I would be filled with the worst sense of dread that enveloped every part of me. Everything seemed terrible. Everyone hated me. I’d be embarrassed that I’d talked so much, or done something stupid. It just made me feel bad.

The book The Anatomy of Anxiety helped me understand how alcohol was affecting my brain. The book isn’t perfect—she repeatedly says she’s not anti-medication, but I think the rest of the text says otherwise. Also she devotes a lot of space to how hallucinogenic drugs can help anxiety, which I have mixed feelings on…like, where am I supposed to have a controlled acid experience? I am a suburban mom. Also I read too much in my abnormal psych classes about how hallucinogens can trigger schizophrenia and it’s become an irrational fear of mine. What if I accidentally take mushrooms and trigger latent schizophrenia? That being said! The explanation of how alcohol affects anxiety was very, very helpful to me and made it clear that this just wasn’t sustainable.

And so this year marked one year of absolutely no alcohol (except once I had a sip of the wine Hollis was cooking with around the holidays…I guess I have to count that if I’m being a stickler). It felt amazing to wake up on New Year’s Day with no soul-crushing dread. It feels great to know I’m always okay to drive. Now, I can blame my regular old bad personality for anything that goes wrong instead of booze.

I don’t have any intentions of judging other people for their alcohol use, but if you’ve been wondering if you should stop…let this be your sign. You don’t have to have a huge problem, or multiple DUIs, or a family-staged intervention to realize that your life could be better without it.

Ultimately, what all these birthday changes had in common is that they were things I couldn’t stop thinking about. I didn’t have to plan them out or do any brainstorming to figure out what I wanted out of those years…I just knew, and in some cases I was basically forced into changes (or else, like the Peloton app, they came into my life via divine intervention/our dearly departed United Healthcare benefits). This birthday feels auspicious because, like Sally says, I’m gonna be 40! I have one year. What is it that I want to accomplish? What do I want to look back on next May?

One thing easily came to mind: I want to be more present, and not in like a generic morning meditation way (no shade to my morning meditations, which I love). Mainly, I want to stop scrolling social media so much so I can FOCUS more on the things I love doing. I really do love Instagram, because I’m a nosy girl at heart and I always want to know what people are doing, but it’s reached a point where it’s making me feel bad about things I didn’t even know I should feel bad about. Also I keep watching the Reels :(

This is embarrassing, but I think about it all the time, so I will share this memory. In high school, Cat and I had a “would you rather” book (the things we did before the internet!) and one of the questions was “Would you rather be smarter or more beautiful?” We were like, “More beautiful! We’re smart enough!” We didn’t even have to think about it. With all respect to my former high school, we were more than smart enough to get by there. But now that I’m older and have more life experience, I feel the opposite way. I look fine. I would really rather get smarter and focus more on my writing and my hobbies.

I’m not planning on quitting Instagram totally or doing a phone breakup or anything, but I am going to put some limits on how I use my phone this summer. I will still post on Instagram when I have events or news, and I will still check in to see what my friends are posting. My first thought when I considered stepping away from Instagram was, “But how will I see Emily’s baby pictures?” I don’t know, I could probably just ask Emily to send them to me, but the point is I will still log on to see the baby pictures. I just won’t be scrolling, which is a bummer because I do love scrolling. But it’s making me feel really bad and anxious.

I’m going to fill that time by doing all the things I actually want to do that I’m not doing because I’ve decided to do a deep dive on some random person’s Instagram. I’m giving myself a summer reading list that is comprised entirely of the books I own but haven’t read (it’s a lot because I loooove being surrounded by books). I wanted some sort of film-watching project that didn’t have too much structure, so I decided to watch a set number of Criterion films. At first I thought, 52, one a week! But then I decided that I liked the sound of “40 Criterions by 40” better. This won’t be challenging, but it will require me to actually focus on it (plus I can watch some with my kid). I have other goals too (I got watercolors!) but these are my book and movie focused goals.

I also really want to spend the summer enjoying my time with my family. I’ll be writing, but I don’t have a book out to promote and I’d rather spend my time with them being present instead of worrying about something I saw online. My son is growing up so fast and I just want to be sure that I appreciate our time together.

I’ll still be on Substack because I use it very differently than Instagram. The Notes app is so bad that it’s hard to spend much time scrolling there—you’d think it would know what I like to read, but everything that pops up there is a 23 year old saying something like, “Substack is for the people who actually did the assigned reading in high school” or someone inexplicably responding to literary world drama like this is Twitter in 2015 (in this one wild and precious life? No thank you!) and seeing something like that just makes me close the app in a fit of full-body cringe.

Above all, I will continue bravely posting about movies and books here on Substack. Is the sarcasm apparent in that statement? I hope so. I love writing No One Asked and I plan to still be writing about it when I hit 40.

To end things on a good note, do you want to see what I did on my birthday? I was a little bit of a diva about the whole weekend and basically demanded to be eating something great at every moment.

Pizza at Harvest, a restaurant that is mentioned in Faking Christmas.

I told Hollis that all I wanted on my birthday was dinner at Chapman’s and he delivered. Not pictured because we already ate it: the general Tso’s cauliflower.

An almond croissant from Littleton’s that was SO good.

What I read while I ate the croissant—there are probably pastry crumbs all over these pages now.

My son bought these for me because “you love reading together.”

Stanley Tucci genuinely startled me at the Book Loft.

I know it’s insufferable to talk so much about your birthday. I know! But I am who I am. I just remembered that my Pie Quest from long ago (my early/mid-thirties) was actually inspired by a birthday, too! If you’re a birthday goal-setter, please please let me know about any goals or to-do lists you’ve given yourself. If you’re not the type of person who gives yourself homework…what’s that like? It very literally couldn’t be me.

Next week’s newsletter is going to be a weird one, so get ready. See you soon. xo

1. Disclaimer that I don’t think you should go off your SSRI based on what I’m saying here! Please don’t take this as me being anti-SSRI. I am very much PRO medication.