This is 42: my wishlist for the year ahead
42 feels mid, as the kids would say, but I still have aspirations
Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and tech worker who recently moved back to my 430-person town in rural Iowa. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
I turned 42 a couple of weeks ago. Even though this year’s Virgo Season is over, I’m still in celebration mode. I’m currently in California, drinking cocktails and talking to old friends. I am also starting to reflect on what comes next.
I’m celebrating life this week, but I don’t feel celebratory about 42. Honestly, 42 feels kinda bleak? The kids would say it’s mid. Middle aged in the Middle West feels as bleh as it sounds.
Despite my best intentions, I’ve absorbed all the subtle (and not-subtle) social and physical messaging that wants me to believe I’m past my prime. The bloom is off my rose. I am no longer the young prodigy. I’m no longer the hot young thing with preternatural talent. My sleep is infinitesimally worse every year. Friends who are a year older than me are suddenly buying reading glasses, and my eyes (which have always been bad) seem on the verge of betraying me.
42 feels like it’s time to fade into middle-aged drabness. It feels like I’m supposed to accept invisibility; that I should accept that the new hot young things will not even see me at all. I should give up on being attractive, but I should also spend all my money on retinol and anti-wrinkle cream. I should stop trying. I should embrace myself as I am, but also not let that self get in the way of younger / hotter / more accomplished people. I should accept that it’s all over for me, like any other mammal who is past their peak, easily caught by predators or age.
I may be permitted to re-emerge in my seventies as a fabulous crone, but until then it’s just a couple of decades of wearing beige and watching my face collapse and not taking up too much space.
But…that’s not a script I have to follow, even though it feels like the default script I’ve been handed. And I don’t want to wait until I’m seventy to feel fabulous again.
So for 42, I’m making a list of things to do — and things to stop doing. And, I have a couple of wishes for the year ahead. Sharing it feels like a bit of navel-gazing, but maybe I’ll hold myself more accountable if I put this list out in the open and let good things come from it. And maybe this list will inspire you to make a similar list of your own.
Twenty things to do (unranked):
1. Write a fucking book. This one is number one even though nothing else is ranked. The book is starting to take shape, and I’m going to dedicate this year to finishing it.
2. And yet…give myself more grace on the days I don’t write. My beliefs on productivity and worth as a human being were formed in a toxic stewpot full of girlbosses and techbros and insanely prolific self-publishing megastars, with a heavy dash of childhood poverty and bit of Reaganesque bootstrapping ethos just to spice things up. But the girlbosses and self-publishing megastars have mostly burned out, I never liked the techbros, and bootstraps are a fraud. A lot of writing advice says to write every day, but maybe it has never worked for me? Maybe I can admit it, finally?
3. Make three new local friends. That’s almost 1% of my small town in rural Iowa, which is absurd. But for the purposes of this goal, “local” = “within thirty miles.” Still not the largest pool of people in the world, but I’m going to make a valiant effort.
4. Go to twelve museums / cultural activities. I want to get back into the practice of solo “artist’s dates” (popularized by The Artist’s Way, among others) and see what I find in the back corners of odd museums. Inspiration is everywhere, but it’s easier to find if I leave the house.
5. Install a generator. I have the soul of a doomsday prepper and a lot of climate anxiety, so I might as well indulge. It will come in handy during our occasional post-blizzard or post-tornado power outages, even if we’re lucky enough to avoid the worst of the coming apocalypse.
6. Walk. This should be easy. But most of Iowa’s roads are gravel and I have weak ankles, so I worry that I’ll break a leg and be stranded on a desolate path where no one will find my body until the buzzards start to circle. I’m also scared of dog bites — dogs roam around, unleashed and unfenced, even in town, and they aren’t all friendly. I asked someone who walks a lot to share her dog-free routes, and she gave a couple of suggestions. But she mostly told me to carry a knife and bear spray.
I don’t love riding my Peloton, but I’ve also never needed to spray Cody Rigsby in the face with bear spray, so maybe I’ll rethink this walking goal.
7. Hang some art. In my twenties and thirties, I often moved every year, and I never got around to hanging anything. But I intend to have this house for awhile, and I am happier in beautiful spaces.
8. Embrace permanence. No, nothing is permanent except death. But I prefer to avoid even the semblance of permanence in most situations, choices, etc. I want to lean into my discomfort and allow myself to start making some plans (or even allowing myself to dream!) about things that take longer than a year to accomplish. I wonder what would come of my writing and relationships if I allowed myself to commit to an idea for longer than a season?
9. Grieve. Grieve what? I don’t know. But I do know that my grandfather died over twenty years ago and his memory is an open wound. My dead family is starting to outnumber the living. I keep them all in little boxes, unacknowledged and unexamined as I carry them from place to place.
Living in Iowa and writing this Substack has unexpectedly revealed what I’ve left behind, and what I’ve failed to mourn. Maybe this is the place and time where I can properly grieve the losses I never acknowledged? Maybe it’s time to let them go?
The alternative is to keep hoarding these memories in the basement of my heart. But if my memories feel like anchors instead of roots, maybe it’s time to do something about them.
10. Clean out my basement. This isn’t a metaphor; I may need to clean out my heart basement, but I need to clean out my real basement too. Do I really need three coffeemakers? Do I really need the empty boxes for every small appliance I’ve ever bought? Do I really need decade-old clothing that my hips have long since abandoned? Do I really need a year’s supply of beans? Maybe yes to keeping the beans, but everything else needs a heavy purge.
11. Read fifty books. Junot Diaz had a great piece this week about setting intentional goals around reading and dropping into the “Slow Zone” of deep thought. It encouraged me to think about how I can be more intentional about my reading time. So the goal is not just to read fifty books, but to set more protective intentions around my reading time.
12. Find the perfect camel coat. Can I pull off camel? Will it look chic, or will I look like an actual camel (i.e. lumpy and irritable)? I don’t know. But I dream of having a camel coat and going to literary readings, and money can solve at least part of that dream.
13. Plant fruit trees. Apples, cherries, maybe peaches. Anything that soothes my inner doomsday prepper without requiring the work of weeding and watering vegetable crops.
14. Allow more play with what I write on Substack (and elsewhere). I feel like I’m developing a rhythm here, but it’s still early days. I want to give myself permission to try other kinds of posts — interviews, lists, recommendations, fiction snippets, etc. Please tell me if there’s something you want to see more of here!
15. Reframe my relationship with the internet (and especially social media). This one is complicated. In the halcyon days of Twitter, I felt more confident sharing my opinion online. I’ve always had various personal blogs and other online spaces. But since 2016, I’ve become more of a lurker. I don’t let myself have hot takes (even though I love reading them). I also don’t feel like I’m getting the best of the internet: the chance to form community with others. In the early days of my writing career, I used the internet to access new communities, and #romancelandia created some real friendships for me.
Now that I live in a people desert, it feels more important to engage again with online communities (while somehow spending less time doomscrolling).
But online communities also feel somewhat awful, and all the social media spaces are shifting. So this goal is about exploring and reframing and trying new things online. I’m hoping I’ll know my community when I see it (like porn, I guess).
16. Find a new shampoo and conditioner. I was an Aveda Smooth Infusion girl for over a decade. But my changing hair texture + Iowa’s humidity = I feel like a greaseball. Of all my small vanities, my vanity about my hair ranks at the top, and I’m not ready to give it up no matter how old I feel.
17. Fix my gazebo. Is this a first-world problem? Gazebos feel like a millionaire problem, but my gazebo is worth approximately $0. It looks nice as the main feature in my back yard, but it’s tilting crazily and doesn’t feel safe enough to use. I don’t want to be responsible for yet another collapsed, abandoned structure in town, and I don’t want to move it or put cows in it the way everyone else does with old buildings, so fixing it seems like the only option.
18. Play with color. Textiles, needlework, watercolor or something else — something that doesn’t require me to get better at my standard stick-figure sketches, but fulfills a different creative urge outside of writing.
19. Rebuild my writing community. Maybe this is part of reframing my relationship with the internet, since a lot of that community is online. Most of my community is California-based and I love staying in touch online — but I wistfully wish that I could write with others in coffee shops.
This goal requires people, and it also requires coffee shops, both of which are in short supply in Iowa.
But I want to get more engaged with writing communities in Iowa and see what’s possible in terms of building connections with other writers here.
20. Continue publishing this Substack weekly. I’ve stuck with my weekly goal for the last few months (except for last week), and I’m really enjoying it. I want to continue weekly posts, while also exploring what it looks like to build a community here. Stretch goal: consider offering a paid tier with more stories / other offerings, but I have no idea what that would look like, or whether subscribers would pay for these stories, or if I want to embrace the “charging for online content” rat race. More to come on this one.
This post is long enough for one day. My next post will be “twenty things to stop doing” + my two wishes for the year — look for it soon. And then I’ll get back to my usual stories of small town life. If you have thoughts, encouragements, discouragements (especially about the camel coat), or anything else, please comment!
And if you’re feeling mid about aging, come sit next to me and tell me all about it. We can rage together.
Until next time,
Sara
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So much of this hits home for a fellow 42. Oh the sleep. Keep the beans and install that generator!!
A camel coat! 😍 It would look fabulous. The subscription/pay for additional content may be a bit of a rat race. But it can also be a means of people supporting you. Thanks for sharing these thoughtful goals. Inspired more reflection for me