40-year crisis: it exists and it can be difficult

Forty years old. It’s increasingly rare to be able to say that being 40 isn’t easy. I had mine for a year and every time I tried to tell someone that I was feeling a bit in crisis for this new age, I was answered: “No, come on, exaggerated”, “Then you will have the crisis of 50 !», «What a crisis, 40 is a wonderful age, it feels great». And again: «Look at you, you are beautiful», «At 40 I have never been better, I am finally in harmony with my body». Now, net of everything that is certainly true about the awareness that is acquired over time, can we say that it is not easy at all, at least for many, to get to it? Can we say that at 40 you also feel bad? Are you starting to give more importance to the face that changes with your body? Are there many discussions?

The narration that is made of this age is often sweetened and only reassuring. I refer to the recent case of Ainett Stephens who responded kindly to Pino Insegno explaining that she feels better at 40 than when she was 20 but the point, in that case, was another: stop defining women’s abilities in based on their age? With the passing years, do we become more or less performing for society? It depends (again and unfortunately) on the work you do. Not from how you are and what your specificities are.

Returning to the bewilderment of my 40 years, I remember perfectly how I felt already months before arriving at my birthday. I didn’t want it to come, I didn’t want to have those years. A round figure, those famous “doors” that you carry them to the end because after that there are directly the “hundred”. But how much better was it to stay in the thirties? I repeated it to myself for a long time and I still haven’t made peace with it. In the end, I decided to celebrate my forty anyway, with a big party by the sea, together with the people I love the most, with my family. But I did it more so as not to have to think that I had made them look like nothing had happened, because deep down it’s not like that. These 40 years have a specific weight for me. Especially now that they have become 41.

I’m not ashamed to say that the passing of time scares me, that I often think about the fact that in less than ten years I will be 50, my son will be a teenager and I ask myself: will he see me as old? Probably yes, sometimes he already tells me this today when he looks at my hands and says: “Mom, can you see the veins in your hands because you’re big?”. But it’s not just a question of aesthetics, it’s the awareness that the piece of life together is always reduced a little more.

I decided to talk to my psychotherapist about it because I needed to normalize this step. Psychology emphasizes this in various ways: 40 is like a middle ground. A soap bubble within which to suffer from anxiety and depression is more likely than before. It is the first real midlife crisis. And I thought it was useful to write about it for this very reason. How many and how many of us, men included, feel this way and don’t say it because the narrative that is made of the increasing years is often one-sided? Of course, wrinkles say a lot about us, they are precious life companions. They taught us with elegance and passion Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren, among others. Of course, over time you learn to live better, you overcome or accept the limits of your character, you feel more satisfied but you are also afraid. To find out late about what you dreamed of being when you grew up, for example.

For me, 40 was the age in which I struggled to ask myself questions: about whether or not I am a good mother, about my career, about my romantic relationship, about my relationships with my family, about my origins, about the choices done and those postponed. On the goals achieved and those left pending. And I started revising in my mind Nanni Moretti who in his film April takes the yardstick and measures the years he has left to live.

I started thinking that maybe I should really move to Copenhagen with my family, that we would be fine in Spain too. I began to tell myself that perhaps I hadn’t given enough at work. I thought I should immediately buy a house, dye my hair, take the gym seriously and stop looking in disappointment at those who greet me with “ma’am”.

I was especially sick when I saw for the first time the look of someone who says with conviction that a 40 years you are on the verge of becoming a mother and so it was almost too late for me too to give a brother or sister to my son. Just at that moment when certainties were so few, I felt the weight of not really being free in that choice: because, to have a child at 40, you also have to be able to afford it. In my case both economically, since I would have done it with assisted fertilization, but also professionally speaking: I should have stopped for several months right now when instead the professional path I have undertaken says that you should push harder.

It was the moment I subconsciously told myself I had to be enough, for everything. And it wasn’t easy. I went into a crisis: maybe I’m still in a crisis but I’ve chosen to start saying it, to talk about it. Because even in this case, sharing is important. That together, the years weigh less. Crises don’t come just to be pain, they can make us reborn.

How did you live (or are you living) your 40 years?

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