The Monster at the End of This Book

I did it, folks. I’m 45.

This whole year I’ve been holding my breath. And today, I take a big exhale.

You know when we all went to bed December 31st, 1999 not knowing what would happen at midnight? And we all woke up, January 1st, 2000, and were like, well, that was a whole lot of hulabaloo for nothing?

Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel today.

I spent so much of this past year being anxious. If I’m being honest, I spent a whole lot of the years before that being anxious too. And for what? Here I am. At 45. I have arrived. And I’m still here.

There was a book I used to read when I was a kid – it featured Grover from Sesame Street and it was called “The Monster At The End of This Book.” For the whole book, Grover begged the reader not to turn the page, not to bring him closer to meeting the monster at the end of the book. I gleefully turned each page, waiting to see what would happen. When we finally arrived at the end, Grover realized that HE was the monster at the end of the book and that all that worry, all that anxiety, was for nothing.

I didn’t realize it as a little kid, but it was a very wise story.

I woke up this morning, and well, it was a January 1st, 2000 kind of moment. Nothing had changed. I still have bills to pay, work to finish, and weight to lose. Not that I wanted a climactic ending, where I would blow to bits at 11:59 pm on December 31st, per se, but everything just feels so… ordinary.

For this entire year of 44, I have been worried. I have dreamt up stories in my head about how this year would be my last. Every plane trip. Every headache. Every weird pain that sent me spiraling to Google at 2 AM. I woke up this morning and I’m still here. Nothing has changed.

And that realization brought me right back to Grover.

Here I am at the end of the book and… the monster wasn’t death. IT WAS ME.

My anxiety. My inability to be present because I was so busy catastrophizing. For the last 365 days, I have treated this year like it might be my last. I was holding my breath all year, waiting for something terrible to happen.

I read a book this summer called “Don’t Believe Everything You Think” by Joseph Nguyen. The funny thing is that I read it when I was in the throes of my 44th year existential crisis. And I often used his technique when I would think about the stupid thing I just said or the uncomfortable interaction I just had with my boss.

But I never connected Nguyen’s advice with the larger macro thing I was thinking all year, which was: I’m going to die.

That is the thing I shouldn’t have believed.

Or maybe not that I’m NOT going to die eventually – we all are. But that it was happening imminently. That 44 was the expiration date stamped on my forehead. That I was living on borrowed time.

At 45, maybe the work is learning to get out of my own way.

I can’t stop time. I can’t control when my book ends. Someone else is turning the pages whether I like it or not. But I can stop begging it not to turn the page. I can stop white-knuckling my way through each chapter. Maybe 45 is about finally relaxing into the story, loosening the reins I’m not actually holding in the first place.

Because here’s what hit me this morning, as I crossed the threshold into 45:

My mother never got to 45. She never got to experience life with me as a teenager. She never met my husband. She never knew her grandchildren. She never got to watch her kids become adults or worry about sun spots or wrinkles.

She just… didn’t get here.

And I did. I am here.

Every day from here on out is uncharted territory. Years my mother never lived. Experiences she never had. I don’t know what to do with that information yet. I don’t know how to live these bonus years in a way that honors her memory without the pressure of making every moment profound.

But I know this: spending the next year – or the next decade, G-d willing – catastrophizing about when it will end isn’t the answer. Being anxious didn’t keep me safe during 44.

I think about what my mother would want for me, if she could see me now. Would she want me obsessing over my mortality? Watching my kids through a lens of fear? Living like every moment might be my last?

Or would she want me to just… live?

To make dinner and complain about the shoes in the front hallway and laugh at stupid things and get annoyed when my kids don’t walk the dogs and stay up too late watching Emily in Paris and eat the gluten-free donuts even though they’ll make me gain five pounds?

I think she’d want the second one. To live, love, and laugh. But seriously. Not in a Home-Goods wall art kind of way.

So here’s to 45. The year after the year I thought would kill me. The age my mother never reached. The bonus round I didn’t think I’d get.

I don’t have this figured out. I’ll probably still catastrophize sometimes. I’ll probably still check Life360 obsessively and worry about plane crashes and Google every weird symptom in me, my children, and even my dogs.

But maybe – just maybe – I can also relax into the story a little bit. Trust that someone else is turning the pages. Stop being my own monster. Know that I am not in control.

Because as Grover taught me all those years ago: sometimes the thing you’re most afraid of is just yourself, working yourself up over nothing.

And at the end of the book?

You’re still here.

Happy birthday to me. I’m 45. And I made it.