Forty at 40 🎂

A bunch of things I wish I'd known about myself at 20.

Today is my 40th birthday 🎈

I’m celebrating it in France with my husband, in a way that befits all of the things I love.

Over the past weeks I’ve been adding to a list of notes on things I have discovered about life and myself in my 40 years of existence. Many of these would have been very useful to have known 20 years ago, but I guess that’s the point. I’m excited to find out what I might learn about myself in the decades (hopefully) to come. Here goes.

1. Everything merges: work, life, creativity. I don’t want to partition my life. I say this after years of being a relatively closed book to my work colleagues.

2. I still love to write with a fountain pen and coloured ink despite it being 22 years since I left school. I currently have a beautiful turquoise Lamy with green ink. It makes me smile every time I write with it, so I do that as often as I can.

3. It’s okay to have several books on the go at once, and if I’m not enjoying something there’s no need to finish it.

4. I really dislike bucket lists. I go with the flow. Always have, always will.

5. Big birthdays don’t have to be celebrated with grand flashy gestures. I sacked off looking for a swanky hotel and instead found a rural French retreat which was much more me.

6. I’m 100% an early bird. I love the quiet of the early morning, the way tea tastes at this time of day, and how productive I feel. Conversely, by 3pm my concentration dips and I just want to chill. (Last week on Wednesday afternoon, I fell asleep around this time on the sofa in our extension only to be woken half an hour later by next door’s window cleaner climbing on their roof to get to the skylights. He definitely saw me, and who cares what he thought?)

7. It’s ok to leave an event (politely) if it doesn’t feel quite right. Especially when it’s taking up valuable time that could be spent doing something else. E.g. writing

8. Time is more precious to me than money.

9. I don’t want to work for other people any more. I want to be 100% my own boss. I just have to figure out how to make this happen.

10. Retirement as my parents’ generation know it is looking increasingly unlikely for me, so I need my work to be sustainable and spacious so I can keep doing it for a lot longer.

11. Living in London is a gift I must continue to exploit: art, music, theatre, people, food…it’s all on my doorstep and doesn’t have to be super expensive when approached creatively. I wrote a piece with some London recommendations here.

12. People pleasing is not good. I repeat, people pleasing is not good!

13. Having my own office/writing studio makes me very, very happy. I’ve got more plans for this space including adding a large pin board and a comfy chair for reading.

14. I want to write. More than ever before. I am so excited for the 5-day non-fiction writing retreat I’m booked onto in July and what it reveals for me.

15. I adore plants. If I could revisit my 20-year old self, I would tell her to pay more attention to this. I spent the majority of a recent walk with my husband excitedly pointing out every single wildflower I saw. I’m not sure he shared the excitement, but he humoured me!

16. Putting a tiny pond in my garden has been a revelation. I wish I’d done it years ago.

17. It doesn’t matter what my body/face looks like, I will always think it looked better five years ago. So it’s better to think in terms of how me in 5 years will think about me now. Are you still with me?

18. I am an introvert. I didn’t know this at 20, but it does make a lot of sense as to why I didn’t want to party all the time back then.

19. Being an introvert doesn’t mean I don’t like spending time with people. They just have to be the right people.

20. To accept and love yourself, you really have to look at yourself deeply. The more you look, listen and take note, the more easily the acceptance comes.

21. I really like swimming but don’t do it enough. I’ll be spending a week in Cornwall in July and I plan to do lots of sea swimming then.

22. Food and wine are some of the greatest pleasures in life. I never want to be someone who thinks a protein shake is lunch, even if that means my waistline has a good wobble to it. (which it does)

23. I am very, very particular about how I take my tea. Yorkshire tea, strong, good slug of semi-skimmed milk, no sugar. Tea is life. Especially when writing.

24. Walking in the countryside with my husband (especially in France) is the best way to clear the mind.

25. If I have an inkling of an idea, I should run with it. Those whisperings that won’t go away have, so far, turned out to be the really good ones.

26. Making friends gets harder as you get older, especially when you don’t have kids, but writing has opened up a wonderful community of people I consider to be my friends. I hope this network of ‘my people’ will continue to grow over the coming years.

27. Learning is a lifelong pursuit. I loved it when I was a child 🤓, and I love it now. I especially wish my 17-year old self had known this in relation to learning French. I gave it up after AS level because it was my lowest grade, even though I loved it.

28. I thrive on creative projects. I always need to have something on the go, and it doesn’t matter if the outcome is ‘good’ or not. Drawing, painting, making pottery, sewing… I enjoy all of these things and enjoy reflecting on my process. Something I would never have done 20 years ago.

29. My musical training helps my writing. I studied music and composition at university. For a while I tried to be a freelance composer, but I gave up because it was hard (shock). But, I realise now that this was excellent training for my writing. Writing music is not unlike writing words, except that music is abstract. I wasn’t writing songs, I was writing orchestral music, and I had to hear the sounds in my head, imagining how all of the sounds would come together long before hearing it in reality. With hindsight, I can see that the abstract nature of this process was the part that wasn’t right for me. The making something, the writing, was for me. I just needed to find it in a different form.

30. I’m addicted to my phone. Since starting my own business I’ve become more obsessed than ever with stats and metrics. I can’t help it. As a birthday gift to myself, I’m going to buy a manual alarm clock so that I can charge my phone downstairs overnight and not reach for it immediately as soon as I wake up. It might be a start.

31. I love spending time with my husband. We’ve been together for over 20 years and I still feel the same way about him now as I did back then 🧡. I’m very lucky to have that, I know.

32. Colourful things make me happy. I always want to incorporate colour into design schemes I work on, I love to have brightly coloured nails (I have this green flash home gel kit), I’m increasingly drawn to clothes with colourful patterns. Colour is life.

33. Leaving my old job and switching up the way I work back in 2023 was the best thing I ever did.

34. Part-time jobs are underrated. I know that not everyone can make it work, but I would always recommend exploring the option if you’re feeling unhappy in your work.

35. Writing helps me to deal with how I feel. I wish I knew that when I was younger. I do have some journals from when I was at music college in my early 20s, but other than that I never wrote. I believed it was for people studying English 😆, rather than understanding that all of us can write. It doesn’t have to be for other people to read.

36. Comfortable shoes are life. Gone are the days when I would squeeze my feet into pointed toes or heels. It’s comfy flats all the way, and I recently treated myself to these beauties for the summer. Who says comfortable can’t be fun?

37. France is my absolute happy place. I’m writing this from a lovely terrace in Burgundy whilst sipping a negroni and eating crisps. Who doesn’t bring a pre-mixed cocktail with them on holiday?!

38. I love artichokes. They’re on the birthday menu ce soir.

39. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. And that’s ok, even if I am technically now *grown up*. Maybe I’ll never know.

40. I’m very grateful for everything I have, the people around me and the 40 excellent years I’ve been lucky enough to live so far. Here’s to whatever the future brings 🥂

There we go! I love a bit of reflection, and a big birthday felt like the perfect time for it.

We’re off to spend the day in Beaune and then will return to our chic holiday home for dinner cooked by my personal chef (husband)🧡

Thank you for being here, for reading and for your kindness and friendship. It means a great deal.

Wishing you a lovely weekend ahead.

Hannah x

p.s. I’ve included a few highlights from this week’s very happy trip to Burgundy below.