It’s May. That means I’ve reached the month of my 40th birthday and I’m in the mood to celebrate. It’s not my birthday until the end of the month, but the celebrations will, I hope, last for a while.
So often I see/hear people lamenting the ageing process or expressing their terror or fear of turning a new number, especially if it begins with a different digit and ends in a 0.
But I don’t feel that way. There’s no terror, there’s no fear. I’m excited to see what this new decade brings for me: the challenges, the people, the experiences. They are all part of the process we call life. They make us wiser and stronger.
Sure, when I was 20 I had better skin and more energy, but I was a prolific people pleaser, unsure of what I truly wanted. I was constantly focused on achieving the next thing and ignoring the process. These days I see things differently.
Take my garden, for example. Every year it goes through a process; the cycle of growing. Yes, the flowers on my roses will look and smell beautiful when they emerge, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in them for the other 11 months of the year.
Right now they are full of buds, poised and ready to emerge. A few months back they were delicate, deep red shoots and over the winter they were bare sticks. I take notice of all of these parts of the process. Each is as important as the other.
It’s the same with my work. I thrive on the learning, the reflection, the constant need to adapt and shift. I wrote last week about giving myself permission to fully merge my creative self with Hannah the interior designer. It struck a chord with many of you and I loved reading and responding to your comments. You lovely readers backed up everything I was feeling.
This past week I’ve been showing up in full technicolour. Not as the polished version of myself I think I should present, but as me. My interests and authentic thoughts are breaking through even further into my work and I’m already starting to feel the benefits of that. I feel more free and less constrained and more able to deliver what my clients need.
That said, I’m still not making enough money from interior design work or writing in order for me to give up teaching, but having that goal in my mind is spurring me on and it’s part of the process.
Success (whatever that might mean to you) doesn’t happen overnight. We have to make mistakes and take the wrong turn from time to time in order to realise where we need to go next.
I can’t tell you how many iterations my website has seen in the two years it has been in existence. I am constantly tweaking the wording or revising a service. It’s all part of my process. It would have been impossible for me to have known what would work best on day 1 of launching it, but I did need to get something out there.
Once something is out there we can amend it, edit it, re-word it. We can’t do that if nothing exists. It sounds simple and obvious, but how many times have you not done something because you didn’t feel like it was perfect enough to put it out into the world? That’s certainly been me in the past.
My website will never be finished. Whilst I am alive, I will never be finished.
We are all a wonderful work in progress and that is more than ok.
"It sounds simple and obvious, but how many times have you not done something because you didn’t feel like it was perfect enough to put it out into the world?" GAH 🙈
Beautiful letter Hannah. Enjoy your birthday season!
Happy early birthday, Hannah!
It's funny how we view 'bigger birthdays' through the lens of what society may present to us - how we 'should' feel, or 'should' behave and so on. But and as you highlight, there will be new challenges, new people, and experiences to learn from, and these can be exciting! Especially when we begin to care a little less about what other people think of us.