The Last Day of My 50s

Well, folks, this is it—the eve of my 60th birthday. I’m going out tonight with family and friends to celebrate a mutual birthday with another family friend, and tomorrow…well, that’s up to Ben and Clint.

Strangely enough, I’m not dreading the 60s, even though everything in/on your body basically falls apart. (It’s been doing that all through my 50s anyway, so whatever.) I like the idea of being wiser, even if no one takes advantage of my wisdom because they’re too busy making their own mistakes and they don’t listen. There’s so much I know now that I didn’t know even when I was 50 and thought I’d reached the pinnacle of sagacity. Like, I’m never gonna know everything. I’m never gonna come CLOSE to knowing everything. But at least now I know what I don’t know, and that’s a big advantage when you’re still trying to figure stuff out.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have all my shit together. I have yet to decide what to do with whatever time is left to me, and if I stay on my meds and do what my doctor tells me to do I should have at least another 15-20 years in me. That’s a long time to sit around waiting to die. So I need to get serious about my writing career, even though I’m absolutely terrified of putting myself out there. I mean, I do that with this blog, but bipolar blogs are a niche-market thing that almost nobody reads except for other people with bipolar disorder and maybe their friends and families (plus the occasional mental health professional).

I’ve dipped my toe into the waters over at Allnurses.com, the nursing website where I’m a longtime member. I used to write for them years ago when I was still a working nurse, but I rather thought my usefulness as a nurse-writer ended along with my career. Not so, said the top administrator, and she gave me some ideas for articles. I seized upon one of them and dashed off a 700-word piece in like an hour. It felt good to write a nursing story and flex my author muscles in a different direction. And I get paid for these…I guess I just needed a boot in the backside to give me a start.

So wish me luck as I head into a new decade, and if you’re a praying person please throw one in for me. If you listen to my son and son-in-law, they’ll tell you that we “old people” need all the prayers and good thoughts we can get so we can plague them for many years to come. Haha!