I turned forty in February 2024. I am forty-two now. Between those two birthdays my body, which had previously been a thing that worked quietly in the background of my life, became a thing that walked into the kitchen, sat down at the table, and started talking.
I am writing the things down because I think the writing-down is, by itself, part of what the body is asking for.
1. My knees stopped pretending I was still twenty-five.
Specifically, my left knee, on stairs, going down, in the morning. It does not hurt, exactly. It announces itself. It says: I am here. I am the joint you have been treating as a permanent condition. I am not a permanent condition. I am a structure made of cartilage and ligament and meniscus, all of which have wear curves, none of which were ever yours to spend freely. I have started doing the exercises the physical therapist gave me. Most days. The knee, when I do, gets quieter. The body's first message was, in retrospect, the easiest one.
2. My back went out the week my dad got his diagnosis.
Not the day. The week. Six days, I think. Tuesday I got the call from my mother. The following Monday I bent down to pick up a sock and could not stand back up for forty minutes. The orthopedist found a small disc bulge that was, by his account, probably old. The bulge had been there. The week the bulge became a sentence in my back was not a coincidence. My back was reading the news faster than my conscious mind was. I have, in the year since, gotten more comfortable believing this.
3. I started waking up at 4 a.m. with my fists clenched.
Not every night. Maybe twice a week. I would wake up and notice that my hands were closed. I would, the first few times, open them with my other hand because the muscles had been clenched long enough that I had to consciously unfold them. I do not know, even now, what I was dreaming about when this happened. I know that, on the nights it happened, the day before had usually contained something I had not let myself name — a tense conversation at work, a small fight with my wife, a feeling I had pushed past in the afternoon. The hands were storing what I had refused. They opened, slowly, over months, once I started naming the afternoon thing the same night.
4. My eyes started watering at things I had previously laughed at.
A diaper commercial. A wedding speech I overheard in a restaurant. A high school basketball game on TV that I had no investment in. The crying, when it started, was not in my conscious control. It just arrived. I would notice my eyes were wet. I would, the first few months, wipe them quickly and pretend not to have noticed. Around forty-one I stopped pretending. The body wanted to cry at the diaper commercial. The body had wanted to cry at lots of things over the previous twenty years and had been overridden. The crying is, I now believe, decades' worth of suppressed tears being released by a nervous system that has, somewhere around forty, decided it cannot afford to keep holding them. I have, on my wife's recommendation, stopped fighting it.
5. My stomach started telling me whether I should take a meeting.
Within forty-eight hours of a calendar invite, my stomach now produces a small reading. Tightening or settling. The tightening is, in my emerging vocabulary, my body's no. The settling is its yes. I have, in the eighteen months I have been paying attention, declined three meetings I would previously have taken. None of the three has come back to bite me. Two of them, in retrospect, would have been mistakes. The stomach was, in some pre-cognitive way, parsing information I had not yet consciously processed.
6. My sex life became a barometer of my emotional life, in a way it had not previously been.
At twenty-five, sex was sex. At forty, sex is a real-time reading of how present I am in my own body. On the days I am dissociated, I cannot fully arrive in bed. On the days I have been present, I can. My wife, who has known me for fifteen years, noticed this before I did. She did not, in her wisdom, weaponize it. She named it. The naming made it a thing we could talk about. The talking made it a thing I could attend to. The attending, slowly, has made the sex better than it has ever been, on the days I do it.
7. My hangovers became messages.
At thirty-five, a hangover was a tax on a fun night. At forty, a hangover is a letter from my liver. The letter is, depending on the night, addressed to different recipients. You drank because you were anxious about the meeting tomorrow. You drank because your father is not getting better. You drank because you do not, on Sundays, know what to do with the slowness. The liver, in retrospect, was always sending letters. They just used to be written in pencil. Now they are in ink. I am drinking less. The letters are getting quieter. The Sundays are getting easier.
8. My posture started telling people my mood before I did.
My wife knows my day from the doorway. The first three seconds of my walking in. She reads my shoulders, my jaw, the angle of my head. She reads it accurately. I have, in eighteen months, stopped trying to perform a different posture for her benefit. The performance, it turns out, was costing energy I did not have, and was not, in any case, fooling her. The body, when she opens the door, is already telling the truth. I am, slowly, learning to let it.
9. My need for sleep became an honest need rather than a negotiable variable.
At thirty-two, I could sleep five hours and function. At forty, if I sleep less than seven, my whole system runs noticeably worse. I am irritable. I make worse decisions. My back is tighter. My mood is grayer. I have, with some grief, accepted that sleep is no longer a thing I can short. The body has set a floor. The floor is non-negotiable in a way it used to be. I have stopped trying to negotiate. The negotiation always cost more than the sleep would have.
10. My desire to be touched, non-sexually, by my friends, became audible.
This one surprised me. I had, for forty years, lived inside an American male friendship culture that involves almost no physical touch between adult male friends. I had not, in those forty years, registered missing it. Around forty-one, I started noticing, in my body, a small clear hunger when I hugged a male friend at an airport. The hug, ten seconds of male contact, was registering as a meal. I had been malnourished for decades and had not, until recently, had the vocabulary to say so. I now hug my friends longer. They have not, in any case, objected.
11. My grief for living people became a permanent occupant.
My father is alive. My mother is alive. Most of my friends are alive. And yet, since forty, I am, by some new metric, in a slow continuous low-grade grief for them, because I have begun to register, in my body, that they are aging on a runway with a visible end. The anticipatory grief for living people is, in my forties, a thing my body delivers without my asking. I have, in the year since I recognized it, stopped trying to suppress it. The grief is, in fact, what intimacy with the people I love looks like in my forties. The suppression was costing me access to them in the present.
12. My capacity to be alone with myself stopped being a skill and started being a need.
At thirty, alone time was something I could take or leave. At forty-two, if I do not have at least three hours a week of complete uninterrupted solitude — preferably outside, preferably with my phone off — my entire system degrades. I am, by the standards of the twenties version of myself, a much less social man. I am, by my own internal report, a much more present one when I am with people. The trade is fine. I would not return to the previous arrangement.
I am forty-two. The list is, I am sure, going to keep growing. I will write a second installment, probably, at fifty. I am told, by older men I trust, that the list at fifty contains items the forty version of me cannot fully anticipate. I believe them.
What I want to say, for any man in his thirties who is reading this: pay attention to the small messages now. The body, in its forties, gets louder about things it was, in its thirties, willing to mention only in a whisper. The men who do best in their forties are, in my limited observation, the men who started transcribing the whispers in their thirties. The men who do worst are the men whose forties body has to shout, slip a disc, and arrive in the kitchen with all twelve sentences at once.
You can, in some real measure, decide which kind of forties you have. The decision is whether to listen now, while the body is still using a quiet voice.
If you are in your forties and the body has started arriving in your kitchen, the midlife stage page and the forties career change page have specific resources. The journal prompts tool has a section for body-tracking that this list was, in part, generated through. If something on this list is loud enough that you have been postponing the doctor, the "when he won't go to the doctor" walkthrough was written for exactly that postponement.