While I was driving to pick up my daughter from school today, the DJs on the radio were talking about some study that said age 47 is the peak of a person’s happiness.

Hey, I’m 47! I think… I forget sometimes.

As I was being detoured by Google Maps to avoid a giant crash and navigating traffic backups, while listening to my phone buzz in the cupholder with incessant work requests, and generally feeling down about life because that is my general state of being at the moment… some person on the radio has the audacity to tell me this is the happiest I will ever be?

So far, age 47 has been one of the shittiest ages.

I don’t know that it’s exactly because the needle has moved into the position of 47 that causes this. And I don’t see it improving any as I hit 48 later this year. It’s definitely a multi-factorial equation with all of the variables combining to make this very complex.

(My daughter has been doing algebra this year, so I’ve been relearning algebra to help with homework. Not happiness.)

Factors not contributing to happiness:

• My daughter turned 13 shortly after I turned 47, and some days it feels like she could send me off to the incinerator with just a stray glance. It’s upsetting! She wants more independence, but doesn’t want it in the ways I’d like her to take it on. Like cleaning or preparing meals. And it makes me sad and lonely.
• My husband is on a countdown to losing his job. It’s a very volatile and unpredictable countdown. But his company is trying to sell everything off and probably maybe definitely sometime this year I will have to be the sole income for our family. Yet again… if I wasn’t carrying so much of all the other mental load it wouldn’t be as frustrating.
• Parenting is brutal. I don’t think I’m cut out for this gig. How can you have someone you love so much and worry that you’re ruining things for them every single day? And how are you supposed to give up your life for this human in their early years, when the endgame is to send them off to be independent and then you no longer have any sense of self when that time comes? This is a cruel system.
• I must be perimenopausal… because despite getting my thyroid meds feeling like they’re more dialed in now, I feel like a walking disaster. I forget common words that I have known since I was a toddler. I mix up words in meetings and sound like a dumbass. My anxiety is sky-high, off-the-charts. I feel like I want to die every single month and that has become the indicator that my period is about to start. When you start to contemplate disappearing from the earth and that is the clue that your body is going to start bleeding diabolically, it’s kind of bleak. I think this phase is probably making those previous bulletpoints feel harder.

I have an appointment to discuss possible hormone treatment. I don’t know what that will entail. Part of me questions if that is actually the answer. I very much feel like a commodity in this whole “perimenopausal woman market” and I don’t want to feel like I got suckered into buying the Kool-Aid. But I also cannot continue on in this same way for much longer. Being on the verge of tears or a mental breakdown and trying to not “crash out” 99% of the time is hard.

The other 1% of time I am asleep.

Oh yeah… sleep is crap these days too. I can’t stay asleep and usually start to see every passing 10 minutes from 3 am until I finally just get up somewhere in the 5:00 hour.

But right now, I feel like I would love to just relive the years of 2015-2019 on repeat. My child was old enough to not need diapers, but she was full of joy and exuberance and innocence. I was running endurance events fairly often still. And work hadn’t become an untenable amount of demands or legislation and I received recognition for what I did. Life was hard, but it didn’t feel pointless or impossible. Maybe that was peak happiness. Ages 37-41 was the peak.

I did try to look up information on that 47 is peak happiness nonsense. I found a few articles posted in the past few days that seem to reference this idea. But nothing felt super trustworthy or groundbreaking. Or definitive as the final source.

Ironically, I also found articles from a couple years to several years back that say 47 is peak misery.

It’s kind of like fashion, it’s one thing and then it’s the other… but it will change and you can’t plan on any one way to be the way you expect.

It’s exhausting, but it’s supposed to be uphill from somewhere around now… but then, I live in our current world. So maybe not.