Let's Make a Deal

Five days deep into the new year, with another new war and all sorts of things to fret about. Trying not to lament the negative energy swirling about, but it’s hard when the mental mindfuck of the last ten years is taking its toll on all of us. Rather than doom scroll my way through January, I sat down this morning with the intent to prioritize my priorities and start 2026 off on the right foot.

(Insert blinking cursor here.)

Feeling immense amounts of guilt that my priorities don’t include saving the world, but sometimes it’s all we can do to save ourselves. My lack of executive function makes it difficult for me to plan and stick to it. All my good intentions begin well enough, but usually devolve into discarded daily planners and screenshots I’ve saved of something life-changing that never gets looked at again. It’s the tale as old as time, but for a midlifer like myself, time is running out.

My husband and I were watching Claire Danes in The Beast in Me last night after a spectacular dinner in Austin, celebrating our 22nd wedding anniversary. I was feeling happy and content and still very much in love, but the further we delved into the show, the more upsetting it was to see Claire Danes huffing to keep up with a younger woman on the walking trail and struggling up the steps, slower than a slug on valium. Ms. Danes is only 46 (seven years younger than me), and I know as a real human person she doesn’t have those sorts of difficulties outpacing the younger women around her. But it’s how she portrays a woman of a certain age that is distressing.

Murder, She Wrote ran for 12 seasons from 1984 to 1996. Angela Lansbury was 59 when that show started, and she was very much depicted as an old coot, which now that I am striding toward that age myself seems like a slap in the face. In the current reboot of Matlock, Kathy Bates takes on the role of a tottering crime solver, but in today’s world, her age of 78 seems more in line with how older women are viewed. Vivacious. Smart. Able to use their hard-earned invisibility as an asset rather than a curse. (Andy Griffith was only 60 when the original show aired.) That’s what makes Claire Danes’ portrayal so unnerving. I am sure both the director and Ms. Danes are sprinkling in the fact that her character recently lost a small child and that she is mentally unhinged, but still. Add the way they have lit her face to look deep-lined and unhinged, and she is not the poster child for reaching menopause with grace.

Granted, if someone were to air footage of me bumbling on the stairs or trying to make it up the hill of campus to the Starbucks, you would guess I was a spry 92. Which brings me back to the new year, new you bullshit. My priorities—excluding home and family, as they are almost always number one—line up like this.

Health/Exercising > Reading/Homework > Writing > Friends > Pottery > Quilting

I have reached post-menopause in the prime of my mental life, but that’s taken a back seat to making sure I don’t die before I’m 70. For the past two years, I have been so focused on school that I haven’t made a firm commitment to exercise like I always have, but hopefully that ends this afternoon. (Hello, Texas State swimming pool.) My pottery has also taken an obsessive-level front seat to writing, and that ends today as well. While I love the physicality of making things, it is an easy distraction from the hard work of writing. Not to say one is more valuable than another, but for me, the pottery is more meditative and fun while the writing is more excruciating and necessary. There’s been a large part of me who has thought this year, “Fuck it. I’m just going to open a small pottery studio and sell local art and pot myself into old age.” (This thought usually occurs when I drive past this empty building close to my house and go into an alternate realty fugue state where I picture myself dropping out of life and staying in small town San Marcos forever, barefoot and happy, covered in mud.) But then a larger part of me remembers why I’m here and sees the clock on the wall inching closer and closer to the end of me.

While I’m not afraid to reach the end of me, there are still some things I want to do with life before I cash my final paycheck. So let’s make a deal. Let’s all of us actually reach our resolutions this year. Let’s contemplate the state of the world, do all we can to help others and uplift those who need uplifting, and manifest civic change in the best ways we know how, but let’s not let the bastards drag us down. Let’s do what we say we are going to do. Let’s meet back here in 1 year and celebrate that we got exactly where we wanted to go in 365 days.

Who’s with me?