I turned fifty-five today.
There was no dramatic reveal, no trumpet blast, no sudden wisdom descending like a clean sentence. I woke up the same way I’ve woken up for years now—aware of my body before my thoughts, aware of time before ambition. My knees negotiated with the floor. My breath found its rhythm. The day arrived without asking what I planned to do with it.
Fifty-five is not a milestone people rush to commemorate. It doesn’t come with cultural fireworks. It isn’t round or shiny or Instagrammable. But it has weight. The good kind. The kind that tells you something has been carried long enough to have shape.
When I was younger, age felt like a ladder. Every rung was upward. You climbed, you proved, you accumulated. You were always becoming. At fifty-five, the ladder dissolves. What remains is a ground you know how to stand on.
I no longer confuse urgency with importance. I’ve learned that not every invitation deserves a yes, and not every silence needs filling. I’ve learned that some friendships expire not because of betrayal, but because they’ve completed their work in your life. I’ve also learned that new friendships can still surprise you—quietly, without the drama of youth, with a steadiness that feels earned rather than intoxicating.
There is grief at this age, of course. Grief for bodies that no longer move the way they once did. Grief for versions of yourself that believed love would be simpler, careers would be linear, justice would be swift. Grief for people you thought would always be there. Grief for the countries—inner and outer—you hoped would heal faster than they did.
But fifty-five is also the age where grief no longer feels like failure. It feels like evidence. Proof that you loved, invested, believed. Proof that you were not careful in the ways that keep a life small.
What surprises me most is how desire has changed. It hasn’t disappeared. It’s refined itself. I want fewer things now, but I want them more honestly. I want time that isn’t borrowed from sleep. Conversations that don’t perform. Work that doesn’t ask me to fracture myself into marketable pieces. Love that doesn’t require me to audition for permanence.
As a writer, fifty-five feels quietly radical. I am no longer writing to be discovered. I am writing because I know what silence costs. I know what happens when stories are postponed, when voices are disciplined into politeness, when truth waits for permission that never comes.
I trust my sentences more now. I trust my instincts. I trust revision. I trust that not everything needs to be explained, and that clarity is not the enemy of depth. I am less interested in impressing and more committed to telling the truth cleanly—even when that truth is uncomfortable, even when it resists neat endings.
There is a tenderness that arrives around this age, too. Toward younger selves. Toward people still scrambling for certainty. Toward mistakes that once felt catastrophic and now feel instructive. I don’t need to punish my past anymore. It has already taught me what it could.
Turning fifty-five, I feel closer to the essential questions and less distracted by their decorations. Who do I show up for? What do I refuse to carry anymore? What am I willing to protect—my time, my body, my attention, my joy?
This birthday doesn’t ask for reinvention. It asks for alignment.
So today, I am not making grand resolutions. I am making quieter commitments: to keep writing toward what scares me, to love without bargaining, to rest without apology, to let some doors stay closed, to greet the future without pretending I control it.
Fifty-five is not about becoming new.
It’s about becoming true.
And that feels like a birthday worth keeping.
Renato Gandia 