Where did you think you'd be when you hit Mid?
Those lists Gen X made, the ones of things we wanted by 20, 30, 40, we scribbled them on actual paper rather than in notes apps, at the back of notebooks, in diaries with locks, in letters to our closest people.
And now we are here in the middle of our lives with more, with less, with everything different.
I found one of those lists recently, when I was visiting my parents' home, rifling through the past, looking for photos of my father's 80th birthday party.
I wrote it when I was 20. I had already left home and moved from the big city I grew up in to the bigger city of my childhood dreams — London. And my sights were set on an even bigger one.
Future me was going to live in New York City. The life I wanted was one of shoulder pads and magazine meetings in gleaming skyscrapers, of writerly brownstones with stoops, cocktail parties and dive bars.
Watch: Hosted by Holly Wainwright, MID is a podcast that goes deep on self-care with zero shame. Post continues after video.
I blame the magazines I read obsessively as a teen; I knew they were all made there. And all the Norah Ephron movies with their photogenic autumnal twinkly streetscapes, and all that New Journalism I devoured, from the court of Tina Brown...
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