I don’t want to die. I also don’t have strong desire to live longer. Just saying.

Where did all that ambitions go — the part of me that once swore I would never live the same life as everyone else?

As my hair grows thinner, as the lines around my eyes multiply, as the once-perky chest slowly begins to sag into a frown, that fierce confidence seems to disappear with them.

My forties. That awkward age when I am no longer young, but not quite old either. I still cannot believe it. I had not even recovered from the shock of turning thirty when the first digit changed to four, and suddenly my heart felt dark and heavy, like an old abandoned house.

Someone I knew once said,

“I’ll kill myself when I turn forty.”

For some people, forty is the beginning of old age. For others, it is the end of youth. And for some, it can feel like the final chapter of a life they would rather close than continue.

In Before Midnight, Céline talks about a friend who was given nine months to live. Strangely, the first thing he felt was relief. He had enough money to survive those nine months. He had made it. At the time, I thought it was simply an unusual way of seeing things. But as I have grown older, I have found myself returning to that story more and more.

“How painful and lonely must his life have been before he could say something like that?”

And sometimes I wonder: if I knew exactly how much time I had left, could I earn only enough to survive that period, stop worrying about everything else, and simply live until it was over?

Of course, life contains many happy moments. But we spend far longer moving between worry, hurt, anxiety and sadness. Like cups of water placed along a marathon route, small moments of happiness appear just often enough to push us forward.

A sport I love. A person I love. A good day.

These small things have carried me this far. But after surviving forty years, their effect no longer feels as strong as it once did. Several times a day, I move between wanting to try again and wanting to give up. One day, I am full of hope and determination, convinced that my forties will be the beginning of an entirely new life. On another day, I wish I could close my eyes and never open them again. Then this difficult life would become nothing. I would not have to admit the humiliating possibility that I may not have what it takes to succeed like everyone else. I would not have to keep struggling to prove my worth to the world because I cannot bear to accept my own smallness.

Lately, I often want to go somewhere far away. Somewhere no one knows me. There, I want to vomit out everything I have learned in order to survive in this world.

The performance I learned so I could fit in with others. The compulsion to stay busy because I am terrified of falling behind. The endless days spent forcing myself to live at the speed and in the manner other people decided was correct.

Then, once I am empty, I want to fill myself with the things that might make me want to live again.

“What do I actually like?” “What makes me laugh?” “What would I continue doing even if no one admired me for it?”

I have one motto that has carried me this far.

“We are all going to die soon anyway.”

It does not mean I should live recklessly because death is coming. Since life will end anyway, I want to spend it doing what I genuinely want to do. It is also a kind of insurance policy against fear. Life will end anyway, so why be so afraid of failure? Why not try?

When I say this to other people, I sound as though I have reached some enlightened understanding of life. But they are still only words. I still measure my position by looking at my friends and everyone around me. I still become anxious when I think I am falling behind. I still work to climb even slightly higher than they have. Perhaps I am tired not only because life is difficult. Perhaps I am tired because I have spent too long performing a life that was never truly mine.

I am not saying that I want to die or something. I just don’t have strong desire to live longer. That is all.

“I wonder what my father would say to this disappointing version of me if he were still alive?”