I’m turning forty this year. Forty. What a number. It doesn’t quite have the joyful significance you’d expect those decade, milestone markers to have. It’s not fifty, a number that commands more respect, or sixty, when people look to you as a new provider of wisdom. It’s not ten, when you enter a big-kid phase and wave goodbye to the last of your single-digit years, and oh how interminable they felt! It’s not twenty, when people slowly no longer see you as a child. A popular sentiment is that it’s the new thirty, but I think that’s misleading. Thirty felt like being pushed into territory you felt unprepared but thrilled to navigate. Forty, on the other hand, feels like being pushed out of that territory and off of a cliff.

Because I live in the modern world as a modern woman with a phone fused to my hand, my brain has become addled by manifestation hotties who assure me that the reason my life feels like a garbage heap going up in flames is because I am about to LE-VEL. UP. And for the low, low price of $500, I can get access to their exclusive workbook tailor-made for guiding me through this experience, and it’s one that they definitely did not copy and paste in Canva from a different but nearly identical exclusive workbook they ripped off another person. Yes, girl! Like a mutant phoenix rising from the smoldering microplastics and forever chemicals that have molecularly bonded to my DNA and melted me into disfigurement, I will emerge as . . . something else. What a glow up.

Also according to the many social media gurus I follow, the my-world-is-falling-apart sensation that I’m experiencing is due to the fact that as I take flight as a fire golem, I’ll be propelled into a quantum leap. That’s right: These highly-photogenic individuals with a dubious grasp of physics have been telling me that I’m about to enter a new and glorious era of my life at hyperspeed. But! In order to do so, I have to shed some dead weight first. Older, useless versions of me have to be killed off so that I can enter this new phase of existence as free as a mother-fucking bird—or mutant phoenix, if we’re being precise.

That’s all well and good, but the question that remains is what iteration of me is getting the axe? They all still feel pretty essential. And that’s not to say that I can’t sense this demise coming—the relinquishing, the purging of some no-longer-needed part of me—but I have no idea what part of me it is. It’s like watching the first episode of every White Lotus season where some unidentified moron is being carted away in a coffin, with the difference being that no one here is rich. So it’s a mystery even to me. And they all feel like different facets of my personality! Every character who has died! Will it be the hotel manager who was like, “Fuck you!” and got stabbed for it? Will it be forever-out-to-lunch Jennifer Coolidge, who you were a little sad to see go, but a lot more surprised she managed to keep herself alive as long as she did? Will it be the guy who couldn’t be told anything, and that quality ended up getting him AND his TrustTheUniverse! partner shot? Who could it be?

Who is it? Who is it?

WHO IS IT???