When the Mirror Tilts

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Somewhere in my thirties, the mirror tilted.

Not all at once.

There was no singular betrayal—just a subtle shifting of the light.

A different kind of tiredness bloomed behind my eyes, like dusk seeping in around the edges of a long day. My skin felt less like armour and more like paper.

I cried at birdsong.

I forgot people’s names.

I started wondering if I knew my own.

No one warns you how existential your thirties can be. There are brochures for adolescence, leaflets for pregnancy, blog posts about burnout. But not much prepares you for this middle place: where the girl is still in there, whispering, and the woman is walking ahead of you with steadier steps, not waiting for you to catch up.

Some mornings I look in the mirror and see both at once.

She—the girl—is still hopeful. A little bruised, maybe. But wide-eyed and full of plans.

And the woman?

She’s tired of plans.

She wants to live more slowly.

She wants a warm brew and a quiet house where no one needs her for a few hours.

The two of them don’t always get along.

There’s a grief that lives in this age, but it’s not loud.

It doesn’t throw plates.

It sits in corners.

It waits politely.

It’s the grief of what didn’t happen. The selves you didn’t become. The babies you didn’t have—or the ones who grew up too fast. The careers you flirted with. The cities you never moved to.

It’s a kind of haunted feeling, not of regret exactly, but of paths not taken—and knowing now, with a thudding certainty, that some of them are closed for good.

I used to believe life was linear.

You grow up, you build, you arrive.

But these days I think life is more like a spiral.

You circle back to old versions of yourself, see them in a new light, gather them like wild herbs and carry them forward.

The past isn’t gone.

It just changes temperature.

I can feel it in my bones. They ache differently now. There are days when my body forgets how to be smooth—emotionally and physically. The moods roll in like sea fog, thick and irrational.

There are no clean lines in this season.

It is all thresholds.

One foot in youth, one in middle age.

One eye looking back, the other squinting into the murk ahead.

And then there’s the rage. No one warns you about the rage.

Not loud, not always.

But a heat that coils under the skin.

A kind of private rebellion against all the times you smiled when you wanted to speak. Against the thousand small erasures of womanhood.

Against the times you didn’t listen to your own voice.

I suppose this is what they call becoming. But it feels more like unbecoming, some days. Like undoing a plait and watching all the strands tumble out—kinked, wild, unsure where they belong.

I am still in the thick of it.

Still folding laundry with tears in my eyes.

Still standing in fields talking to God, or to nobody, or to him.

Still holding both grief and beauty in the same cracked teacup.

But I think something is forming.

Something quieter than ambition.

Something steadier than desire.

Maybe it’s wisdom.

Maybe it’s just survival, softened into prose.

All I know is this: I am not who I was.

And I am not yet who I will be.

And somewhere between the two,

I have finally learned how to sit still.