I am not twenty-five. Nowhere near.

Try twice that.

Or so.

Still, in a recent Zoom meeting, a woman I had just met laughed when I said I had completed an MFA program nearly twenty years ago. She said she thought I was twenty-five.

I wanted to feel flattered … although we all know the vagaries of Zoom video quality, right? But when I woke up the next morning, I felt off, as if my psyche had gotten stuck overnight and was wailing, “Don’t send me baaaack!”

When I was twenty-five, I was just emerging from my early-life crisis. My divorce had come through a few weeks before that birthday, right before I flew to Japan, where I spent two years teaching English, recovering from said crisis. (Post continues below … )

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At that time, “twenty-five” was, inconveniently, still regarded in Japan as the age by which a woman should be married, lest she get stale … like Christmas cake, which no one wants to eat after the 25th of December. Back then, jokes my new colleagues and neighbors made about my age and stage cut me to the quick, and I fake-laughed along with them to cover up my grief and the secret that I was no kurisumasu ke-ki.

I spent that two-year recovery period falling in and not-quite-out-of love with a thoughtful salaryman, encouraging my female students never to settle for second best due to their gender, and learning to play and perform on the koto. Then I spent several years processing and writing about it all in my memoir, The Same Moon (Camphor Press, 2020).

Having worked through those memories in writing, workshopped them with multiple writing groups, pitched them to agents and publishers, presented on them at events and answered questions about them for book groups, I have to say age twenty-five still sits pretty close to the surface. I can go back there—to my thoughts and feelings, the tastes, smells, sights and sounds—pretty quickly.

What a blessing—and a curse!—to be, on paper and, in some ways, in my mind and heart, forever young.

But since leaving Japan and that life, I have lived many others, finishing graduate degrees, and working as a science writer, newspaper reporter, college English instructor, public relations professional, yoga instructor and writing consultant.

I have survived heartbreak over boyfriends and girlfriends and coworkers and faith communities and family and places and oh so many failures, surprises and expectations unmet.

But more than that, I have celebrated many happenings too, top of which being that I found the right man to marry and together we brought our son home from India. We moved west and farther west and now east, back to where I started. Together we’ve made a life.

At twenty-five, I never could have imagined all that living, or how everything that happened in my mid-twenties would become the foundation for my future. Thanks to that young woman, I learned to walk away from things that don’t work … to assert myself … to express feelings I used to think needed to be bottled up … to listen to my heart and, more importantly, for the still small voice of God.

I would never, ever go back to being twenty-five.

But I am forever indebted to the woman I was at that age, taking risks, making mistakes, recognizing opportunities and dangers, and learning lessons I’ve carried with me and built on ever since.

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Writing prompt

Now, a question for you: What age are you thankful for … both for its lessons and for its passing? I invite you to use this as a writing prompt … and/or feel free to share in a comment!

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Join me for a reading and discussion of The Same Moon — including a chance to win a copy!