The Weekly Edit: Another Trip Around the Sun

Tomorrow is my birthday.  I’m going to be 38.

When you think about birthdays, it’s the milestone years — 18, 21, 30, 35, 40 — that catch the most attention.  And as grateful as I am for another year, I’ve been feeling down all week.

The question that keeps percolating in my mind is, “Is this where I thought I would be at 38?”  And the answer is no.

I spent almost two years in a deep depressive episode, and that experience put my life off track.  Attempts to re-align have been moderately successful, but nothing feels like the level of achievement and contentment that I’m looking for as I move through my late-30s.

When you’re 18, you plan for college.  In college, you plan for your 20s.  By the time your 30, you realize that you still have so far to go on your career and life journey that making plans into a distant, unpredictable future gets harder.  It’s easy to plan for the next ten years when the milestones seem somewhat obvious.  It’s harder to create milestones when you realize you’ll be working for another three decades.

This weekend, I plan to find some time to start mapping out the next year.  My experience with goal-setting has been mixed, but some of my friends swear by it.  And I freely admit, that my decisions over the past four years have felt more like a triage than a plan.  So I’ll set some goals for the next year, and see if trying to put a sense of agency back into my future plans helps.

Life feels more stable these days than it did two or three years ago, but it still doesn’t feel as fulfilling as it once did.

For months, my ‘Sanity Walk’ uniform has been a striped sweatshirt, a North Face vest, and a pair of leggings.  Comfortable, pulled together, warm.  (Not to mention super simple.)  Then, yesterday, out of nowhere, the mercury spiked and I needed to find something cooler to wear.

Guess who doesn’t own any outdoor, summer-appropriate workout tops?

Part of the issue is that I don’t love sleeveless workout tops.  I don’t love my arms, and I’d like to offer them a little cover.  But almost every summer workout top is sleeveless.  So here are a few that aren’t.

Athleta Camo Daily Tee 

Core10 Icon Tee

Athleta Foothill Tee

We all know that I love a good true crime podcast, and my newest listen is CounterClock.

The podcast investigates the murder of a young woman killed in the late 1990s in her home in Kill Devil Hills, NC.  The story is told by a young journalist from Kill Devil Hills whose feelings about her hometown were forever changed by the shocking crime.  If you need an interesting podcast to listen to, this one is a good place to start.

Being back on the campaign trail feels weird.  It’s a surreal experience to be at work again, even is the 2020 trail looks very different than past years.  And being back at work, I need to wear makeup, but there’s no way that I can manage a full-face of makeup right now.

So I decided to give an old favorite, Laura Mercier’s Tinted Moisturizer, a try.  I bought the mini-size from Sephora, and was so grateful to have a product that felt light and wearable but offered enough coverage to help me look like I came to work.  Unlike the old days, the product comes in dozens of shades.  One chat with Sephora customer service and they helped me pick out the right shade without having to visit a store.

If you’re looking to simplify your makeup routine when your workplace reopens, Laura Mercier’s product is definitely worth a look.

As I’ve mentioned before, Kyle is loathe to eat dessert of any kind.  He’d rather have another Old Fashioned or a second appetizer than ever eat dessert.  So this year, I decided to bake myself Molly Yeh’s Birthday Cake for Two.

It’s a cute, simple, funfetti-style cake that feels festive without creating leftovers.  I’ll have a slice after dinner, and a slice for post-birthday breakfast, and that’ll be plenty.

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