Choices
I'm 45, and I'm looking back at my life and all the choices I've made and I know, for certain, that quite a few of those choices were wrong. I'm not going to go do down the cliche of, yeah, but they led me here. I feel like that's a cop-out. I knew they were wrong when I was making them, and I know now that the right choice could have led me elsewhere, and that elsewhere could have been better. I've taken the L on those, necessarily. I'm still standing.
But then, I can see choices that I've made that could only have been made differently if I knew all the facts. If I had access to the future. That hits a little differently for me, because I couldn't have optimised for those. I can't say that I made those choices clearly, because I didn't actually have access to all the data. There's a short story in that, probably.
The novel
I've submitted my manuscript, and I'm waiting for my agent to get back to me, and let me tell you something: waiting is brutal. I've never been good at it. Worst case: my life pauses, at least emotionally, until it resolves. Best case: I occupy myself with hobbies and things that have fallen to the wayside. My garden. My it-only-exists-when-I-have-nothing-else-to-do art practice. Cooking and baking. I haven't figured out what kind of case this is. I seem to have just been doing a lot of shopping for clothes for a new version of me that will be braver, skinnier, and more literary. The new version is pre-release and being beta tested.
Domesticities
My husband now out-earns me by a factor of five. That's a weird position to be in, given I've been the lead provider for most of our marriage. I'm still earning the same, but he's a philosopher with Google Deepmind now, and US-based tech compensation can be alarmingly financially upbeat.
There's a little bit of a shift in the power dynamics, but it's different because I still make enough that I can still send the kids to private school and pay the mortgage on my own, which is functionally what I've been doing for the last decade anyway. But now my husband can say things like, oh but we can move to a bigger house, and it's not a dream or something to consider, potentially, down the line. It's a we can do this now if we want to situation. I'm grateful, because I'd be mad not to be, but the gratitude doesn't clear away some of the very slight and vague lingering unease.
We're early days, so I don't know how the shift in power dynamics go, or how deep. Right now, we're basically the same, except with better clothes and, crucially for the kids, much nicer holidays.