The Downhill Slope Feels Like Freedom

There's a thing going around - my friend Taryn told me about it - called a screenshot journal.

The idea is simple: you print out the screenshots you've been collecting on your phone. The recipes you meant to try. The quotes that grabbed your eyeballs as your fingers tried to keep scrolling. The pages from a book you photographed because you didn't want to lose them. You print them and put them somewhere you can actually touch and use and do something with.

I loved this idea so much I blocked off time on my calendar the next day.

I spent hours going through my phone. I started with my Canon Ivy 2 mini photo printer, running sheet after sheet of zink paper through it, until I'd burned through an entire package and hadn't even begun to scratch the surface. So I switched - started laying things out collage-style in Canva and printing on regular paper to glue in.

It was one of the most satisfying afternoons I've had in a while.

Not because of what I made. Because of what it meant that I was doing it at all.

This is what 49 feels like

I just turned 49. And something about this birthday feels different from the ones before it - more weighted, more luminous, more awake.

Part of it is the obvious thing: 50 is right there. One year away. A number that feels, in our culture and in my own bones, like a real threshold. I want to live this year fully - not in a frantic way, not playing at aliveness for anyone else, but genuinely, specifically, in ways that matter to me.

But there's something else underneath that, and it's harder to talk about in a short-n-snappy way.

I have been waiting my whole life to become a Crone.

Not in a morbid way. In the oldest, most accurate way - the wise one, the elder, the woman who has moved through enough seasons that she stops performing and starts simply being. That figure has called to me for as long as I can remember. And I’m approaching the edge of her threshold now.

The awkward truth about the downhill slope

Lest you begin to believe that my rose-tinted glasses are adhered to my face, I’ll say this: my body is changing in ways that feel nearly as awkward and disorienting as adolescence. Perimenopause is its own particular landscape - aches and brain fog and a body that sometimes feels like it's making decisions without consulting me. The biology of this season is real, and it is not always graceful. (HA! If that’s not an understatement of the highest order, I don’t know what is.)

And I am somehow, inexplicably, excited anyway.

That's the life wink. That's the thing that stopped me and made me pay attention. The slope is real. The changes are real. The ticking of the clock is real.

And I am leaning into it instead of away from it.

What I'm understanding about the weight of this

The screenshot journal afternoon clarified something I'd been feeling but hadn't put my arms around yet.

All those saved images - all those intentions collected and stored for later - they'd been sitting there assuming "later" was unlimited. That there would always be more time to get to them. That future-me would have a free afternoon and the right energy and a working printer with enough paper.

49 is the year I sincerely stop believing that story - and then do something about it.

Not from fear. From clarity. From the plain, observable truth that time moves faster as you accumulate more of it - and that I do not want to arrive at the end of my life with a phone full of intentions I never printed.

This urgency isn't panic. It's a compass.

And it points toward more than just screenshot journals. It points toward the people I love and the things I haven't said - the plain, true things, the hard things, the tender things I've been assuming they already know. It points toward the community I'm part of and what I could actually give back if I stopped waiting until I felt more ready. It points toward the world we're leaving behind - the water, the soil, the air, the rights of people I'll never meet - and the weight of knowing that I am alive right now and that aliveness comes with responsibility.

That is not a light thing to feel on your birthday.

It is also, somehow, not a dark thing. It feels like finally picking up something I was always meant to carry.

The thing about doing instead of saving

I used to screenshot things I wanted to remember and then let them pile up on my phone like good intentions in a waiting room. This week I printed them. I touched them. I put them somewhere real.

That's the practice. That's all of it, really.

Do the thing. Say the thing. Tend the relationship, the community, the world while you're still here and while it still matters that you showed up.

The downhill slope turns out to feel like freedom.

I wasn't expecting that. But there it is.

If you're standing at your own threshold - whatever it looks like - the Apothecary is open.