I vaguely remember seeing this piece by Anne Helen Petersen a couple years ago (about the “portal” you enter in your late 30s-mid 40s), maybe even reading it – or starting to read it – and it just didn’t resonate. She published that piece in October 2023, and I was 38. I had just gotten married. That definitely felt like a completion of sorts – tying the knot on a bow I had been trying to tie for nearly a decade (longer, if you consider my first – failed – attempt at marriage). If I was moving into a different phase of my life, it didn’t feel like it, really. I just felt – satisfied. My dream job was still mostly my dream job, I had finally ticked this big box and we had a lovely wedding. As with marriage, the wedding itself was a chance for a do-over. I got a real wedding dress, I loved our venues, everything looked how I wanted it to look, and none of my friends had to move any tables (none of this was true the first time around, when I got married – broke – in my early 20s). Most importantly, this time I married the right guy for me (Trevor is someone’s right guy, just not mine). So in 2023, I think I just had this sensation of relief – of “whew, finally nailed it”. Also outside of the wedding and our marriage, things were just going well. Mom had had cancer, but she was through it, active treatment had ended, and we didn’t yet know it would recur a year later. Work had its challenges (the work itself was challenging), but it wasn’t yet what it came to be. I realize now that I was in sort of a temporary sweet spot or lull.

Now the concept of “the portal” resonates with me (go read AHP’s piece if you haven’t already). And in thinking back, maybe it began all that time ago – when Mom first got sick. Or even when grandma passed, which was way back in 2021. It’s also hard to separate any sense of a personal portal from the overwhelming political upheaval that has been happening since before 2016; or separating it from Covid. It all intersects.

Mom’s initial cancer diagnosis was destabilizing. Quite apart from the physical toll she experienced, it also shook us all emotionally and mentally – certainly her most of all. But cancer – or any serious diagnosis – impacts so many people beyond the patient. For me, it meant facing her mortality for the first time. Obviously, I understand how aging and human bodies work and I knew that it’s likely she would pass before me if everything went well, but it’s all hypothetical most of the time – you don’t think about it that much. When she was diagnosed, yes, but especially all that time spent beside her during chemo, I had to consider for the first time what it might be like when she leaves and that it might be coming sooner rather than later.

We’ve in many ways been very fortunate, although I don’t know if that’s how she would describe it lol. She had a brief period after her first diagnosis and treatment of getting and feeling stronger and almost back to normal. But a year-ish later her care team discovered the cancer had metastasized and spread to her lung. She went back into treatment – more chemo, and immunotherapy. It is Fall 2026 and she has just recently wrapped her last immunotherapy infusion for the time being. Her cancer is stable – her cancer is such that it never really goes away, she never really gets to ‘remission’ or ‘no evidence of disease’ as we think of it, but the goal of her treatments has been to arrest its growth and keep it from spreading, and it appears that has been successful again.

I know from conversations with her that she lives and plans in 3 month increments – the time between scans. I encourage her to think and plan more expansively, but I understand why that feels impossible. When it comes to these type of uncertainties, the approach I have taken to sort of protect myself and preserve some of my peace, is to try not to worry about things that might happen until they do happen. I reason we will have plenty of opportunity to worry then, and it’s fruitless to waste the time we have now in a state of constant fear or despair. I’d rather be happy, or at least: unafraid.

It’s kind of funny to me that I’ve ended up being the voice of this particular brand of reason, given how much time I have taken up worrying about other types of uncertainties in life – smaller, meaner ones like “what will we do if the flight is late?” and meatier ones like “what will I do if I leave this career field?”. But maybe those are exactly the things that have prepared me for this. Because I spent so much time worrying about things and I eventually realized that every bad – or just hard – thing that’s ever happened to me: I’ve gotten through it. And what I worried about beforehand often weren’t even the things I should’ve been worried about. I’ve learned from experience that the things you worry about when you’re guessing what to worry about are almost never the things you actually need to worry about, either because those things never happen or because they do – and they unfold so wildly differently than you could ever have predicted.

Mom’s cancer turned me into a version of a caregiver. We were again fortunate that, outside of her very first surgery recovery, she never really needed constant or in-home care. I didn’t need to care for her in that way, but I’ve been to many appointments and I’ve been to nearly every chemo treatment. But beyond these practical measures, I’ve also cared for and tried to in some ways help carry her fear, her worry, her processing of it all. That’s what feels like entering the portal – the flipping on its head of the order of things. I don’t feel like her parent, it still feels like I’m the daughter and she’s the mother – but I feel responsible for her like you would for a child, or any vulnerable thing; and I’m not used to thinking of her as vulnerable and exposed and fragile. She’s been a real badass in her life, and she still is. Over the last 4 years since her first diagnosis, we have entered a new kind of relationship to one another. There’s little things like her becoming an overly cautious and slow driver (this woman once drove race cars, for godsakes); and there’s bigger things like talking with her about retirement decisions, or where she’s going to live, or having deep conversations about what it means to die a good death. These are not things you envision at 6 years old as she hands you a popsicle; or even at 18 years old as she drops you off at college. Over time the balance just slowly shifts (if you’re lucky it’s slow) and that has been happening to us. I feel closer to her than ever, new ways of feeling close that layer on top of all the old ways that were already there.

Then there’s Dad. He lives halfway across the country and is dying of cancer. He’s in active treatment, but it hasn’t been going well. Unlike Mom, he didn’t catch it early, and his prognosis is poorer. He says things like “I want to see my friends in San Antonio one last time”. He’s coming to visit this December, and this is his last trip to us before he decides, in the new year, whether or not to continue treatment – he’s leaning toward not, but there’s still some hope that the new chemo regimen they switched him to is doing more than the previous one, so we won’t really know until he’s through this round. But he’s acting like it’s a foregone conclusion and we are also acting like that right alongside him, for now.

Our relationship is different than the one I have with my mom – for many reasons, not least of which is that he lives in Wisconsin (nothing against Wisconsin, it’s just far away). I wish he was local, but I’m also grateful he’s not because I don’t know if I could do him the same justice I have done Mom. He wouldn’t let me care for him in those ways if I tried. And I get it because we are basically the same person – everything I find challenging about him are things I find challenging about myself, and most every decision he makes is perfectly clear and uncomplicated to me, because it’s the same decision I would make in the absence of considering others. I am not saying he does not consider others, but I am saying that he has always been both decisive and ambitious in a way that treats that as an afterthought and not the core motivating factor, which I’ve come to see as the key difference between us, a father and daughter who are otherwise remarkably similar.

So there’s that. Then there’s leaving my “dream job” because it had become so abjectly terrible. All of my job and career changes – and I’ve somehow already gone through 3 big shifts at the tender age of 41 – have been long and drawn-out affairs, full of indecision, hemming and hawing, procrastination, and doubt. It took me over a year from the point I wanted to leave to the point I actually left animal rescue. The work itself is hard and I was burnt out on many aspects of that and suffering compassion fatigue – but the organization was also a mess and working there had become untenable quite apart from the animal-rescue of it all. I finally left and my job now is – easy. No job is perfect and this one has its own challenges, but they are normal challenges, in line with normal workplace struggles – creating minor and occasional frustrations, rather than an existential crisis every other week. I had already been learning and honing my skills at having good boundaries between myself and my work, mostly borne out of necessity as disentangling myself became a means of survival. Now I find I am adept at it. The workplace is different, but so am I. I’m just doing it differently this time and it’s serving me better. I think some of being in “the portal” is just benefitting from your own experience, moving differently through the world, and really feeling that difference.

I also have the feeling that I’m in the middle. I think of the portal like swimming through a tunnel full of jello. I’ve entered it, I’m in it, I feel it all around me, and I don’t know where the end is yet. Perimenopause is coming for me. I look and feel older and the give-a-fucks are withering away. But I also feel this burst of intention, of bravery, of willingness. I’m going to the gym and hiking and I love how my body feels when it does hard things. I’m also circling back to things – I used to write poems, and now I write poems again. I used to dance – now I want to dance again. The weird one is my relationship to caring how I look – I both care more than ever and somehow also less than ever at the same time. I feel like I had 10+ years of schlubbiness and I want to be done with that, but on my own terms. I want to dress for me in the sense that I want to dress the way I’ve always wanted to dress but never had the energy to. I have more energy now for that kind of thing, while having so much less energy more generally. The portal feels like contradictions and a great re-figuring-out. I feel discombobulated, but certain. I’ve never felt this before – discombobulation has always made me feel unsteady, and now I feel sure-footed in it, unstable but fine with it, safe in it, assured it will all be fine.

For me, this is the portal. I don’t know what’s on the other side of it, but I trust it will be good. I think things are only getting better, even as they’re in many ways getting very hard – with aging parents, the swinging blade of mortality hanging above us all, our aging bodies and the realization of so much we have already missed. Being in the portal for me is being done with missing it. It’s staring down the finiteness of life and reacting to that staredown by cramming more in, but also by slowing down, savoring, and leaving more room.

What is “the portal” like for you? Are you in it now? Do you feel it coming? Does it feel far away or nipping at your heels?