Finding My Vocation On Substack As I Turn 62

A passion for writing defeats my birthday blues

This week, I turned 62. Birthdays are never just another day. Our time alive is marked by calendars; the passing of our years is the most stubborn of all facts.

Using Christmas as a universal birthday, John Lennon sang a lament for how the years pass us by.

“And so this is Christmas and what have you done; another year over, a new one just begun.”

For most of my life and most of my birthdays, I didn’t want to consider the question of “what had I done,” because the next question would be “what did it mean?”

These had been dangerous questions for me. When something triggered existential thoughts in my forties and fifties, I would find myself traveling down lengthy spirals of misery. When I reached the bottom, I would doubt the very why of my existence.

One such trigger happened at Christmas 2003 in Florida after I had seen the last of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

At the very end of the trilogy, after a long and perilous journey and a final, world-saving defeat of the dreaded Sauron, Frodo has come back to his home in the Shire–– think of the Cotswolds absent gloomy weather. Frodo is with his fellow hobbits drinking ale in an idealized version of a British village pub.

Everyone’s celebrating except Frodo. His forlorn eyes give him away. He’s lost the capacity to enjoy his old pleasant life. With a sadness that haunts me still, he rattles around his comfortable old hobbit hole as if lost and says, “…there is no going back.”

At that time, twenty years ago, I had no clue why this scene of Frodo’s grief had made me so sad, leading to one of my downward spirals.

Not until I wrote an essay about it here on Substack was I able to understand the connection. After his heroics, Frodo couldn’t return to his Shire life that had previously given him purpose. Frodo’s realization that he couldn't go back triggered in me a remorse that I had lost something precious about my childhood.

When I wrote my essay, I realized I had needlessly enslaved myself to the mythologies of my youth.

In 2003, as I was about to turn forty-two, having lived a conventional life, I had felt that my childhood dreams of achieving some heroic, world-shaking glory had been closed off. I had the sense that with the passing of each year, I was losing more and more of that “old me.”

But now, through my writing, I could understand there was nothing so wonderful about “the old me.” In fact, I had evolved to prefer the current version of me to any past version. By quite a wide margin.

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Fellow Substack writer

Caroline Cala Donofrio

wrote a sentence that helped me think about how my writing had changed me for the better.

“A personal essay is a conversation between the person you are when you begin it and the person you become by the end."

In language at once simple, beautiful, and true, Caroline captured the gift of self-awareness that can come through writing. Or through any vocation that ignites our passion in a way that leads us to a greater sense of ourselves.

My mother discovered her vocation around the same age as I am now. Her vocation was an immersion into helping people with Crohn’s and Colitis through founding both a clinical and research center. Her devotion and passion to this cause changed her.  

She read everything she could about the science of these diseases and the development of their cures. Her specific curiosity for her vocation sparked a general hunger to learn. It was an intellectual awakening. Among many subjects, she came to love philosophy, especially stoicism.  

Most importantly, she discovered for the first time in her life the great capacity she had for making a tremendous positive difference in many people’s lives.

The last two decades of my mother’s life were by far her most joyful.

I’ve hoped to find a vocation that would provide joy and a passion that fed upon itself. I believe I’ve found it in writing within the community of writers and readers on Substack.

As Carolyn wrote, each post I write is a conversation I have with myself. Each post has changed me, some posts more than others. But the cumulative effect has been transformative.

Having turned 62, I can face the questions of “what had I done” and “what did it mean” with a confidence that is new to me.

And what did I do on my actual birthday? I had a heartwarming dinner with my family, but in the afternoon, I had two zoom discussions with fellow Substack writers

Kim Van Bruggen

and

Alice Kuipers

. We talked about our shared passion for writing personal essays. The time flew by.

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Question for the Comments: Do you anticipate your birthday with dread or glee?

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Note:

My wife Deborah convinced me to begin writing on Substack. She’s always encouraged my writing and has saved everything I’ve ever written to her, including this very first card I gave to her in 1984 right after we met.

What I wrote inside:

“Here is the taxi I can never find when I’m with you. It’s quite possible that you are exceedingly unlucky or that we’re both completely incompetent at hailing cabs.

My explanation, however, is that you simply distract me to the exclusion of everything else. So please try to be a bit less alluring, attractive, etc. when we’re looking for cabs in the future. I know it will be difficult.”

Signed simply David. It took a little while longer to use the “L” word.