Today, I turn 40. (Cue “Sunrise, Sunset.”)
Stray grays, crow’s feet, smile lines that don’t fully go away anymore. All of it is a badge of honor. Thinking about my life in decades instead of years highlights how much has changed.
My first decade was the formative one. The earliest pieces are fragments, the kindergarten mat at rest time. Putting on my mother’s heels, following her around like a shadow, watching my father shave and patch the nicks with little flags of toilet paper, knowing the exact comfort of my grandparents’ laps, making friends outside of family. I still have distinct memories of the smell of my apartment building hallways, the pattern of my elementary school floor tiles, my teachers’ names and dispositions (the ones we liked and the ones we were a little scared of). The routines my family kept, tracing the same car route to the grocery store, walking the Coney Island boardwalk with my mom. The sights, the smells. All of it imprinted on me.
My second decade was coming into my own. The teenage years, the hormones, the big feelings. Figuring out my likes and dislikes and trying new things, good and bad. Running around the streets of Brooklyn with my friends and getting into trouble (well, light trouble, I was always a rule follower). Losing my grandfather when I was 11, my first experience with death. My first love and my first heartbreak. The stress of college applications, and then realizing almost immediately how good we’d had it in high school. My father teaching me to drive in the Floyd Bennett Field stadium. The thrill of driving around in my mom’s Volkswagen Beetle with my friends in the car and the music blasting, which was the most freedom I had ever felt (just thinking about my own kids doing this is giving me heart palpitations). Going off to college and watching my mom cry as the car pulled away, not fully understanding why.
My third decade was becoming a woman, finding my life’s passion, and exploring different career paths. Medicine, then law, then landing on public health. The beautiful stress of grad school. Making big mistakes and course correcting and figuring out my way. More love, more heartbreak. Losing my grandmother at 20, and with her, our lunch dates over borscht and pierogi. My first real job and my first real paycheck. Somehow finding the energy to be a full-time student while cobbling together tuition from ten different part-time jobs (where did I find that energy?). Train rides in and out of NYC day after day, writing papers on the LIRR with the stop announcements blaring overhead. Becoming Dr. Steier. Moving up the ladder, meeting my husband and figuring out that he was my person, adopting cats, moving cross-country to be closer to my parents, getting married under banyan trees with everyone we love in front of us.
My fourth decade was becoming a mother, which meant becoming an entirely new person with entirely different priorities. Falling madly in love with two little humans I worship, then watching them turn into actual people with distinct personalities. Feeling a kind of anxiety I didn’t know existed every time they got sick or got hurt. Watching my father get sicker, and then suffering the greatest loss of my life when his heart stopped in December 2019, and becoming a new person yet again. Living through a global pandemic. Finding science communication, which is now the work I care most about. Another cross-country move, and five dogs fostered and rescued along the way. Reinventing myself and my work. Weathering personal and professional losses I’ll be grappling with for years, including betrayal and bullying and a different kind of heartbreak. Surviving it, then thriving. Building a business, and alongside it trying to build something bigger, an argument that science communication is a discipline in its own right. Learning that lifelong friendships can begin in any decade, and that they feed your soul. Noticing creaking bones and muscles I didn’t know I had. Feeling very mixed about getting older, and grateful at the same time.
What the next decade brings, I don’t know. I’m told the 40s are the best decade, the one where we finally live for ourselves and come into our own, with most of the “what will I be when I grow up” worry behind us. This is supposedly where we thrive. I’ve learned a great deal and I am less certain of things than I was at 30, which I’ve come to think of as progress. There is plenty left to learn. I’m fairly certain there will be high highs and low lows. I’m excited anyway.
I’m celebrating in the best way I know how, which is surrounded by my people. My mom is in town (her birthday is tomorrow, two Leo lionesses a day apart). My childhood best friends are driving in from New York, and other friends have flown in from Argentina and Florida. We’ll hang out and barbecue and laugh and sing and enjoy each other’s company. I feel unbelievably lucky.
Writing about my life this way feels strange. So many things, big and small, fleeting moments locked into history, every second of every day contributing to who I am right now. It also carries a weight I wasn’t expecting, because setting it down in decades shows me how much of it is already behind me. The people, the places, the routines, the versions of myself, all of it receding, and time only ever moving in the one direction. My father is in these paragraphs and he is not here. I am old enough now to know he will not be the only one.
And writing this to you, on the platform I built brick by brick, is surreal. It’s the greatest gift I could have asked for. Thank you for being here, for following along with Unbiased Science (my third child), for letting me live so much of my life through this work. Here’s hoping the next ten years shift the work itself, so that we spend less time rebuilding trust in science and more time talking about the things that made me fall in love with it in the first place. The advances that change lives. The wins we get to celebrate. The unglamorous work of helping people live longer and feel better.
Onwards to decade five.
Stay Curious,
Unbiased Science
HAPPY BIRTHDAY! The forties are GREAT. Keep learning and living and enjoy those kids.
Happy birthday! 🤓