Last week I reached the staggering, and quite frankly bewildering age of 44.

Although in theory I was expecting this (although my mother, who started telling people I was 40 sometime around my 37th birthday probably wasn’t. I imagine she thinks I’m 50ish by now…its not good for my nerves!) there were a number of ways in which I am finding it a little difficult to get my head around. For one thing, I feel exactly the same as I did when I was 24, or, for that matter, 4. It comes as something as a shock, therefore to discover that I am a card carrying ‘responsible adult’. Part of me is quite convinced that I am not old enough to drive or own a house. Most of me is quite convinced that I am not grown up enough to be trusted with most of the work I do, much of which could have quite far-reaching consequences if I mess it up!

The biggest thing that I am trying, in my own odd little way, to work through in my mind is that I don’t seem to have ended up anywhere near where I expected to be by this age. By the time you get to my age, you are supposed to have a sucessful career, at least two and a half children and the greater part of your mortgage behind you. I have to say that judged against these criteria my life has been an abject failure.

A mere six years ago (it still amazes me to think that it is so recently) I knew beyond doubt exactly what the rest of my life was going to look like. Boring, but safe and by the usual way inwhich such things are measured, successful.  I had been married for nearly 15 years and saw no reason to think that would change. While the marriage (especially in retrospect) wasn’t brilliant, it wasn’t bad either. It was comfortable and easy. I was Head of Department in a very nice secondary school that was slowly but surely draining all the life out of me, but it was safe. I knew exactly who I was and what was expected of me. I was very comfortably off and I knew what to expect of the next few decades. I was also (I am now able to see) quite seriously depressed.

Just over five years ago things started to fall apart quite drastically. For someone who has made quite an extensive study of religious experience I have always found it quite amusing that nothing of that type ever happens to me (except, as a friend of mine once said, when it does.) This, however, was one of the more notable exceptions. In a fit of desperation I ‘asked’ for my marriage to be ‘sorted out’ in some form or another. Anyone who knows me will know that I am not religious in anything that can be described as a conventional way and I couldn’t even tell you exactly who I was asking. The Universe in general, I suppose; or maybe it was just a very strong ‘wish’. What I do remember is a very strong impression of a reply. I want to be absolutely clear on this, I didn’t hear anything at all I just had what I can only describe as a very strong impression in my head, and what it said was this, “Are you sure?” There was something very sinister about that voice.

What followed was three years of chaos. The breakdown of not only my marriage, but also of several things I had come to regard as axiomatic; a new relationship out of the blue far sooner than I thought I was ready to think about such things, and with it a complete change of direction. I had no choice about my marriage but about three years ago I made the conscious decision to give up my extremely well paid and safe career. It was, as you can imagine, not a decision I took lightly and I can remember actually crying with something approaching panic as I put my resignation letter into the post box. For many years I had combined teaching with working as a senior examiner but a dispute with my management left me painted into a corner. I could carry on teaching, or I could continue to do something I found deeply rewarding and which, I believed, meant that I could make a real difference to a subject I loved passionately on a national level, but I could not do both. For a long time I hung on desperately to what felt like the edge of a cliff, and then I let go. Without a doubt it was the single most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me, and yet, three years on, here I am, still alive and kicking and most importantly I have got my ‘self’ back. I am, once again, a person that I recognise from my university days rather than the shadow I was undoubtedly turning into.

It is true that I have a great deal less income than I had and that money is a constant worry in a way that it had just stopped being when I quit work. It is also true that the job that gave me the financial security I thought I could not do without also took away all the fun and colour from my life and was beginning to turn me into someone that even I didn’t much enjoy spending time with. I am still frightened, mostly because I no longer have the slightest idea what the rest of my life is going to be like. (As well as my examining and consultancy I now also help my partner to run a funeral home….and if you had asked me for a list of the jobs I was least likely to end up doing that would have been near the top.) I am also having more fun than at any time since I was in my twenties and I wake up each morening genuinely excited about what the day is going to bring.

So I think what I am tring to say is that there is something fundamentally wrong with how we measure ‘success’. I don’t have the ‘trappings’ that I sometimes feel I should have at my age…financial security in particular, but I am doing a number of things that I love and I am making a difference to the world if only in a small way. I have freedom that I could once only dream of, people around me that I love and respect and the rare opportunity at my advanced age to ‘start again’. I’d say that’s not a bad achievement to celebrate on your birthday!