It was my 54th birthday recently. You might argue even caring about your birthday is a bit babyish, but I like the marking of time with some kind of ritual. And so I had been out for a lively night to celebrate.

A lively night? I know, I know. My lexicon is contracting into a formality that I used to laugh at in older people. Observing a new pair of fashionable shoes, my Mum or Granny would describe them as “fun”, “smart” or “trendy” and my brother and
I would roll our eyes. Now I look at just such a pair of shoes and have to choose between the aforementioned old-person speak or outdated hip adjectives – “cool”, “funky”. I could try on a piece of contemporary vernacular, but the word “peng” sits as comfortably in my mouth as expletives in a nun’s.

Despite the “lively night”, I had a problem. For the first time ever I had felt not a flicker or a flutter of birthday feelings before, during or after the event. My 79-year-old father texted to ask me if I’d had a happy birthday and I huffily answered that it had been rubbish. “Welcome to adulthood,” he texted back.

The American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology describes adulthood, n. as “the period of human development in which full physical growth and maturity have been achieved and certain biological, cognitive, social, personality, and other changes associated with the ageing process occur.”

What does that mean? Adulthood is difficult to define. It definitely doesn’t happen at the 16th, 18th or even 21st year and certainly it did not for me. I floundered and failed at the traditional markers for adulthood like marriage, financial independence, parenthood, work.

The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that regulates impulse control, emotions and many other things that can be reduced to one summary unscience-y word: sensibleness. It is also the last part of the human brain to reach maturity, at 25 or more. Definitely or more in my case. My age is more than double that, and even now that I have grey hair and no longer menstruate I still wonder, really, am I a proper grown-up or just a womanbaby?

But I know I am aged and ageing, and there’s less years to live now than have been lived, unless by some miracle I live to 108. Yet even though every one of us is walking towards death for me, at 54, it’s not scary, exactly. It just, is. I keep thinking of the last 30 years, since I was in my early twenties, and it’s gone so fast. Time seems to move faster the older I get. Time is relative. Don’t you remember how long a day was when you were eight? The speed of time sure sharpens the mind.

I know people who do everything they can to fight it with pills and injections and frantic longevity antics, and they seem a bit hyperactive and deranged. In aiming to prolong life, they seem awfully detached from living it. I want a long and healthy life but that doesn’t mean trying to run away from getting older because, truthfully, it feels all right.

It feels more all right than it did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. How, I can’t say neatly. There’s a trend at the moment for women to shout loudly about how wonderful it is to be middle-aged, and how confident/sexy/empowered they feel. I thought hard about this and could not in all honesty join their ranks.

Which does not mean I don’t enjoy being this age, it’s just not exactly for those reasons. What’s beautiful about it is I’ve developed an incredibly strong sense of selfhood away from all the daft, noisy and neurotic flappy attachments of personality. I’m not some meditating yogi but I can sit and distinguish between all that scritchy-scratchy business and the purity of something more constant. Is it a soul. Is it the steady pilot light of existence, whatever it is is it is still, like the eye of a storm.

Some days I feel absolutely crap. I still get things wrong – constantly, all the bloody time – but my ability to sit with things is infinitely changed by age and experience. Right now my life is not the best it has ever been. I have on occasion in the past been heaped with praise, had insanely good sex, flirted with incredibly exciting men. I’ve travelled well and had cash to burn and a wardrobe of lovely things. I long for those days sometimes. I miss them. The past is gone, the future can’t be known. Stuff is irrelevant. Gossip is gibberish. Love is eternal. Hate is pain. Happiness is transitory. Acceptance is peace, an animal companion is the door to another world, and a good night’s sleep is the best drug you will ever take. I just know this now. In short, I am earthed.

While you do change a great deal as you grow in years it is not as simple as, “Yay, I feel wonderful about myself,” which is an uncomplicated sort of sentiment that verges on toxic positivity. I’m not going to be sharing thoughts so asinine that they require a cheesy library photo of a middle-aged woman jumping on a trampoline (because I know how the middle-aged pelvic floor would react to that particular activity).

That there’s happiness and joy in getting older is not precisely it – it’s more that you possess serenity, perspective and calm. Life stays challenging. In some ways it’s harder than it has ever been and I still, at times, feel acute self-doubt. But there is certain knowledge that if you stay steady through the crappy bits and don’t allow it to consume or define you, then it will inevitably be replaced by something else. As the old Persian saying goes, this too shall pass.

Henry Ford, the man who gave the motor car to the people, said, “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” Mostly, now, that’s how I feel. Sometimes I look at the peachy juiciness of youth and it hurts that I’ve lost that. I’d be lying if I said I spent my time giddy and ecstatic about being a grown-up. But I don’t mind.

I treasure my body and physical health; relaxing into my age does not entail letting it all go. But I don’t feel a need to look, act or feel young. I want just to be. In other cultures with perhaps less advanced women’s rights movements than we have, age gives older women power and agency they never had before. Vogue Philippines put a wrinkled 106-year-old on its cover and it was truly a beautiful image. It’s ironic, really, that in the West, where we are meant to be so advanced, age is something women try to disguise like it’s shameful.

We don’t believe in anything, so all we can focus on is the glory of youth. The symbol of ouroboros, the snake perpetually eating its own tail, has symbolised the cycle of life since the Egyptians. I saw it painted on the side of white ceremonial hall with a straw thatch roof where 20 years ago I waited with a Swiss photographer to meet one of the most powerful figures in voodoo.

We went to the Ouidah Festival of Voodoo, or La fête nationale du vodoun as they call it in French-speaking Benin. All the iterations of voodoo around the world practised today originated here in the old pre-colonial Dahomey kingdom. The coastal town of Ouidah is known as the “cradle of voodoo”. It is an intense place to visit. A memorial called La Porte du Non Retour looks out to sea. Ouidah was one of the most active ports in the barbaric transatlantic trade in men, women and children. It was these poor souls who spread voodoo to the Caribbean, Brazil and America.

Voodoo’s such a deep part of west African culture and largely misunderstood. I am not an expert, and was just an observer of it 20 years or more ago. But something struck me about voodoo that has grown more and more interesting as I’ve got older.

We live in a secular world, and I am happy with that. But while voodoo has just one god, it also has many, many spirits that exist in all things. It exists in a world that is alive, what we call animism, and there’s power, symbolism and magic in the trees, the wind, a rock, a snail; the dead and our ancestors live among us; creatures have power. The voodoo world has an inordinately different substance to ours, its practitioners are entwined with the world and with nature.

Voodoo also throws the best parties. Dancing can fill you, literally, with spirit. And you never, ever want to stop dancing. The festival at Ouidah was fascinating. It was also a blast.

I don’t want to convert to voodoo, I barely scratched the surface of the surface of it back then. But it has something to it that we have lost, and that, as I get older, I want to recover. Capitalism, Civilisation and the Enlightenment and all that jazz have given us wonderful things but destroyed our very long-lived human instinct to worship nature and see magic in things.

What we got out of it was a great sense of superiority, and an anthropocentric idea of ourselves as special and different. When we so clearly aren’t. We are just one animal on a planet full of living things. But instead of immersing in the world we are a part of, our attention is gripped by stuff we can buy in shops and the cult of youth.