On Trying.

Joy, Bieber, and turning 40.

Apr 18, 2026

In the kitchen in the morning, while making protein muffins and packing school lunches, slicing bananas and setting pinto beans into a small container with a leak-proof lid, I am playing Justin Bieber’s “Baby” on repeat and intermittently showing my son the choreography that my friends and I once made up, drunk on cheap box wine, in the kitchen of their rental in Costa Mesa.

I am not alone in this phenomenon this week. Since his performance last week at Coachella, messages from friends, new and old, flood my phone; people who know or don’t know how deep my fandom goes. It doesn’t matter this week whether you always loved him or could barely stomach him, or missed that generational moment, or have never heard of him—there is something palpable in this shared fascination. Something we have all been starved of in these years: a kind of joy, of communal joy that we have been going without. And maybe I am being dramatic or feeling nostalgic, but there is a certain chord progression I feel in my body watching this man, and I am having so many personal realizations about my own age, mortality, and artistic career that I am, at times, brought to tears.

I will be 40 this summer. I tell my husband, while we are sitting on the couch in the dark, that realistically 40 is halfway, not 50. How many people actually see 100? Not many. I could ask the robot, but I don’t. If 40 is half of my life, then what have I actually done, and what am I still brave enough to want from the rest?

While I am getting ready to write this morning, I hear my son say at the kitchen table to his father, “I am so excited for the reptile party.” And I am not sure a single sentence has ever brought me to my knees like this does. What I need to know is how do we keep that as we age? How do we keep on having moments that feel this way? And how has Justin Bieber and these reptiles so thoroughly unlaced my heart? And how do I find more of that as time speeds so fast I often feel like I am in that hallucinatory tunnel in Willy Wonka?

I watch a woman on Instagram try on Coachella outfits and talk about how, at 58, she’s finally realized that joy and fun and sparkly things are not reserved for the young—that we can have them too as we move forward, that if we are willing, they are ours for the taking. I am, right now, aware that the healing I have to do is for someone who does not exist yet. That my healing has this reaching-forward quality. That I have always been someone who places their worth and their joy on being thin and being beautiful. That might be gross to you, but I was raised in a house where it was clear that this was a kind of power and currency. Three girls and a mother who valued this highly, not secretly, just as much as getting good grades and living each day to the fullest. These were the messages I had: life is short, you’re gorgeous, enjoy the shit out of it. It’s not wrong, but they somehow got bound up together in my being. That one could only exist because of the other. And now I am trying to untangle that mess so that the next 40 isn’t a slow bloodletting of joy as I feel less deserving of it as I age.

Maybe this metaphor is messy and that’s alright. I am not here to write about something that makes sense entirely, or something I have made sense of. I am not that kind of writer. I just want to tell you what I am thinking about. That there is something bouncing inside of me like a pinball, and it has to do with Bieber at Coachella and frown lines and reptile parties and rewriting my book for the fourth time and wondering how much time is left. How much joy will fit into it.
And how the fuck I am going to let myself grab it.

Not let myself. How am I going to help myself feel good enough so that I even try.

and to spark a little joy, some photos from Coachella 2009: