Remember who the fuck you are!
And then don't forget it again | The Muse Letter No. 171
I try to remember where I read that 35 is the age a woman is in her prime. At first I thought I read it in Fräulein Else1 by Arthur Schnitzler. A novella or rather a monologue from the point of view of a 19 year old girl, who is forced to marry an old rich man and consequently takes her own life. However somewhere there my brain must have cross-wired. I remember the time I was reading it. I was living in Berlin to study playwriting, I was 25, single and desperately looking for guidance.
A woman at 35 is in her prime.
I liked the idea because at that point 35 was about a decade away. It seemed an exciting prospect. Back then I wasn’t even sure I was ever going to make it to 35. To conquer that age, as my mental health was flailing and doubt was the cluster fuck of my life, where trapdoors would open and I would find myself in a murky underworld like the Greek goddess Persephone. “My mind was leaking, falling through trapdoors. Behind every thought, there was a maybe. Maybe I was going ma…