AGE IS JUST A NUMBER or is it

42

This last year the school district’s theme was superheroes, a common theme used among education. However, I didn’t want to live in someone else’s imagination. I wanted to be my own superhero. Through a flow of conversations the name Lady Limitless was born. I had a graphic designer at my school design a logo for me. It was a mask in the shape of the infinity symbol but it had extra flair on the sides that looked like long winged eyelashes. So on my white board for the year were the words Lady Limitless and the number 42.

42 is the meaning of life of course.

stefacam42@aol.com my very first email address. Stef, that’s my name, cam because I earned a living by filming sweet sixteens at the end of the 90’s and 42 because it is the meaning of life. At least that’s according to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Whatever 42 is, it was assigned to me.

I went through my 20’s answering “why the 42” at the end of my email, I simply said

“because it’s the meaning of life” and I moved on from there. I never explained the hitchhiker's guide to them. I never found the meaning to life in my 20’s. I found meditation and reiki and college and bartending and financial freedom but no meaning. Just shit we are supposed to do in our 20’s.

My 30’s that email address no longer existed, Neither did my meditation, reiki, college or bartending. I traded in that quest to become a wife, school teacher and mom. I thought I had found meaning and for awhile I really felt it in my heart. I was teaching art to teenagers and in that classroom art was more than hue and line it was thought and philosophy, it was freedom and laughter. The art room that I lived in for 10 years pulsed with meaning as it created life for so many children to carry on with them through time.

There was certainly meaning in being a mother. More life to nourish and allow creativity of energy to grow and blossom and become. I believed there was meaning in being a wife but that never created joy. It was the one illusion in my life that I believed was the mission we had to go on. I did the motions with an emotional detachment determined to make it to the finish line, whatever that meant.  

Then I turned 40, I got a divorce, I left the classroom and my kids are now in double digits. All the things that I believed to be THE MEANING OF LIFE were changing, ending and I realized I was just part of the journey in other peoples meanings of life. My meaning was defined by who I was to them.  

At 40 I found out I was married to a man living a double life. While I was kept safe behind the white picket fence he was out doing unspeakable things to other women. I was forced to abandon everything I had pretended to be for the last 10 maybe 20 years.

Ever since my life had become my own in my 20’s, I had not given it my own meaning. I had given it everyone else’s meaning. I had to find my meaning. I gathered up the pages I had been writing for the last 30 years. My journals were always part of me. I dissected each page one by one. I frantically gathered up my notes and starting making corrections like it was the term paper of my life. For months I sat there looking behind the edits I had made over a lifetime. I didn’t sleep or eat. I just pondered my life book and how I forgot to write a happy ending. Then it dawned on me. This wasn’t the ending. It may have felt like death but this was simply the climax.

All of a sudden I was 41 and I had learned about fear and childhood trauma and how it distorts your perception of reality. I had learned that my brain was in a fog and had created scenarios to keep the demons out, scenarios that weren’t real, scenarios that hurt more than reality.

Layer after layer of old skin was being pulled back. I was getting to the core of me. I was finding out who I was before the cultural ideas of how life should be, crept in and slowly erased my memory.

All of a sudden I was 42 and for the first time I was feeling joy. All of a sudden I was 42 creating my own superhero and feeling limitless. All of a sudden I was remembering 42 holds the meaning of life.

Today I am 42 and a half and I have meaning, real fucking meaning. At 11 years old I wanted to be a writer. I got my first diary and somewhere along the path of self destruction I lost my pen and paper but here I am at 42 with meaning. I am meant to tell my story. 42 may be a made up number by the writer of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but for me it was assigned as the year I would find who I am and where my meaning is, it’s standing on stage as an artist of words.