The Middle-Aged Ghost

Dear Delyara, I’m forty today. I spent the morning looking at my life and realizing it looks nothing like the one I planned when I was twenty. I’m not a famous novelist, I don't have a house with a garden, and I’m still not sure if I’m "happy." I feel like I’ve spent the last two decades just waiting for my life to start, and now I’m realizing that this—this messy, unfinished, mediocre reality—is the whole thing. I feel a strange sense of mourning for the person I thought I was going to be. Who am I now? And is it enough?