Reflections on Turning 40 (+40 Things You Might Not Know About Me)

Today, I turn 40. Behind the scenes, I’m taking an intentional day to myself (no computer or phone) to celebrate the massive decade that is behind me and to lean into the excitement I feel for the decade ahead.

When I turned 30, someone told me my 30s would be the best decade. I often think about that because my 30s did turn out to be monumental. It wasn’t the best decade in the way this person meant. But, at the same time, it kinda was.

Before the first year of my 30s was halfway over, an event I now think of as “the Big Bang” knocked the ground from beneath me in ways I never saw coming. My 30s were a decade of great pain, but it was a strange sort of pain. I look back on it, and, honestly, it seems glorious. It was the sort of pain that brings change, transformation, liberation.

It was a portal. A Doorway of No Return—right on time as my First Act ended and the Second began. And what an Adventure World I entered.

It was a character arc.

It changed me, utterly. I grew up. I moved beyond narrow constrictions and definitions that I had thought were mine, but that were not. I stripped myself down to the very core—down to the shadows, down to the emptiness—and then out into unfathomable vastness, into the raw and unbearable glory that is life itself. I got to choose life in a way not everyone does.

It was a decade in which I moved three times, bought my first house, focused on healing, fell down more times than I can count, and rose and rose again.

It was a decade in which I came to understand Story on a deeper level than I ever had before.

Photography by Mackenzie Westphal.

As I stand here at this threshold between decades, I wanted to mark the moment with something a little lighter and more personal—a celebration, not just of my biggest lessons and transformations, but of the small, quirky, human things that make up the texture of my life. So, in honor of turning 40, here are 40 things you might not know about me. Some are serious, some are silly, all are pieces of the story that’s brought me here and the one still unfolding.

40 Things You Might Not Know About Me

1. I’m passionate about health and biohacking. Over the years, I’ve learned how much my creativity depends on my body’s energy and balance. I love exploring ways to support that, including eating as clean as possible, staying active, practicing yoga, minimizing toxins, and generally treating my body like an ally in the creative process. For me, it’s not about perfection, but rather curiosity and stewardship. I’m always seeking how to better live in harmony with the systems that sustain me. I’ve learned that creativity is life force, and as such it has to be cultivated, which very often looks like cultivating your health. It has to be honored and approached with reverence rather than control. It has to be listened to rather than dictated to.

2. My favorite “cheat” meal is mac and cheese. (My nieces and nephews even call me “Aunt Mac.”)

3. For guilty-pleasure movies, I always go back to Golden Hollywood. It’s what I grew up watching. So much good storytelling in those years, and I also just love the lightheartedness in so much of it. There’s a wholesomeness to it I really love. It always feels like home when I go back to old movies like Stagecoach and It’s a Wonderful Life, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn.

4. A belief I held that once protected me but eventually limited me was that my life was meant to follow someone else’s map. For a long time, that belief made me feel safe—until I realized the path I was on was leading me away from myself. The day I started charting my own course was the day my story truly began.

5. I cannot stand bananas.

6. My morning routine always includes skincare, meditation, and baked eggs for breakfast.

7. My theme song is “Eye of the Tiger.” (My dad started calling me a “tiger” before I was born. I still own the stuffed tiger in a little T-shirt says “I Katie” that he bought me when I was a newborn in the hospital.)

8. I was homeschooled in a small town in western Nebraska in the middle of nowhere. I owned two horses, and the highlight of my year was spending time on a friend’s cattle ranch in Wyoming every summer.

9. I started writing as a way to “not forget” the stories I would tell myself. My first writing gig was a family newsletter that eventually became Horse Tails with a subscribership of 30 people—of which I was very proud. I produced it for five years until I finished high school and started focusing on novels.

10. I’m secretly really good at swearing like a sailor (in three languages).

11. My coffee ritual: Chemex pour-over, dark-roast decaf, organic and water processed, with just enough cream to cover the bottom of the mug.

12. My favorite part of storytelling is the part before I even start writing it. I love to be in the daydreaming and the imagining. My second favorite part is outlining when I’m just having a conversation with myself longhand in a notebook.

13. I can’t start writing until I have some kind of food to ground me. I default to a cup of coffee. Music has always been key as well. In the past, I would listen to my soundtracks alphabetically because I liked that sometimes I would get weird contrasts—like when I’d be writing a love scene to Gladiator, or I’d be trying to write a battle to something really soft and contemplative like Cider House Rules. Sometimes, it totally didn’t work, but sometimes it would help me find interesting juxtapositions and emotions. Nowadays, I’m much more moody and spend way too much time trying to find exactly the right thing.

14. When I was twenty, I was in an ATV accident that cracked my skull. Just a few weeks before turning forty, I totaled my vehicle in another car accident. In both cases, I (more or less) walked away. Those moments remind me how fragile and miraculous life is. They made me more conscious of my health, my body, and the sheer gift of getting to keep living this story—as well as the sense that there’s a reason I’m still here and a purpose in each day I get to keep living.

15. My biggest ongoing life lesson is boundaries—learning not to front-load them from avoidance, but to work with them holistically in relationships. Telling people no.

16. I once tried to learn to bowl just to beat a boy at a bowling contest. I practiced for months and still mostly threw gutter balls, though weirdly I’d often get a strike on my very first try and never again after that.

17.  The quality I most admire in people is authenticity. It’s that capacity to be deeply in touch with your own truth and your own wholeness—and also a sense of what is broken and perhaps blind. It’s the cohesiveness of self that allows you to stand fearlessly in who you are. It’s not to say you never admit you’re wrong or never change, but there is a deep sense of truth about where you exist on your own cutting edge at any moment. I would say that is something I admire because it’s such a core quest for myself.

18.  I believe love is a state of being. It’s a frequency, a vibrational force. It’s not a feeling per se, although we do feel it. I believe most of what people say love is are just emergents from what love really is. To me, love is the same vibration as health, the same vibration as truth, the same vibration as beauty. When you’re “in” love, the world is right. There’s an alignment to who you are and how you move through life. You are whole; you are fulfilled. Love isn’t something you give or take. It’s like being in a swimming pool: love is the water that surrounds you. Being “in” love is a matter of bringing yourself into that vibration. You can literally learn how to flip the switch.

19. My favorite household ritual is going around the house first thing in the morning and opening all the curtains to see what the day is like.

20. My happy place is hanging out with my nieces and nephews.

21. The place that changed me most was probably Missouri. I lived there for three years. They were really hard years, but I learned and discovered so much about myself. They were really great years, too.

22. The timeline of my life has never matched what has been taught as normal. I’ve hit some milestones early, and others I hit late or have yet to hit. I’ve had to learn to surrender to the idea of “trusting the tide I came in on”—that I was born at the right moment for everything I’m meant to do in this life and that I have to trust the process, have patience with the profound amount of transformation I have embraced in this lifetime, and to acknowledge that while this creates a great deal of speed in some areas, in others it requires a great deal of slowness. I’m allowing my story to be what it is instead of insisting it has to be something else. There is a profound amount of freedom available in that discovery.

Photography by Mackenzie Westphal.

23. I always write with a black pen.

24. My ideal day off looks like taking a day off to just binge-watch something all day long. I don’t watch a lot of TV and movies every day anymore, but I take a day once a month to just binge-watch something.

25. I’d rather be a stand for something rather than against something. I’ve seen so clearly throughout my life that what we resist persists. On a personal level, I have always felt it was never enough for me to move away from things that weren’t working; I always needed to have something I could move toward.

26. One of the guiding principles of my life has been that old proverb that “if you want to change the world, change your country, if you want to change your country, change your city, if you want to change your city, change your family, if you want to change your family, change yourself.” It all starts at home. It all starts within.

27. I also believe even the smallest acts of integrity within oneself (even if they’re happening behind closed doors in your house and no one ever sees or knows what you have chosen, worked through, and overcome) have a ripple effect. Most of the pain in the world comes from a feeling of separation—of turning something or someone into the Other that must be defeated or fought against. Recognizing that starts within, because there are so many parts of ourselves we try to make Other—that we’re ashamed of or that we vilify or put into the shadow. I believe the most important work we can do is the work of the self.

28. I love the idea of inner callings—that we come into this life with certain things we are meant to fulfill, that some part of us already knows. To me, that offers a great deal of meaning and purpose, even when things are hard or don’t make sense. There’s always a lesson, always a teacher, always something for my good that’s meant to help me do what I’m here to do.

29. I believe life is ultimately about learning to come into integrity and wholeness within oneself, to bring back and heal and integrate the pieces that sometimes are shattered or lost. Inherent to that is the quest for each of us of learning to listen to who we are, to know what is true for us, and to gain more and more capacity to stand in that integrity. The only thing any one of us is asked to do in this life is to be true. I think we can get very easily distracted from that—not least because sometimes, the thing we think is the truest for us is really the loudest ego projection in our lives. For me, there’s this tremendous mandate to not just try to overcome my blind spots, but to accept with humility that I have them—and that, by their very definition, I don’t know what they are. I don’t think that should undermine confidence or conviction. But I do think it merits a tremendous amount of humility and a great deal of self-introspection.

30. I’ve often defined my own success only in retrospect. I’ve reached certain marks and realized that by certain people’s definitions, these markers would be defined as successes—whether it’s podcast downloads or books sold or making a living as a writer or winning some award or having a certain number followers on social media. All of that’s great, and I’ve always appreciated it. But I’ve never chased it. I’ve never really felt comfortable chasing end goals. I’m much more interested in being curious and playing and focusing on the job at hand. My goals are more about “I’m going to do this today” or “I’m going to put this book out this year.” I don’t much like being in the space or energy of worrying too much about how well things will do. I just do my best and put it out there.

31. I’ve dealt with imposter syndrome my entire career. I have faced it by looking it in the eye and being very clear about who I am, what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it. Sometimes that clarity might be about “how much money do I have to make to be a success?” or “how many books do I have to sell?” But it’s also asking, “Am I doing what I love? Am I being authentic? Am I showing up in a way I’m proud of? Am I making an impact? Am I putting something good into the world?” That’s not to say I don’t define my success by material things, because I totally do. If all of a sudden, I made zero dollars tomorrow and sold zero books, I would obviously face some pretty big ego deaths and fears. But here’s what I come back to all the time: I used to say about writing fiction that even if no one ever read what I wrote, I’d still do it. To me, I think that’s the definition of success. Is what I’m doing something I would do no matter what? Is it something I would move heaven and earth to do?

32. I  name all the important trees in my life. Right now, I’m making friends with Mr. and Mrs. Maple, the Owl Tree, and the Sentinel.

33.  My Myers-Briggs type is INTJ. My Human Design profile is a 6/2 Generator with emotional authority. My Enneagram type is a 3 (tritype is 351). Scorpio Sun, Scorpio Rising, Libra Moon.

34. I’m slightly paranoid about fire and sometimes have to go around and double-check that outlets aren’t hot.

35. When I was younger, I didn’t have a place for emotions in my life. I didn’t understand how sensitive and emotional I was, and I didn’t really learn how to cry until life cracked me open at 30. But life has been so much richer with emotion. It’s more difficult, but so much more dimensional too.

36.  The character I relate to most from my own books is 100% Allara from Dreamlander. I didn’t intend her to basically be me, but in a lot of ways she was. IYKYK.

37.  My favorite movie is The Great Escape. But the story that changed my life was Lord of the Rings.

38. To me, story is a primal force. I often speak of story in the singular. It’s capital-S Story. It’s an archetypal force. The more I study it, I just see it everywhere. And I don’t know if story itself is the reflection or if story is what everything else is reflecting. For me, story is a map. It’s the cartography of the cosmos. There is so much more there than we understand. Story is so much more of an initiatory force than we acknowledge most of the time. In my life, when I have gone through my hardest moments, it is story that has saved me. And I don’t mean specific stories, although they’ve played a role, but story itself and my own capacity to recognize it as this archetypal, immutable force in the world and in my life.

39. What I wish I could tell my younger self… I always think of the line from the movie The Kid (which has always been a meaningful movie to me, but especially now that I’m turning 40, which is what the story is about). In the film, someone is asked that same thing, and she responds, “I’d say, baby… it’s gonna be fine.”

What I’d tell my younger self is:

“It’s all going to work out.

I’ve got you.

All the things you think can never happen in your life—all the doors that you think are closed—they’re not.

By the time you get to 40, you’re going to have walked through almost all of those doors, and you’re going to be a version of yourself you will be so proud of.

So just hang on.

Keep doing what you’re doing.

Keep showing up.

Be honest.

Trust yourself.

Let yourself cry.

And, above all, keep listening to the stories.

Keep telling stories.”

40. The best thing about turning 40 is that it doesn’t feel like the beginning of the end. It feels like the beginning of the beginning. It feels like I am at the threshold of all the most important things that will happen in my life. I feel wide open to what it is I’m really here to do and to say—full of vitality and excitement and anticipation and gratitude for all that has been and for all that I know will be.

Photography by Mackenzie Westphal.

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