I thought my life would feel sorted when I turned 40. It doesn’t – and that’s OK | Carolin Würfel

In the 1970s, the German novelist Christa Wolf wrote a letter to her friend and fellow author Lew Kopelew, which included these lines: “One stands quite comfortably between all fronts, and must come to understand that this is, in fact, the only possible place to be.” The fronts Wolf was referring to were the Soviet Union and the west, the GDR and West Germany, the politics of the cold war – but I believe the idea resonated with her personally, as she was then too, in the middle of her life.

There is a certain irony and wit in those lines. Standing between all fronts can mean you don’t have to choose – a relief, for some. Or it can mean you never arrive anywhere, neither here nor there. At worst, it marks a person with no standpoint, no stable position. Lost in foggy ground.

Being a millennial has always felt something like that. So does turning 40. Statistically, half my life is behind me. What lies ahead is uncertain territory – and for many of my peers, myself included, 40 is a terrifying number, because no matter how we bend it, 40 is not the new 30. Forty is 40

Weeks before my birthday, my best friend called to check in. You ready? she asked. And I replied with a shaky: Yes. I’m glad these 30s are finally over. I grew a lot, learned a lot, but it was exhausting. I hope this new decade will be calmer and less of a dance in the in-between, I said.

Over the past years, especially the second half of my 30s, my life has felt defined by transition: leaving a marriage, moving alone from Berlin to Istanbul with two suitcases, starting over professionally and privately, learning to live entirely on my own again in an unfamiliar place. It was both scary and exciting – but for a long time I also thought of all this as a temporary condition, as if eventually I would “arrive” somewhere stable once the dust of these major life changes had settled. It has, and it hasn’t.

I recall, as a child and young adult, thinking that people who were turning 40 were proper adults. They had their lives under control and walked confidently through whatever came their way. In my idealised image of them, they had cars and houses, routines, incomes – and never stumbled.

The reality is: I do not feel in control most of the time. There are days when I think I should be somewhere else entirely, and these questions keep circling through my mind: Why am I not further ahead? Why isn’t my bank account fuller, my career more established? Why haven’t I bought a house, or a car? Why am I still struggling to find a proper routine? Should I have stayed married? Should I have had a child? Did I take the wrong path – and if so, when? Did it start with studying history instead of going to journalism school, or even earlier, when every adult around me said I should become a lawyer?

I know, I know. Don’t we all sometimes think, if only X, Y, Z had happened, I would be happier, more confident – that if I had just done this or achieved that, I’d finally be in the right place?

At the end of last year, I moved from the European side of Istanbul to one of the Princes’ Islands in the Marmara Sea. They belong officially to the city but feel entirely their own, sitting in the middle of the water between Europe and Asia. From here you can see both sides of Istanbul – its skyline clear on some days, hidden behind fog on others. You are part of the city and you are not.

The decision was spontaneous – a sudden offer from an acquaintance to take over the apartment, which, unlike the rest of the city, is still affordable. It was only once I was here that the doubts arrived. Would living on an island make the feeling of in-between even heavier? Would I be completely lost in space?

I needn’t have worried. I think I have never loved a place as much as this one. But it took me a while to understand why, on this island, I suddenly felt more at peace than ever before. Something had shifted – I couldn’t quite describe it, but it had.

A group of friends came over by ferry from Istanbul for a lazy Sunday afternoon on the first weekend of real spring weather. Before sunset we sat on one of the cliffs looking out over the sea. We talked about what we would let go of with the disappearing light – what we would release at the end of this day.

I said aradayım – I am in-between – and that I wanted to stop wrestling with it, this feeling of not being stable, of not having arrived. Because in-between is a place, too. One that allows me to see in multiple directions at once. And haven’t I always been rather good at living in-between? Isn’t the in-between something where I have done most of my living, most of my thinking, most of my becoming?

Like Christa Wolf, I am a former GDR citizen. I was too young to witness what she witnessed, but I carry something of that formative fracture – Germany reuniting in 1989-90 after 40 years of division, trying to grow back together. What I understood early, growing up within that collision of two systems, two ideologies, two entirely different ways of life, is that you cannot simply dissolve the in-between, the space that separates them. To erase the distance between two sides would mean erasing the histories that created it.

Yet we are taught to experience this as failure – as evidence that we haven’t grown enough, learned enough, built enough, secured enough, become enough.

Whenever I am in Germany, I get asked: how much longer will you stay over there? When are you coming back for good? And in Turkey, people struggle to understand why I – a German citizen with a life in Europe – would be in Istanbul at all. There is often an implication that this in-between life of mine is a strange adventure, that will eventually be over when I choose one side over the other.

The in-between is supposed to be a waiting room, not a life. But I no longer believe that.

Don’t we all move, always, between fronts?

On my actual birthday my best friend called me first thing, congratulated me, and asked: So, how is it over there? Do you feel different? I laughed and said: No, I feel the same. In-between, as always. Because it is in-between that our lives are lived.

Of course Christa Wolf – that genius of a person – knew that all along. I had to become 40.