The Years The Glue Stopped Working
Nobody warns you that after forty, things quietly stop sticking together. The friendships. The routines. The jobs. The skin on your face. Your own sense of self. It all loosens. Quietly. Almost politely.
The house still stands. The work emails still come. The kids still need dinner. But behind the curtains, everything feels a little… unglued.
You smile in photographs. You reply to the group chat. You meet deadlines. You telll your parents you’re fine, even as their hair thins into cotton wool and their voices grow small like old radio static.
You tell your partner it’s nothing, that you’re just tired. You tell yourself that you’re just tired.
But it’s not tiredness, is it?
It’s the slow, steady unravelling. Just life..teaching you new ways to live…And the terrible thing is… this was always coming.
We were raised on this myth like it was gospel. Hold it together. Be dependable. Be solid. For women, it came with a smile and the quiet martyrdom of our mothers, who carried everyone’s grief in the folds of their sarees, who held the family with trembling hands that never dared tremble in public.
For men, it came wrapped in pride and silence. Their fathers fixing taps, paying bills, never blinking, even as life sanded them down like old wood.
It didn’t matter what cracked beneath the surface. The only crime was letting anyone see it. But now, after forty, the cracks aren’t beneath the surface anymore.
They’re in the corners of your eyes. In your belly that won’t become tight despite the daily Yoga. In the awkward silences with old friends. In the growing distance between your body and your reflection. In the quiet fear that maybe this isn’t a phase. Maybe this is just how it feels now.
It’s older. Sadder. Quieter.The exhaustion of always being the strong one. Of carrying the house, the parents, the spouses, the children, the job, the fears, the facades…..without ever once admitting it’s too heavy.
For men, it’s the quiet panic of becoming invisible. The receding hairlines. Of watching the world celebrate youth and hustle while you feel yourself slowing, softening, becoming irrelevant. And yet you show up. You stay solid. You joke at parties. You don’t say you feel scared.
For women, it’s the heartbreak of fading friendships, of growing invisible in a room, of tending to everyone’s needs until your own feel unfamiliar. Of buying creams for your face and swallowing the bigger grief….the slow vanishing of your own name from the conversation.
And the most brutal part? You’ve been told this is called strength.
It isn’t.
It’s forgetting how to fall apart.
This isn’t new.
Our grandparents did it. Their parents did it. They just didn’t have Instagram to pretend otherwise.
Look back far enough and you’ll find whole generations glued together by duty, by reputation, by the quiet terror of collapse.
The Romans had a word for it, Auctoritas. Not just authority, but the kind of quiet, unshakeable dignity you wore like armour, even when your insides felt like a crumbling temple.The Roman statues still stand in museums. Proud. Untouched. Unbroken. But the real men and women behind them?
They cracked. They faltered. They lost. They aged. They softened. They died. We’ve inherited their statues.We’ve inherited their silence, too.
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud, not even at 2AM after three whiskeys when the truth usually spills. Maybe we weren’t meant to hold it together forever. Maybe things are supposed to fall apart sometimes.
The friendships.
The versions of ourselves that no longer fit.
The illusions of being invincible.
Maybe the house of cards collapses, not because we failed, but because everything beautiful needs to be rebuilt sometimes.
Including us.
I look around at my friends in their forties and fifties, and I see it everywhere. The man too proud to say the business scares him now. That love scares him now. That he does not mind ‘failing’ now if it means peace. The woman laughing at brunch, but grieving the friend who ghosted her years ago.
The marriages that feel like two people renting space inside old memories. The friendships that faded, not because of betrayal, but because life grew noisier and none of us knew how to shout over the static.
We think we’re unique in this ache. But history hums differently. People have always unravelled. And some of them, brave, tired, stubborn …learned to weave themselves back together.
Not neatly. Not perfectly. But honestly. So here’s my quiet rebellion, offered to you gently, without hashtags, without platitudes:
You don’t have to keep holding it together. It’s okay to:
Let friendships go if they’ve turned into polite ghosts.
Admit you miss the person you used to be.
Allow yourslef to become a new version, something that makes you happy
Cry in your car after the parent-teacher meeting.
Say out loud that you don’t feel young anymore, and it scares you.
Rage softly or loudly against the invisible walls life built around you.
Reach out to people ..to talk, to love, to sometimes simply ask for help.
It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you real. The Romans lost their empires, but the people found their way. Our parents buried their exhaustion in rituals, but we… we can choose something else.
We can name the cracks. We can sit with the pieces. We can stop apologising for the years when the glue simply stops working.
You’re not broken. You’re just unfinished.
We all are.
The house may lean. The hands may tremble. The friendships may thin like old bedsheets. But nothing says you can’t begin again.Softly. Slowly. With trembling hands and tired hearts.
Not to rebuild the old house exactly as it was, But to make space for the person you’re still becoming.
Even now.
Especially now.
🪷
I always enjoy your thoughts.
This is beautiful Rose.. And so true...