I had a plan for turning 50, but life had other ideas

You planned them in January with a new notebook and an optimistic pen, filled them with intentions and deadlines, and measured them in small achievements. In my case, there was my 50-in-50 Challenge for 2025, a list of things I wanted to do before I turned 50.

Now years feel more like weather. You get rained on, then dry out. You learn where the leaks are so that next time you can at least put a bucket underneath them. Occasionally, a storm comes along and knocks the stuffing out of something you thought was solid, and you spend a while rebuilding it with slightly better judgement and fewer illusions.

Meanwhile, you keep the ordinary things going. You feed the cat, do the school run and brush fur off the sofa. You try to squeeze in a little self-care somewhere between work and family life, perhaps a walk, a fitness class or a cup of coffee that actually stays warm long enough to drink.

It wasn’t a crisis year and it wasn’t a particularly great year. It was a year in which things happened quietly, insistently and daily. There were sore joints, news alerts, WhatsApp pings and cups of coffee abandoned because someone always seemed to need something just as I sat down.

Change hovered around the edges. Sometimes I could see where I wanted things to be different, but that didn’t mean I could change them immediately. I spent quite a lot of the year learning that wanting something to move and being able to move it are two different things.

I also started questioning why I was so determined to turn myself into a newer version of me in the first place.

This was the year I turned 50 and stopped pretending that being “fine” is the same as being well. My hormones were making themselves increasingly known, my body wasn’t behaving quite as I expected it to, and I kept wondering why doing all the supposedly right things wasn’t producing the results I had been promised.

I exercised regularly, lifted weights and I even watched what I ate from time to time. Yet I wasn’t losing weight or building muscle in quite the way I thought I should. There were times when it felt deeply unfair. Surely if I was putting all this effort in, my body ought to have the decency to acknowledge it?

It took me most of the year to realise that I had been measuring the wrong things.

Cyrus grew this year, and not just physically. He has opinions now, along with theories, questions and an increasing tendency to explain things to me that I absolutely already know.

Watching him grow is wonderful and occasionally unsettling because children are very effective markers of time. You can convince yourself that nothing much has changed until you look at the child sitting beside you and realise the little boy you remember from a year ago has already gone.

H remained reassuringly H, Persian to his bones and convinced that pistachios, fruit and a proper meal will solve most human problems. He isn’t always right, although irritatingly, he isn’t entirely wrong either.

Somewhere during the year, fitness stopped being mainly about how I looked and became much more about how I felt and what my body could do. I still care about my weight and how my clothes fit. I’m not going to pretend I’ve reached some enlightened state where I never look critically in a mirror again. But it seems to matter less than it used to.

I talked about this with Cyrus in the car or while we were making dinner. I want him to understand that exercise isn’t punishment for eating and that his body isn’t something he needs to spend his life fixing. When a day feels heavy or unfair, you can move. You can go to a class, kick a ball around the garden or walk until whatever is sitting heavily in your head starts to loosen.

I realised I was trying to teach him something I hadn’t entirely learned myself.

I tried different ways of coping with perimenopause and the general fogginess that seemed to come with it. I tried Lion’s Mane in the hope that my brain might remember where I had put my phone. I started leaving my gym kit somewhere visible because if I can see something, I am considerably more likely to remember it exists.

When my eyes felt tired from screens, thinking and everything else, I sometimes put on an eye mask and lay still for ten minutes instead of picking up my phone. This sounds simple, but apparently I needed to relearn how to do nothing.

Some things helped, but others didn’t. A few worked brilliantly for several days before I forgot I was doing them.

January began exactly as January tends to begin when I am involved: with a plan. My 50-in-50 challenge included a health and wellness reset, and I was surprisingly good at following it.

I drank my daily shot of wheatgrass, got through two litres of water, held a one-minute plank, took my vitamins and turned up to try a new class. None of these things was particularly dramatic, but I was doing them rather than merely writing about doing them in a notebook.

I didn’t manage all four of the Cyclone sessions I’d planned at David Lloyd Newcastle. The classes had become harder to book, with new members taking slots and then sometimes not filling them. Still, January wasn’t about perfection. I had started, and at that point starting felt important.

February was more educational. I planned resistance training three times a week, 8,000 steps a day, daily affirmations, a Sunday meal plan and ten minutes of stretching every evening. Looking back, I appear to have believed February contained more hours than other months.

I did some of it and I lifted more and walked a lot. I stretched when I remembered and even wrote affirmations until I forgot where I’d put the notebook, and I meal-planned until ordinary family life got involved and then we turned to take-aways.

Nothing collapsed because I hadn’t ticked every box. There was, I discovered, quite a difference between planning a routine and living inside one.

In March, I started doing things that made me feel more like me. I gave myself one evening a week for a DIY spa session, usually a face mask or a treatment with sefidab. There was something comforting about taking care of my skin rather than standing in front of the mirror looking for evidence of ageing.

I chose clothes because I liked them rather than because they were merely presentable. I decluttered one room and then another and noticed how much calmer I felt when there was less stuff around me. We also celebrated Nowruz, because keeping Persian traditions alive in our family matters to me.

I took part in the Blaze Community Games too. It was sweaty and competitive, and I managed to hurt my head in the process. We didn’t win, but we got free coffee and spent the day as a team and I was perfectly happy with that.

April was supposed to involve less sugar, lemon in the mornings, apple cider vinegar and considerably more reading. I managed the first few with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The 12 books were another matter.

I read some, started more, but I abandoned a few when reading them began to feel suspiciously like homework. I had spent years assuming I didn’t read enough because I lacked discipline, but I began to wonder whether what I actually lacked was quiet.

I wasn’t short of books or words. I was just short of enough uninterrupted space to disappear into them.

May was the month when I noticed how much of my fitness life was actually about other people. I kept turning up to Zumba, Ignite, Blaze, Rhythm and Cyclone. Some days I was enthusiastic. On others, I would have happily stayed at home until I remembered who I would see when I got there.

I didn’t make it to the sponsored Zumbathon I had imagined doing, all neon, goodwill and righteous sweat, but I stayed connected to the people around exercise. I also spent some of my promised 50 minutes a week reading, thinking, writing or sitting, none of which looked particularly productive from the outside.

I had joined a gym to become fitter. Somewhere along the way, it had also given me friendships, routine and somewhere to go when I needed to get out of my own head and that was never written on the membership form.

June was in Cyrus’s words “satisfying”. I booked health checks I had been putting off and actually went to them. I worked on my bedtime routine and slept better. It wasn’t particularly exciting, but I felt more in control because I was dealing with things instead of thinking about dealing with them.

I also did some of the smaller things I had promised myself. I sent notes and messages to people and tried to pay more attention. I took a photograph every day, not because anybody needed to see it, but because I wanted to notice my own life rather than rush through it.

I even took a whole day away from screens. I hadn’t realised quite how much noise I was carrying around until some of it stopped.

By July, I was lifting heavier weights that were enough for me to notice the difference. My core felt stronger and my posture felt better. For once, I was proud of my body for something it could do rather than disappointed by something I thought it should look like.

We cooked more and ate together more. For a while, there was less bread. I even replaced one coffee with herbal tea, reluctantly, and discovered that the world continued turning. I just felt stronger, and I liked that.

August was fine. We had a lovely holiday in Crete. I ate more plants, tried 16:8 before we went away and spent more of my free time doing things I enjoyed rather than things I thought I should enjoy.

My energy was fairly steady and my mood was mostly good. Nothing much happened. It was lovely.

September brought real life back rather abruptly. My routines slipped, my energy dipped and some of the enthusiasm I’d had earlier in the year disappeared with the summer.

I looked at the vision board I had made and realised how much it represented the woman I thought I should become. There were goals and plans everywhere. By September, I was less interested in becoming her and more interested in understanding the woman who was actually standing there looking at the board.

I did some Pilates, stretched when I remembered and tried to be a little kinder to my back and my expectations. Mostly, September was a wobble.

October was my birthday month and I turned 50. There was no sudden “Oh, I’m 50 now, moment.” Mostly, there were just people to see, things to organise and the notion I was reaching a birthday I had been thinking about for years and discovering that the following morning I was still myself.

I celebrated, smiled and continued to say yes to everything. I saw friends, although often in snatched conversations rather than the long ones I would have liked. My diet became whatever was quickest and most comforting, and the journalling I had planned didn’t happen with any consistency.

It was a good birthday, but I realised afterwards that I hadn’t really rested. For all the noise we make about turning 50, I didn’t need another reinvention really, I just needed a little more space.

By November, I wanted to finish the year properly. I had an idea that I would revisit my fitness goals, check my Boditrax numbers, work on my core and just tie up the loose ends of my 50-in-50 challenge.

That isn’t quite what happened. Life was busy and practical, so I did what I could. I moved at weekends, kept showing up to classes and held on to the habits that still fitted.

For once, I didn’t turn the things I hadn’t done into evidence against myself. I was still moving.

December slowed things down enough for me to look back. I went through the photographs I had taken during the year and realised that what I could see wasn’t really progress in the way I had imagined it in January.

I could see my life. There were gym classes, family days, holidays, ordinary mornings, friends, Persian celebrations, coffee, Cyrus growing and all the bits in between that would never have made it onto a vision board.

I hadn’t achieved every target. I didn’t have visible abs and my Boditrax numbers hadn’t magically arranged themselves into the figures I once thought would prove I had succeeded. But I felt as though I knew myself better than I had 12 months earlier.

Some things on my list were done.  Others were quietly abandoned because something else mattered more at the time. Earlier in my life, I might have regarded that as failure, I am trying hard not to anymore.

We celebrated more gym birthdays than I can count, usually involving cake and coffee between classes. On my own birthday, my Ignite instructor and the other members sang “Happy Birthday” while I stood there in my sports bra at 10 in the morning. There are probably more dignified ways to enter your 50s, but I’m not convinced they would have suited me.

There were also the friends who checked in and the gym buddies who noticed when I was quieter than usual. Someone would save me a bike, a mat or a space in class. These were the things that mattered to me.

We spent time with the little Persian community we have built around us too. It is a small circle, but an important one. Looking back, the people who were there were far more important than most of the things I had written on my list.

I think that was what 2025 was really trying to teach me. A life isn’t a checklist, and growth doesn’t always look like becoming more disciplined, thinner, stronger, calmer or better organised.

My body, meanwhile, has been doing its own thing. I still go to the gym. I lift weights, sweat through classes and sometimes dance at Zumba when my coordination has stayed at home. I don’t go because I hate my body, I just go because I usually feel better when I leave than I did when I arrived.

I kept writing throughout the year because writing is how I work out what I think. Often, I don’t really understand something until I have tried to put it into words. It also stops life rushing past unnoticed. I can take an ordinary moment, sit with it for a while and realise it meant more than I thought at the time.

Sometimes somebody reads it and writes back to say, “Me too.” That still means more to me than numbers on a screen.

What I learned in 2025 isn’t amazing. I can’t outwork a nervous system, or keep treating my body as though good behaviour should produce the result I ordered. I definitely can’t perform my way into feeling peaceful, or keep postponing life until I become the person I think I ought to be.

I can make dinner, go for a walk, write something, lift weights and just pay attention to the people in front of me. I can still make lists and lose them. I can become wildly enthusiastic about an idea and then my mind wanders off halfway through it. I can overthink a conversation that hasn’t happened and become completely absorbed in something that has caught my attention.

Those things can sometimes be exhausting, but they are also part of me. So at 50 I can spend a little less energy trying to make myself easier to deal with and a little more on accepting who I am.

So I leave 2025 older, obviously. A bit more tired. Less tolerant of nonsense, definitely. But I also feel steadier and a little kinder towards myself than I did when I wrote that enormous list in January.

I started the year wondering what I could improve. I finished it wondering why I had assumed I needed quite so much fixing in the first place.

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.