Eighteen days from now, on the 19th of October, I will turn 49. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about what I want this particular year to mean to me, and the more I thought about it, the less interested I became in treating 49 as simply another birthday. There is something about being one year away from 50 that makes you look at your life differently. You begin to notice what still feels alive, what feels unfinished, what you have outgrown, and what you might want to experience while you still have plenty of time to choose differently.
I found myself thinking about all the things I have said I would do one day; the places I would visit, the things I would learn, the creative pursuits I would return to, the experiences I would have on my own, the little luxuries I would allow myself, and the parts of myself I would give more attention to if life ever became a little less busy. Then I had a rather simple thought: perhaps I don’t need to wait for life to become less busy. Perhaps I can simply decide that this is the year I am going to pay attention.
That is how The 49-to-50 Project came about.
Rather than making another list of resolutions or setting myself a collection of goals that I will either complete or quietly abandon, I want to give myself a year to explore. A year to become more intentional about the woman I am, the life I am living, and the life I want to create next. I want to learn, travel, create, rest, move, laugh, spend time alone, make my home feel good, nurture my body, enjoy beautiful things, and ask myself some questions that might not always have comfortable answers.
Most of all, I want to see what happens when I stop thinking of 50 as a destination I have to arrive at and start treating the year before it as an opportunity to live more deliberately.
Why 49 feels different
There is something strangely powerful about being 49. You are close enough to 50 to feel that milestone sitting on the horizon, but you still have a whole year between where you are now and where you are going.
I don’t want to spend that year trying to become a perfected version of myself. I don’t want a before-and-after story where 49 is the woman who needs fixing, and 50 is the woman who finally has everything figured out. I’ve lived long enough to know that life doesn’t work that way.
There will always be another layer to discover, another thing to learn, another part of ourselves that surprises us. Becoming isn’t something that ends when the candles are blown out on a birthday cake. It is something we keep doing throughout our lives.
So my intention for 49 is not transformation; it is attention.
I want to pay attention to how my days actually feel. I want to notice what gives me energy and what quietly drains it. I want to become more conscious of the choices I make with my time, money, body, relationships, and work. I want to notice what I keep postponing and ask myself why. I want to make space for curiosity and pleasure alongside responsibility.
I want to live this year rather than simply get through it.
The five areas of my life
The 49-to-50 Project is rooted in the five core areas that sit at the heart of my work with Midlife by Design: Identity & Self-Discovery, Health & overall Well-being, Relationships & Connections, Money & Purpose, and Quality of Life.
I don’t see these as five separate compartments of life; they constantly influence one another. The way I feel about myself affects the choices I make. The way my body feels affects the way I experience my days. My relationships affect my sense of belonging. My work and relationship with money affect the freedom I have to make choices. And the environment I create around myself can either support the woman I am becoming or keep me attached to an older version of my life.
Over the next year, I want to look honestly at all five.
Not because I think my life is broken, but because I think it is worth designing with intention.
The Life Audit
One of the first things I have created for the project is The Life Audit: The Questions I Ask Myself at 49. And Again at 50.
There are seven questions for each of the five areas of my life, and I will answer them twice. The first time will be as I enter my 49th year, when everything is still ahead of me. The second time will be as I approach 50, when I can look back at what actually happened.
The questions ask me to look beyond the version of myself I present to the world and consider who I actually am when nobody is watching. They ask me which parts of my identity feel genuinely mine, which stories I have outgrown, where I might still be playing small, and what I would do differently if I stopped needing anyone’s permission.
They ask me how my body actually feels, what it might be asking of me, what my energy is telling me, and whether I know how to rest or simply wait until I collapse. They ask me about the relationships that nourish me, the relationships that may need to change, what I am not saying, and what my relationship with myself looks like when I am completely honest.
They also ask me what I am actually building, what money means to me, whether my work still reflects what matters, and whether the way I spend my time matches the priorities I say I have. And they ask me something that feels particularly important for this project: what does a day that feels truly mine actually look like?
I don’t expect my answers to be particularly polished; in fact, I hope they aren’t. I’m much more interested in whether they are honest, because when I answer these questions again at 50, I want to be able to see not only what changed around me, but what changed within me.
The Becoming: 49 Edit
Alongside the Life Audit, I have created The Becoming: 49 Edit, which is a collection of things I am saving for, calling in, and gifting the woman I am becoming.
Some of the things on the list are small pleasures that make ordinary life feel a little more beautiful. There is a scented candle, chocolate truffles, chai, a beautiful umbrella, mule-style slippers, and the perfect warm brown lipstick. There are things for my home, things for creativity and things that simply make me smile.
There are also experiences and investments in myself, including watercolour painting, yoga and Ayurveda, along with the possibility of a solo retreat, afternoon teas, botanical gardens, spa days and countryside adventures.
But something interesting happened while I was creating the list. I realised how many things I already own.
I already have beautiful creative supplies. I already have clothes I bought because I loved them. I already have things that were intended to make my life better, easier or more beautiful, but that I haven’t always used as much as I imagined I would.
That has become part of the lesson.
The Becoming: 49 Edit isn’t an excuse to buy more things.
It is an invitation to use what I already have, appreciate what I already own and be much more intentional about anything new that comes into my life.
If something genuinely adds beauty, pleasure, meaning or usefulness, it can stay on the list. If it is simply another thing that will end up sitting in a cupboard, it can go.
The woman I am becoming doesn’t need more clutter.
She needs more life.
49 Before 50
Then there is 49 Before 50, my collection of experiences, adventures, experiments and invitations to myself for the year ahead.
Some of these will be things I have wanted to do for a long time. Others will be simple experiences that might otherwise be overlooked because they seem too ordinary to make a list.
I want to take myself out for afternoon tea. I want to visit botanical gardens. I want to travel by train simply because I can. I want to spend time somewhere beautiful on my own. I want to take a watercolour course and see whether painting becomes something I continue long after the course finishes. I want to have spa days, explore new places, and create more opportunities for myself to experience my own company.
There will also be things that cost absolutely nothing.
A morning spent painting at home. A walk with no destination. A cup of chai while sitting somewhere lovely. An afternoon reading. A day when I put on perfume and lipstick for no particular reason other than I feel like it.
I don’t want to confuse a full life with a busy one.
Some of the most meaningful parts of this year may be very quiet.
Learning to enjoy my own company
One of the things I want to explore particularly deeply during this year is solitude.
Not loneliness. Solitude.
There is a difference.
I want to become even more comfortable taking myself places. I want to sit at a café alone and enjoy my chai without feeling as though I need to look busy. I want to have afternoon tea by myself. I want to take a train somewhere and spend the day wandering around. I want to book a hotel room and enjoy the delicious freedom of having nobody else’s timetable to consider.
There is something incredibly liberating about realising that you don’t need to wait for someone else to be available before you experience something beautiful.
I want that feeling to become normal.