At 64, I am in a weird place.

I am almost “elderly”.

At my age, my mom, a nurse by profession, had been retired for six years. She had a perm, wore sensible shoes and had a handbag. She knitted and made preserves and watched TV when she wasn´t attending to the needs of my dad, a war veteran with a (quite literally) broken heart.

My hair is a mess, I walk in Converse and carry my mobile phone in a black canvas tote bag. I don´t knit, I do not watch TV, and I don't have a husband to attend to, but I did cook some apple sauce today.

When my mom retired, I was 26. I was dating my future ex-husband, with whom I would have three kids and a crazy life overseas. It was fun until it wasn’t. We got a divorce. He moved on, but I didn’t, not for a long time.

Instead of moving on, I got stuck for years. I watched my family members take new positions and introduce new members to our kin. I felt like a remainder. I did not fit into the equation. I felt sad and unworthy.

Eventually, however, I managed to take a grip, pull myself up my bootstraps and write a book. I have since written four. They haven´t made me rich or famous, but it doesn’t matter since writing is the one thing that keeps me going and drags me out of the rut I sometimes, okay, often, find myself in.

When I turned 60, I was fine with my age. Just fine. No crisis whatsoever. This is, at least, what I said to everybody who cared to listen. I may have even shouted it from the rooftops. I felt liberated, what with 60 being the new 40 or whatever.

I laughed at my friend, two years my junior, who laments her high age every time we meet. She thinks getting past a certain age is a terrible tragedy, while I used to maintain it is a cause for celebration. We have made it, I exclaimed. We have survived for this long!

She wasn't convinced and still isn't.

Turns out I’m not so convinced, myself, any more.

Four years ago, life looked at me smiling, promising me possibilities. Freedom! Romance, even. But most of all, freedom.

But then I became a grandmother. I love the tiny toddler, I do, but I do not know what to do with myself.

Sometimes, at night, when lying in bed and trying to make sleep happen, I experience strange dissociation, exactly the kind I did when I, at 19, had just moved to my first own place and left my family and my old life and even my little shih-tzu called Dakini behind.

Who is this person thinking these thoughts and remembering these memories, I ask now, just as I did back then. And more importantly, who is the person asking all this?

I had my first age crisis when I was 19. I remember this vividly. I was skating on the ice rink in my hometown when it suddenly hit me: I am an adult!

What does that even mean, I wondered. How is one supposed to be an adult? There is no blueprint, but there sure are expectations. You are supposed to do this and that, but no one tells you how to mature into an adult who makes mature choices.

We transition from one age group into another through crisis, it seems.

I realised I was no longer a child when I was about ten. I got confused. I’ve seen the same thing in my children. How to be a non-child when you don’t have any experience of it?

I was talking to a woman yesterday who had just turned 40. She is going through that crisis women her age know so well: Tick Tock. How to be a woman without children?

And now that I’m at retirement age, I wonder how to be a person who no longer has a work obligation. Who is an effing grandma! Who is old but still walks in Converse, writes books, and chats with AI.

Indigenous peoples have rituals to help with transitions. We don’t have them unless the first communion and bar/bat mitzvah etc, count as such.

Should there be?

In Judaism, there is a ritual called Simchat Chochmah. It means “rejoicing in wisdom” in Hebrew.

It was long forgotten until it was revived in 1986 by the religious scholar Savina Teubal on her sixtieth birthday. She found she needed some rite of passage as she entered a new phase of her life.

It is a lovely idea.

The word ‘crisis’, by the way, comes from the Greek word for turning point. Only later was it given a negative connotation. The transition to different ages is not necessarily a catastrophe but rather a change, a turning point, a crossroads.

A crisis is not a threat but an opportunity.

I am in a weird place of opportunity. It is scary as f*ck and just as intoxicating.