Forty: The Story So Far (And the Stories Still Untold)

They said life begins at forty. I don’t know who “they” are, but I suspect they didn’t have a stack of unfinished manuscripts, a laptop with more coffee stains than RAM, and a heart bruised from love and rejection letters. And yet… here I am. Forty. Cuatro décadas. A number that feels like a chapter title—bold, inevitable, humming with narrative weight. Not quite the climax, but far enough from the beginning that the prologue feels like someone else’s book entirely.

I started with rhyme. A boy in a small town in Mexico, scribbling verses at the kitchen table while my mother stirred something soulful on the stove. Poetry was my first rebellion—my way of turning silence into music. Later came the fiction, the horror, the dark corners of the human psyche I couldn’t resist exploring. I never wanted to just tell stories. I wanted to bleed them. Back then, I thought being a writer was about mystery and solitude. Now I know it’s about clarity and connection.

Somewhere between those first rhymes and today, I became an insurance agent—life’s twisty like that. But you know what? Sitting across from people, listening to their fears, hopes, and messy human details they rarely admit, turned out to be training. For empathy. For character development. For writing people who feel like people. I used to think success meant publishing a bestseller. Now I think it means writing something honest—something that makes someone pause mid-scroll and whisper, “Damn. That’s me.”

I’ve wrestled with rejection, with impostor syndrome, with the bitter taste of comparison. But I’ve also held my own words in my hands—Musas Imaginarias (an unpublished collection of poems), short stories like Obsessed, articles that trace my love for writers like King, and essays born from midnight thoughts and café confessions. Some days, it feels like I’m still at square one. Other days, I remember: square one is where all the magic starts.

The memoirs are still brewing—quietly, insistently. Not because I think I’m famous enough to write one, but because I believe in documenting the human condition. Especially the parts we’re not proud of. The lust, the guilt, the ache of almosts. The way a woman can walk into your life when you least expect it and turn your truths into poems. The way pain sometimes makes better sentences than peace. These memoirs won’t be clean or chronological. They’ll be raw and full of detours—like me. They’ll talk about heartbreak, ghosts, and what it means to try again even when the ink runs dry.

So what does it mean to turn forty as a writer who’s still chasing the dream? It means owning the long game. It means celebrating progress that can’t always be measured in book deals or followers. It means looking back with tenderness and forward with fire. I’m not done. Not even close. If anything, I’m just now starting to understand the kind of writer I am: one who blends Spanish with sarcasm, poetry with plot, and humor with heartbreak. One who sees the world not in black and white, but in late-night bar confessions and stories overheard at gas stations. Forty is a milestone. But it’s also a mirror. And what I see in it is a man who has something to say—and the stubbornness to keep saying it.

So pour me a glass. Light the candle. Let’s write the next forty.

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