When I was a kid, I never pictured myself old. Not because I thought I’d be some tragic hero taken too soon, but because I was told—quietly, clinically—that old probably wasn’t in the cards.

Juvenile Diabetes isn’t known for granting lifetime memberships. It’s a ticket you get early, and you ride it hard. You hear words like “incurable,” and they cling to you like static. You don’t grow up with that. You grow around it.

So I picked a number. Not the usual ones people pick. Not 100, or 80, or whatever birthday they slap on a mug at the Hallmark store.

I picked 60. I don’t remember why. Maybe it sounded ancient to a 13-year-old. Or maybe it was the age I thought I’d never get to, and if I did, well then I’d win. Whatever the game was, I’d win it.

Or maybe, as I grew closer to it, I realized how many friends and family never saw that number. My kid sister. My high school buddy. The mayor of dogtown, in his sleep.

This week, I turned 60.

Only, I didn’t feel like I turned 60. I felt like I crossed a border and became a man in his sixties. A phrase that sounds like it should belong to someone with a gold watch and a fondness for porch swings.

But to me, it felt like being let out early for good behavior. Sixty didn’t feel like a deadline. It felt like a parole.

On the day, there was no great party. No confetti. Just a quiet morning where I woke up and realized I had arrived.

Not just at a number, but at a feeling. The sense that everything from here on out is borrowed—and I have no intention of giving it back. I started counting forward, not down.

That might be the most surprising thing. How much joy there is in getting older once you stop treating it like a funeral procession.

The world wants you to dread it. Whole industries exist to make you fear your next birthday. The creams, the serums, the euphemisms. “Sixty is the new forty,” they say, as if sixty were a crime you had to alibi.

But I don’t want to be forty. Forty was great, but it was noisy. Forty still felt like a test. Sixty—sixty is permission.

And maybe that’s the trick: picking your number. Not in a fatalistic way. But in a way that gives you a benchmark, a lighthouse in the fog.

Mine was sixty. I made it. And I liked it so much, I’m staying a while. Hell, I might stretch it out. Sixty-two sounds pretty good. Sixty-eight has a nice ring to it.

So I recommend it. Find your number. Pick it young. And when you get there, don’t mourn the years. Celebrate the miracle. You made it past the myth. You arrived in your own future.

And if you’re lucky, you’ll find it’s quieter than expected. And beautiful in ways no one warned you about.