The Lies I Burned On My 49th Birthday (Literally)
I'd Like To Thank Myself

The Lies I Burned On My 49th Birthday (Literally)

B1IntermediateAugust 25, 202619 min

It's my 49th birthday, and instead of dreading getting older the way we're all trained to, I'm doing the one ritual that changed how I feel about aging for good. If your birthday has started to feel like a countdown, if you're seeing fine lines and wrinkles that feel like they showed up overnight, like your face fell off a cliff while you were sleeping, if you feel yourself going invisible after 40 and you've laid awake at 3am doing the math on everything you think you've lost... this one is for you. For the first...

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down a number that everybody treats like the beginning of the end, this one's for you.

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  • 173 words a minute: natural, fairly fast speech.
  • 57 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.

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0:00

If you've ever had a birthday that made you feel like you didn't matter, or you're staring down a number that everybody treats like the beginning of the end, this one's for you. So today is my birthday. I know.

0:12

I'm so excited. I am 49 years young today. It's true. So I went from a house with no running water to a life that my daughter will never have

0:21

to claw her way out of, back when people swore that I was hopeless and would, quote, never amount to anything. So doing the impossible and rewriting the stories I got handed, that's kind of my thing. And today, for the first time, I'm doing it on camera.

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