So now I am here, under Athena Perrakis, coming back to myself on my birthday. The timing feels right.

Now back to perfume …

I have made perfume for years, and here is one thing perfumers know: The ingredients that sound the most beautiful are rarely balanced enough to create an unforgettable blend. For example, a perfume made only of flowers is usually flat. It needs something deeper underneath: resin, bark, smoke, earth, salt, leather, something bitter, sometimes something animalic. The ingredients you might reject on their own are often the ones that make the beautiful notes even more beautiful. They give the fragrance somewhere to go. They make it last on the skin. Maybe life is composed the same way. Bitter notes makes a flat scent round, gives it texture, just like challenges sharpen life and force us to forge new tools in the fires of uncertainty.

But real talk though: I believed I would arrive at my 50s differently. I thought by now my life would have hardened more into its final shape. I would know who was staying. I would know where I belonged. The money would be (kind of at least) figured out. The children would be safe. The house would be quiet. The work would make sense. The people I loved would still be alive. I would have learned whatever lesson everyone kept assuring me the universe was trying to teach me.

Instead, I arrived at 53 carrying a strange collection of notes for a an unfamiliar scent. Some top note victories. Some base notes of emotional wreckage. A few spectacular mistakes. Children for whom I have walked through fire. Businesses I built from imagination and nerve. A body that has carried me even when I haven’t been particularly kind to it. People I miss so much that occasionally the missing still feels physical. Relationships I stayed in too long. Doors I should have closed sooner. Money made. Money lost, mostly to attorneys, which truly sucks. Trust given to people who knew exactly what they were doing with it. A thousand things I would do differently and a handful I would do exactly the same, even knowing how they end.

These are not the notes I imagined when I was younger. Nobody stands at 23 choosing the fragrance of her future and asks for disappointment. Betrayal. Fear. Failure. Grief. She reaches for rose. Jasmine. Orange blossom. Bergamot. She chooses love, children, success, beauty, friendship, belonging. She cannot yet know that a fragrance without base notes disappears almost as soon as it touches the skin.

This is what nobody tells you about becoming a woman of a certain age: you don’t necessarily become certain; you just become less willing to counterfeit certainty. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing a good chunk of the time. But I doubt anyone else in my shoes would either.

I have stood in front of thousands of people and taught about magic while privately wondering how I was going to survive something they have no idea about. I have lit candles with shaking hands. I have made perfume while grieving. I have put on lipstick before walking into rooms I dreaded entering. I have been belittled and betrayed. I have been shitty when I could have been kind, and sometimes unrelenting when I should have eased up. I have been brave because there wasn’t another option, and I know now that is very different from being fearless.

Transformation smells nothing like I imagined it would. It isn’t all frankincense and roses. Sometimes it smells like hospital corridors. Courtrooms. Old cardboard boxes. A child’s hair when you hold them first thing in the morning. Your mother’s clothes after she is gone. The sheets after someone leaves. Coffee at 4 a.m. Paperwork. Tears mixed with sweat. Champaka flowers in July blooming after a wicked thunderstorm.

Maybe that’s why I still make perfume. Because scent has never required life to be pretty. A rose can be almost obscene in its beauty, but underneath it is soil, manure, decay, insects and rain. Frankincense begins as a wound in a tree. Myrrh is resin drawn from a cut. The things we burn at altars are often the hardened evidence that something living was opened, sometimes violently. Perhaps we are not so different. Maybe a life acquires its fragrance through what breaks open, and is made sweeter by what has been torn asunder.

Maybe this is the year of divine union for me, blending with greater ease the notes that seem counterposed. Dragon’s blood and jasmine. Salt and roses. Smoke and skin. Grief and birthday cake. The sacred and the profane sitting beside each other at my table, finally relieved that I have stopped asking one of them to leave. Maybe that is 53. Not peace. Not closure. Not becoming untouchable, but slowing becoming permeable again. Letting life’s perfume stain my clothes. Letting beauty matter even though everything beautiful is temporary.

Because there is one more thing I know about perfume: The first thing you smell is almost never the thing that remains. The bright notes rise first. Citrus. Flowers. The beautiful, volatile things. They announce themselves and then disappear. What remains hours later, close to the skin, is the drydown: the woods, the resins, the smoke, the things with enough weight to survive evaporation. That’s what aging is: A long drydown. Not the disappearance of the woman I was, but the revelation of what in her was never temporary. And of course, I think my permanent base note must be patchouli.

Tonight I am 53. Some notes I brought to the perfume of this lifetime have already disappeared. People. Places. Certainties. Versions of myself I thought I would be forever. Others are fading now, and I can smell that too. There are things I cannot keep no matter how tightly I close my hand around them. But beneath them is something I recognize. Something that has survived every version of my life so far. I don’t have a beautiful spiritual name for it. Maybe it doesn’t need one. It is simply the thing in me that remains. And perhaps that is the question I want to live now, not What will happen to me? Not Who will stay? Not even Who am I becoming? Something quieter: When everything volatile has left me, what will I smell like close to the skin? I don’t want to become so careful with what remains that I forget what perfume was made for in the first place.

It was made to be worn.

So I want to wear this life. Extravagantly. On my wrists. Behind my ears. In my hair. I want to use the beautiful things instead of saving them. I want to make the love. Burn the candles. Open the bottle. Anoint with the good perfume on an ordinary Tuesday. I want to keep reapplying life to my skin.

And when this life is finally done with me, I hope there is nothing left in my bottle. Cheers to 53, and to wearing every drop of life’s scent well. Grateful for an 8 year in numerology and Jupiter in my sign. Infinite blessings sound really good right now. And thank you for being here. I hope my musings here make you laugh, think, cry, and feel a little less alone on this road we share. I imagine there might be poetry here, open questions without clear answers, and reflections on life dripping with metaphorical prose. A space where the goddess does not have to be so sage.

To listen to me read this post, click below. Always, Athena

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