Reflections on Loss, Growth, Mental Health, and the Beginning of a New Decade
Written By: Rob Aurelius
On the top floor of Vista Sky Lounge in Long Island City, with the Manhattan skyline and the Queensboro Bridge lit up in the distance, I turned 40 closer to home than I had planned.
For months, I had imagined celebrating somewhere else. South Carolina was on the horizon. San Francisco kept calling my name. Tampa crossed my mind too. I told myself I didn’t want to spend my 40th birthday in NYC. I wanted movement. I wanted a milestone that looked cinematic from the outside.
Instead, I found myself in Queens, seated across from a special friend, looking out at a city I had spent so much time trying to leave behind for one weekend.
And maybe that was the point.
Because by the time I arrived at 40, I already knew that a birthday does not become meaningful because of distance. It becomes meaningful because of truth. And the truth is that these last few years have taught me more about resilience than any itinerary ever could.
The year everything changed
When I turned 38 in 2024, I was carrying a heartbreak that still felt fresh enough to cut. Two months before my birthday, my relationship had ended. There had been plans for a cruise, the kind of birthday escape that promises a reset. But the breakup came first, and the trip disappeared with it.
What remained was not celebration. It was silence.
I remember Hartford, CT. I remember standing on a bridge and reflecting on what my life looked like compared with what I thought it would look like. I remember how lonely that birthday felt. Not loud lonely. The quieter kind—the kind that settles into your chest and changes the way time moves.
There are birthdays that feel like parties, and there are birthdays that feel like mirrors. Thirty-eight was a mirror.
It forced me to look directly at what I had lost, but also at what I still had: my voice, my work, and my ability to keep going even when I did not feel especially strong. At the time, that didn’t feel triumphant. It felt like survival. Looking back now, I understand that survival was its own triumph.
The quiet lesson of 39
When 39 arrived in 2025, I wanted one last grand memory before I crossed into a new decade. I had plans to go away. I wanted the symbolism of leaving one chapter behind somewhere far from my everyday life.
That didn’t happen either.
Instead, I stayed close to home and did something much quieter: a photo shoot in my office studio. No plane ticket. No tropical backdrop. Just me, a camera, a controlled light source, and the stubborn decision to show up for my own life exactly as it was.
At first, I won’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed. Part of me still wanted the version of the story where the final year of my thirties looked bigger and brighter from the outside. But something shifted in that studio. The silence that had felt punishing at 38 began to feel instructive at 39.
I started to understand that resilience is not always a comeback montage. Sometimes it is a still frame. Sometimes it is a man standing in his own space, making peace with what is, instead of grieving what isn’t.
“If my thirties taught me how to survive, I want my forties to teach me how to live—more honestly, more gently, and more on purpose.”
The skyline at 40
By the time my 40th birthday came around this year, I wanted escape again. I wanted South Carolina or San Francisco or Tampa. I wanted somewhere that felt far enough away to mark the occasion properly.
What I got was something simpler, and in its own way, more beautiful.
A special friend took me out to dinner at Vista Sky Lounge in LIC. The skyline was there, steady and luminous. The night felt elevated without needing to be extravagant. The city I had hoped to leave for the weekend became the setting for a celebration that felt present, grounded, and real.
I have spent enough time believing that joy had to arrive in a different zip code to count. But 40 met me here. It met me in New York, in conversation, in gratitude, in the quiet recognition that not every blessing needs to look dramatic to be life-changing.
And 40 is not only about where I celebrated. It is about who I am becoming.
I returned to fragrance work with The Fragrance Group after stepping away from full-time life as a fragrance brand ambassador. Coming back to that world does not feel like repeating myself. It feels like returning to a part of my identity that still has more to teach me. There is dignity in re-entry. There is power in beginning again with more wisdom than you had the first time.
There are also new possibilities on the horizon. A potential opportunity connected to a Hamptons pop-up has entered the conversation. Summer feels open in a way it hasn’t in a long time. I don’t know exactly what door will open next, only that possibility has returned—and possibility changes the air in a room.
What grief clarifies
Turning 40 has also sharpened my understanding of time.
Recently, my family lost one of my uncles at 85. Loss has a way of interrupting whatever fantasy you had about endless tomorrows. It reminds you that legacy is not an abstract word. It is what remains when the day is over—how you loved, how you worked, how you treated people, what you built.
I have felt that even more deeply in missing my grandmother. She would have been 98 this year. I miss her every single day. There are milestones that make absence louder, and this birthday was one of them. I wished, not for the first time, that she could see who I am now: the man still building, still healing, still trying to make something meaningful out of pain.
Maybe that is part of what Chapter 40 is really about: understanding that legacy isn’t only something we leave after we’re gone. It is something we practice while we are here.
That truth is shaping the way I think about my health. At 40, mental health is not a side conversation. Physical well-being is not something to postpone until life gets less busy. Self-care is no longer a slogan. It is maintenance for the life I still want to live. It is rest. It is boundaries. It is paying attention. It is refusing to romanticize exhaustion.
It is also shaping the way I think about my work. The Resilience Project documentary is slated to debut this fall, and even writing that sentence feels significant. What began as vision is becoming form. What once lived in my mind is moving toward the screen.
And inspiration is still finding me in unexpected places. The recent Michael Jackson film stirred something creative in me—not just nostalgia, but ambition. Michael Jackson has always represented a level of artistry and emotional reach that continues to move me. At 40, I feel called to keep channeling that kind of purpose in my own way: not by imitating anyone else, but by honoring the belief that art, story, and love can still change people.
I know I am not the only person who has entered a new decade carrying grief in one hand and hope in the other. That is why I wanted this chapter to be shared publicly, not kept as a private note to myself. If the last few years have taught me anything, it is that resilience becomes more powerful when it moves beyond one person and starts speaking to a community.
So this is where I am at 40: grateful, grieving, healing, rebuilding, remembering, and reaching. Still in New York. Still dreaming. Still becoming.
If there is a call to action in this chapter, it is simple: protect your peace before the world teaches you how expensive it is to lose it. Care for your mind. Care for your body. Call the people you love. Make the appointment. Take the trip if you can, but if you can’t, do not mistake stillness for failure. Some of the most important transformations happen when nothing looks spectacular from the outside.
Chapter 40 is not the end of my story. It is the part where I finally understand that survival was never supposed to be the destination. Living is. And if the years ahead ask anything of me, I hope I answer with courage, with care, and with the kind of hope that keeps making room for what is still possible.
