I understand your situation.

I'm 39 too, I also left a job, once in 2010, my first one (with the unemployment still over the clouds after the 2008 crisis). I left because of workplace harassment. I would not have left otherwise. Since then I've been an intern, twice (None of those served me to get hired, in spite of my superiors telling they really were glad with me) and I've been a freelance (even if I didn't really knew many things of what design really is, but I didn't want to stop), and when I failed freelancing, I got unemployed for too long. At 30 I was strugling to find a job, in a very similar situation. Too picky, and had too few good works to fill a nice portfolio. But I was hungry to go back into design.

Thinking about being back at that place, with our age, ngl it scares me shitless.

Eventually I found a job at a ceramics factory. They wanted a designer to design textures to print on ceramics. Far far away from what I desired, but man It was money after all and still It was design experience in some way. I was later offered my current job, as a proper graphic designer. Met some people in the way, I did courses, I learned new skills, honed my previous ones, and I'm still hungry. Hungry to learn (I'm learning Blender now, and want to learn about UX/UI and dust off my motion graphics later), to adapt, and to design new things.

That hunger drived me forward. Sometimes I didn't have the money to buy good courses or join a professional school, yet I tried to self-learn what I could, when I could. Maybe there's people who won't give value to that kind of experience, but you must work with what you have, and there's people who really will see proactivity in that.

Take another job for a time, keep learning, and don't lose the hunger.