The Older You Get The More You Realize What’s Important

Don’t apologize for your wrinkles, your opinions, your thighs, your voice or your past. Just relax and celebrate by living.

Christmas 1967, age 2.

I’m turning 60 in a little over a year, which would be far more difficult to believe if I wasn’t faced with so much evidence of aging—certain body parts that are…ahem…no longer perky, a head of white hair underneath the hundreds of dollars of hair dye, and less hair overall, except for the ones sprouting on my chin. Then there is the way the white hairs are wiry and coarse. What happened to my shiny, soft, manageable hair? It’s as if my body is drying from the inside out.

Moving on from hair, there is the crackling noise my knees make when I use them. Did you know you can track how gracefully you’re aging by how many times you mutter “Oh God!” whenever you stand up? Or that no one tells you rigor mortis starts when you’re still alive. My hands are evidence. There’s also the way I automatically eye-roll pretty much every new fashion trend (high-waist mom jeans in particular, followed closely by crop tops) because I’m still stuck in - and probably will forever more be stuck in - fashion circa 2015.

It’s not easy getting older. There is nothing graceful about seeing the skin on your thighs transform into a pile of crepe paper or how your neck now resembles a Slinky, with all the lines.

But aging is…alas…something we must accept and consider ourselves lucky to experience.

Aside from the whole Watching Yourself Deteriorate thing, there are pros to being a certain vintage age. For instance, many people think life gets boring after you reach your 50s, but we had two cardinals in the bird feeder at the same time this morning, and I’m still reeling from the excitement. I also don’t have to suffer the embarrassment of trying on those goofy mom jeans. I can tell from across the store that they’re not for me.

Mentally, I feel more comfortable in my own (wrinkled) skin and have a better handle on what is important and what is not. There is a real element of peace to that.

I understand now that I’ve spent too much of my life trying to make myself into who I thought other people wanted me to be. I‘ve begun accepting that I must be myself in all my nerdy, dorky, sarcastic, foul-mouthed, weird, creative, somewhat sensitive glory.

Coming out of the back end of middle age and sliding into old age feels like many things, but most of all, it feels authentic.