I swear I spent most of this weekend recovering from last week. Between shuttling back and forth between Los Angeles, Seattle and Vancouver, I was freakin’ wiped. I’m so not 21 years old anymore! I get so tired so quickly. I guess this is what aging is like.
I turn 28 in a few weeks. Twenty-eight! It’s not that old, I know, but I never really thought I’d be in my late 20s. I remember being terrified of the aging process when I was younger. Turning 22 was very upsetting to me — all of a sudden birthdays weren’t about being allowed to do things, like drive a car or buy cigarettes or drink alcohol. They were just about being closer to death. My 25th birthday was a hard one, too. I’d always seen myself as being married with kids and the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a prize-winning novelist by 25. And I wasn’t. I was newly single, working a nine-to-five office job I hated, and I didn’t understand how my life had gotten so off-track. I ran to the bathroom to cry in the middle of my birthday dinner, and I was tearful most of the night.
In my early twenties, I was terrified that I would be one of those women who doesn’t age gracefully, who’s 50 years old wearing a midriff-bearing halter top, chain-smoking in a college bar, hitting on 21-year-old men and begging girls like me to do shots with her and be her BFF. Those women were tragic, and I didn’t want to be like them. But I had no idea how to age. I had no idea how to go about existing as someone whose primary social value was not in her sex appeal and her youth. I had no idea how I’d navigate that. I was so terrified I’d fail, that I’d spend the rest of my life trying to be a 21-year-old party girl because I didn’t know what else to do.
I can see now, though, that my story won’t look like that. The older I get, the more I appreciate getting older. I value experience now, and I can see how it helps me today. I can hear my mother’s advice and realize that, perhaps, she actually does know things I don’t. I can see how my experience will continue to benefit me. As society views me less sexually, I find that I am able to more clearly see my other qualities, and I’m more able to value them. I’m more capable of demanding that I be valued for everything else I am, that I be respected and loved for things substantial. It’s beautiful and it’s empowering and I love it.
I’m not going to be the tragic floozy at the college bar. I’ll be a woman who ages with dignity and grace, who is surrounded by wonderful friends and family who love her deeply, for anything and everything she is. I will be one of those old ladies who just radiates grace and love, to whom you’re drawn because you know she is comfortable in her skin and she is full of joy and peace, the kind of woman me and my girlfriends look at now and say, “That’s such a beautiful woman. I want to look like that when I get old.” I will be like that because I will choose that life for myself.
