The 45 Project, part 10: Aging

It occurs to me that it may be a little odd that — in a writing project specifically about turning 45 — it took 9 months before I thought to write about aging.

It feels strange to use that word at all. “Aging” has always seemed like something that is the concern of people who are so much older than I ever am. That is, until your doctor tells you that you’ve reached the age where you have to have a mammogram and a colonoscopy. Having experienced both of these medical indignities in the last couple of weeks — and relying entirely on my eldest-child-obeys-the-rules conditioning to follow through on either — I have to admit that mortality has started to show up in my thoughts and in my life more often.

Generally, I’ve never minded getting older. I don’t pretend I’m younger than I am or get sullen around my birthdays, or shush people who start to reveal my age. I like myself more and more each year; I become myself more and more each year, and I treasure that becoming. In some ways, I’ve always felt older than my years, so getting physically older makes me feel more…aligned.

My taking getting older in stride is also influenced by the experience of becoming a manager at a pretty young age, and therefore continuing to be a leader often younger than my peers and my direct reports for many years. After having spent the bulk of my career being frequently underestimated and condescended to, a part of me welcomes any wrinkles or gray hairs that show up along with their accompanying perceived legitimacy.

Of course, there are tradeoffs. I walk like a crone when I first get up in the morning. I can’t bounce back from a night out like I used to. I don’t recognize more than half the people onstage at the Grammys, and whenever someone mentions a rapper with young, baby, or lil in their name I grumble about real hip-hop. Most appalling of all — I recently got an early outreach mailing from the AARP! (That’s going too far. I mean, really.)

On a more serious tip, this season of my life is also the inflection point when friendships change. Relationships that used to be tested by having someone’s back while out dancing are now deepened by showing up when they have surgery. There were years when the main events of life were your friends’ weddings, and now you dread their parents’ funerals.

Mortality is showing up everywhere. Not just my own. It’s losing all the elders in your family, until your parents are the elders, and watching them slow down and change. It’s knowing you’ve had more time with them behind you than there is ahead. It’s knowing you are next for that elder spot, and that when you get there, there won’t be anything between you and the void — that we all take our turn and that even the longest lives feel short.

Why are we made like this? We can’t live without each other, but our lives are filled with losing each other. Everything we love, we eventually lose, or loses us. Grief is such a huge part of our lived experience, and yet as a society we don’t have rituals or practices to help us with the toll it takes on our lives and hearts, with how long it takes to reckon with it, with how it changes us.

One year in my early 20s, my mother called me on one of her birthdays in her early 50s and said that she had something really important to tell me. She said that when she was a kid, she believed that once you got to your adult years, and definitely by the time you were in your 50s, you had figured life out. You felt settled, and clear, and steady — things came together, and you had it all under control. She said she had learned the hard way that that never happens. That no matter how old you get that you’re still confused sometimes, and uncertain a lot of the time, and on a roller coaster of life all of the time. She said she wanted me to know that now, so that as I got older and realized it for myself, I’d know it was normal and not something that I was doing wrong.

In the blush and bloom of my early 20s, I’m pretty sure I just laughed and wished her a happy birthday. In the 20+ years since, I’ve thought about that conversation hundreds of times with gratitude and incredulity. She was right — it doesn’t get easier to hold steady, and I never seem to reach the place where I’ve figured everything out. But I get more ok with that as I age.

This is part of a monthly series, The 45 Project, reflecting on my first 45 years — find the other installments here.