Thoughts on Aging

It feels so strange to be here writing this. When I turned 30, a lot of folks around the same age as me had really daunting thoughts about entering this decade. They bemoaned the thought of aging, which I always thought was silly because aging is such a privilege. Do you really want the alternative? (dying young, the alternative is dying young). And 30 is SO YOUNG still. I was excited to enter this decade. I had all these big plans and had started grad school. 

Then the pandemic hit when I was 31 and life just stopped. For a few years, I spent a lot of time inside, away from people. Then I was in a relationship that further made me feel more lonely and isolated. I’m coming out of that and am now 36 but for the past two years, I’ve started having anxious thoughts about my age. Thoughts about potentially being too old for some things. Thoughts about how some prime years of my life were sucked into space, gone forever. What have I accomplished? I often feel like I’m nowhere near where I thought I would be. 

And yet, 36 is still young. Maybe not AS young, but definitely not old (even though I hear people younger than me refer to themselves as “old”. And I’ve been referred to by 20-somethings as an elder queer - but I feel like that’s different since a lot of queer people don’t get the privilege to live into old age. So I’ll accept that. ANYWAYS). 

I find myself wondering (lol as Carrie Bradshaw would say) where these thoughts were coming from. The first guess is, of course, society at large. Anyone older than 30 is considered old. Especially when the norm for so long was having children in mid- to late-twenties. I say this because the norm has been raising kids so by the time you’re in your mid-thirties, you are FUCKING TIRED. But a lot of us, myself included, chose to not get married and have kids. We are not on that timeline that should’ve been completed by now. We have our whole lives ahead of us still and so much free time to be whoever we want to be. It’s a good reminder when these strange “omg I’m aging” thoughts come up. I purposely made the lifestyle choices I did because I didn’t want to be stuck in a certain type of life. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want.

I recently saw a TikTok that featured some dude asking, “Hey, if you’re over 35 years old and you don’t have kids, what are your Sunday mornings like? You ever wake up and you see a 7 and you’re like ‘oh no that’s too early, it’s the weekend’ and then you see a 9 or a 10 and you’re like ‘alright I guess I should get up now’ and then you do what you want? Is that how it works?”

Yes, dear, that is exactly how it works. And I fucking love it.