I can say with all honesty that I hate getting older. I know that sounds rather harsh; the aging process is not for the faint of heart.

I was at my doctor’s yesterday for a checkup. She’s a naturopath I’ve worked with for the past ten years. Wow, just saying “the past ten years” makes me feel old! I was complaining about wrinkly skin and how much I feel I’ve aged over the past three years when she bemusedly said, “We don’t talk about wrinkles.”

And the other day, I met with a student client. At the end of the session, we did an oracle card reading. The office space where we meet is very dimly lit, and I had to use the flashlight on my iphone to read the guidebook. My client said they’d like to read it, so I handed them the book. Of course, they were able to read the text easily, despite the dim lighting!

Seriously?

Aging feels so disorienting. It’s like the face in the mirror has suddenly begun to look different from the face I carry around inside myself. My internal sense of who I am isn’t aging at the same speed as the reflection I see in the mirror every morning. There’s an unfamiliar disconnect between the two that I find quite difficult to accept.

At the same time, I’m in yet another transitional period in life (I am so over transitions!). A new decade. Leaving behind a long professional chapter and building something new with sound, creativity, spirituality, and healing.

Sometimes, it doesn’t feel quite authentic. I’m decades older than many of the people I work with, although they’d never know it unless I revealed my age. I don’t show how much I struggle with this truth. Running alongside younger practitioners. Even at the university I recently left, I was much older than most of my colleagues.

There is this invisibility to aging that occurs internally. From the outside, people see me functioning, creating, building something new, putting myself out there. What people don’t see, however, is the private reckoning happening below the surface, the studying of my face in the mirror, noticing what has changed, or trying to reconcile the person I still feel myself to be with the body that keeps reminding me that time is passing. Passing at a pace I find disconcerting.

With age certainly comes wisdom. And I appreciate that greatly. But there is also grief as I experience this body physically changing without my permission.

How confounding to be mourning my younger self at precisely the moment another version of me is trying to be born.

And then there’s the way women are pressured to chase after beauty, to preserve our youthfulness as we age. Both the external and internal pressures feel perilous. It seems like nearly every female celebrity over 50 has had some kind of intervention, whether Botox, fillers, plastic surgery, or something else to enhance her appearance. The privilege inherent in having such access bothers me, but even more maddening is the expectation that any evidence of aging should somehow be erased.

A slow erasure of the self.

Sometimes I wonder how other people perceive me. Do they see the lines and wrinkles, the spots that I see? Do they notice the changes that sometimes seem glaringly obvious to me? Or is it only because I know my own face and body so intimately that every new line or dimple feels magnified?

I grieve not only the physical changes, but what youth represents: possibility, desirability, sexuality, physical ease, and time stretching out ahead of you. I get tired of hearing “embrace your age” and “love your wrinkles” when there’s a new dark spot that seems to appear every damn day! I can know intellectually that aging is a privilege, that a life well lived is something extraordinary, and still fucking hate these lines and wrinkles.

But, perhaps, the most terrifying part is recognizing that time no longer stretches endlessly before me.

This poem by Mary Oliver about aging really hits home:

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

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Maybe that’s where I am with aging. I don’t have to love it. I don’t have to embrace every wrinkle, dark spot, ache, or reminder that time is passing. I can grieve the younger versions of myself and still be curious about the woman I’m becoming.

Maybe the medicine isn’t learning how to love getting older, but learning how to remain fully alive and present while I’m getting older.

Keep creating. Stay curious. Notice and invite in beauty. Allow myself to want things I haven’t yet experienced. Keep becoming, even as I become increasingly aware that my time here is finite.

I don’t know that I’ll ever look in the mirror and celebrate the changes. Very likely not. The grief is underneath everything, while above ground, I’m busy trying to build the next life.

What a long and winding path.

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I’ve loved this song since adolescence, but it hits differently now.