This year I turned fifty-five.
I honestly don’t know how it happened. Last time I checked, I was thirty-five. And suddenly now I’m getting the AARP invite emails. Where did the time go?
They say age is a state of mind, and that’s partially true. We often feel far younger than we are. But age is also thinning and graying hair, expanding waistlines, new medications and teeth teeth teeth! I wish I could state-of-mind myself back to twenty. Or maybe twenty-five.
Mark and I have a good friend who was born after we met. She’s super smart and pop-culture aware, and yet she looks at us blankly whenever we mention our own pop-cultural references that once-upon-a-time everyone was familiar with. I mean, who doesn’t know the Soup Nazi?
Sigh. I am old.
* takes a deep breath *
Okay, I know I’m not that old. I still have a good decade or more before I reach social security age. And I’ve done great things with my time so far. Mark and I have run a successful small business for twenty-five years, and in the last ten, I’ve gone from entirely unpublished to being a successful author with over forty published works.
And yet, what I wouldn’t give to be thirty again. To have made different choices. To have plowed ahead with my writing career before my mid-forties. If only I’d had a crystal ball.
Who wouldn’t want to be twenty-five years younger? Well, maybe twenty-five year olds LOL…
Still, there are some perks that come with advancing age. I am the sum of everything I have seen, learned, and done these past five-and-a-half decades. I know who I am now. I’m much more secure in my writing than I was in my twenties or thirties. And I actually like myself, something that wasn’t true when I was growing up.
And though not everything in my life has gone the way I’d hoped, I have a wonderful husband, great friends and family, a roof over my head, and so many more stories left to tell you all that I will never manage to write them all before I die.
And I still have my hair.
So I figure this aging thing ain’t all bad. I had this strange conviction when I was younger that I would do my best writing when I was in my forties, because I would have more life experience under my belt. I think that was true – the difference between what I wrote in my teens and twenties and what I’ve written this last decade is like night and day.
Why shouldn’t it just keep getting better?
So I raise a glass to the next decade, and look forward to what the future might bring.
It’s not over yet.