Gravity Comes For Us All

On aging bodies & egos

Hi friends.

Been thinking about my body this week as I approach the moment where I will have to stand in front of an audience soon. About how I feel about how my body has been changing in middle age. And about how it connects with my ego. I took some notes in my journal:

I’m annoyed, I feel angry, I feel lazy, I feel OK sometimes because I’m still moving, I’m still able, I’m still at least a little bit cute. If I wanted, everything could be a little different, I could go to more classes at the gym, I could get work done on myself, I could get surgery. But honestly I work so hard in the rest of my life, in this instance I want to do just want I need to do and not much more than that. Whatever I need to do to stay healthy, stay off medications and so I can still fit in my clothes. My body is different now. That’s my truth.

There’s a little shift I’ve been making about how I see myself when I look in the mirror. Applying a certain logic for as long as it takes to get to the next place, the next emotional buoy. Once I was this way, now I am another. We are all changing every second of the day. It’s impossible to remain the same.

And yet there’s Facebook giving us another photo of ourselves ten years ago with much tighter skin, and how long do we study it? Should we even care? How much time do we want to lose to a memory? (Facebook is a tool of the patriarchy, if you didn’t already know that.)

It is hard not to miss the way things were at least a little bit. If you would like to know the thing I miss most about my younger body I can tell you without batting an eye.