'Aging is another word for living'

15 things I've learned in the last year

In the couple weeks before my 35th birthday, I started to feel a little old. 

I noted the places on my forehead where I might, just might, see the merits of injecting a certain neurotoxin. The left hip pain that never really went away after pregnancy has been keeping me up at night. I started looking at Pinterest pictures of women with a dyed grey streak in their hair a la Susan Sontag, because I am 100% doing that at some point, and I started to wonder if the growing number of greys on my head means that time is now. I queried friends on why their skin looks so much better than mine. 

I grew up in LA, and I watch enough Real Housewives to know that people who go down the road of trying to stave off the visible signs of aging don’t tend to stop. They are effectively hopping onto a treadmill that will get faster with each passing year — as they get older, the so-called “treatments” get better, and the standards get higher. It’s no wonder that when I see 20-somethings with lip filler these days (a disturbingly common occurrence) I’m always struck by how sad they look. They have a long road of this ahead.

“Whenever the urge to be ‘proactive about anti-aging’ hits me, I remind myself that aging is another word for living.” I pasted that sentence, from Jessica DeFino, into the Notes app on my phone a few months ago, when I started noting down the lessons I’ve learned in the last year. I think the point of writing these lessons down* is to create a record of the way that life can actually get easier and more joyful as you get older — albeit with more aches, pains, and fine lines.

If you are doing the work, paying attention, trying not to repeat the same bullshit, you inch towards a place of liberation and surrender. You get more responsibility, yes, but also more agency and confidence to shape not just how you want to life your look, but more importantly, feel. The hope is to arrive at a place where the optimizations and injections may still seem alluring, but you ultimately know they will not provide what you are looking for. 

Walking through the garden in October, my favorite month of the year, I’m struck by how it doesn’t try to hide its decay, pretending it can stay in bloom indefinitely. The skeletons of spent flowers don’t cling onto their brown petals, coaxing them back to pink, preventing their seeds from being dispersed. They display a different kind of beauty: wisened, hardy, and assured of all the the life force that’s yet to come.

Here’s some of what I’ve learned in the last year.

1. You need a “kind of pathological stubbornness” to survive as a creative person over the long haul. Forget AI, Substack, or the next big thing to either save or threaten your creative livelihood. None of it matters. All that matters is you in the chair, doing the thing. Sometimes you’ll earn money from it, sometimes you’ll have to go get a job elsewhere. That’s how it’s always worked. Just keep doing the thing in the meantime.

2. Saturday night babysitters are overrated. You are tired then. Your kid is already asleep. You could be resting for free. That’s why Saturday morning babysitters are where it’s at. The only rule is you have to use the time for something other than work or chores: go workout, go sit in a cafe and read a book, go act like a person who has free time. Magically, everyone will come home liking each other a bit more. (Shout out to Izzy and Ciara for holding our family together, three hours at a time.)

3. When you are going through a rough time mentally, one of the most reassuring things you can hear or say to yourself is: It won’t always feel like this.

4. As you get older, your options narrow. Youth sees this as a bad thing, but you’ll start to notice that people who operate by the inverse of this — keeping their options chronically open for fear of making the wrong choice — are also limiting themselves, just in a different way.  

5. This will only make sense if you live in the UK, but having a clothes dryer in your house will change your life more than you ever thought possible.

6. If you are bad at accepting or asking for help, you need to interrogate the value systems, power structures, and incentives that led you to believe you should be able to do everything by yourself. Therein lies your answer. 

7. Nothing will get you more comfortable with the unfairness and uncertainty of life than the endless stream of sickness and viruses that come home with your child from nursery. Where once you were a germaphobe, hoping every hand wash and plan canceled out of caution might stave off the next disruption, you are now literally and figuratively licking the floor. That’s because it is much less stressful to accept defeat and deal with things as they come (they are usually not as bad as you imagine), than to live under the oppressive fantasy that you can control everything. 

8. You should absolutely allow yourself to go to bed angry. No relationship problem has ever been resolved at 10pm after a day of working and parenting a toddler. Congratulate yourselves each time to manage to save the conversation for a time when you are slightly more regulated versions of yourselves.

9. You are now a person that carries little packets of nuts around you at all times. That’s because eating in a way that balances your blood sugar will do wonders for your mental and physical health. 

10. There is one time when the unsolicited advice from retired men in their 70s is very helpful, and that is when they know a lot more about allotment gardening than you do and want to offer you help. Accept it.

11. If you think you don’t have time for hobbies, writing, fitness, reading, gardening, it’s because you’re looking for hours. Look for 25 minutes, a few times a week. That’s all you need. The first five minutes for faffing about, the next 20 are for doing the thing. 

12. Nobody reads long professional emails. It’s very tempting to write a strongly-worded, 800 word email outlining all your carefully calibrated points to plead your case. Unfortunately, it won’t accomplish anything. Send a polite, two sentence email stating your bottom line or boundary. Then move on.

13. There is a state of being where you are hyper-functioning, pathologically getting things done, thinking that once you tick off every last thing, you will finally get to all the good stuff. It’s possible to spend your entire life in this mode, promising yourself you’ll enjoy it all once you get to the other side. The other option is to accept there is no other side. To realize that the assignment is not to get everything done perfectly, it’s to find ways to relish life even (especially) when you’re the busiest. I will never not be re-learning this lesson, but Oliver Burkeman’s essay on adopting a “deliberate defiance toward the inner taskmaster” has really kept it front and center in my mind this year.

14. As Miranda July devastatingly put it in her novel: “Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it.” This isn’t to drag men, it’s to say that the work of caregiving has been systematically hidden and devalued by society, and that work is predominantly done by women for reasons both of biology (unchangeable) and society (changeable, to an extent). When women appear to “have it all” — big career, kids, full life, hobbies, friends — they are very likely attaining it at the detriment of their own sanity and well-being. I don’t want this to be true, and I don’t know what the answer to this riddle is. However I’ve learned that it helps with the rage if you start to say this truth out loud.

15. Moving won’t change your life but having more help and people in your life will.

*Here is last year’s list, which numbered at 20. Maybe with each passing year I will write fewer, yet more profound lessons?

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