I Don’t Want to Age Gracefully ⏳

I do not want to age “gracefully.”

I want to age with red desert dirt stuck under my fingernails, with salty sweat stains encrusting my baseball cap, with scabs decorating my knees from attempting another mountain bike trail I probably have no business riding.

I want to age with a voice that shouts in the face of injustice. With an unhurried stride of someone who doesn’t give a fuck if she’s late. With wrinkles that hold stories of celebration and grief and of wild days where you just had to be there.

A few days ago I turned 34. When I got out of bed to brush my teeth, the first thing I noticed were those growing dark circles under my eyes. I texted my college friends: Ummm, so what do we do about these under eye circles?! and got back a bunch of messages about having high cholesterol. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There’s a point where you feel a sense of aging whiplash. Because through childhood and adolescence, we’re encouraged to look to the future: we tell elementary schoolers about college, we emphasize figuring out what you want to “be” when you grow up (as nouns and not adjectives), we celebrate first kisses and first homes and first marriages — all the Adult Things — and then, at some point, once you finally have all those Adult Things, the drive shifts in reverse.

The focus, the goalpost, becomes what you had before. We get lost in nostalgia and memories of when we could drink two beers and not totally wreck your night’s sleep. Of those eyes that shone so brightly in 2am selfies from college.

And so we spend so much time, money, and effort trying to make it look like we’re somehow immune to aging. The lengths we go to cover up our years! Everyone’s talking about where to get Botox, or whether or not grey streaks are in fashion this year, or how to cover up those goddam undereye circles I’ve adopted.

Scrolling back to photos only 4 years ago, I see myself and think, ugh, I want those bright eyes back. But then I freeze — I don’t want that full self back. The older I get, the more I love who I become. Why would I want to go backwards? I don’t want to age with so much brainspace dedicated to… not aging. (Let’s be real, not appearing as if I’m aging.)

So I don’t want to age gracefully. I want to age audaciously, honestly, bravely. I want my outsides to match my insides.

I want to age knowing I squeezed out every last ounce of juice from this one wild and precious and weird AF life.

Luckily, I have a lot of friends and role models to show me more appealing alternatives to aging gracefully.

This past weekend, I was in the Grand Canyon with a group of 50+ women ready to hike to the bottom of the canyon and back:

One of those women once told me that she is aging “fantastically,” and after spending the weekend with her IRL, I can assure you she is.

Paula Murray was about to turn 60 when she saw a Facebook ad for an all-women’s backpacking trip through the Paria Canyon, and she spent a month talking herself out of it. Her mind ran the list: you’re not strong enough, you’ll be slow, you can’t keep up. Something drew her to sign up anyway. “Best thing I ever did was go on that trip,” she told me. Six decades in, her life was about to expand in ways she didn’t expect.

When I met Paula virtually, she was 63, living in the Wasatch with a bunch of big desert hikes on her calendar. She has 6 kids, 12 grandkids, and a long-term goal to stay active to get the $100 ski pass from her resort that’s reserved for 70+ year olds.

Deep in the Grand Canyon, watching Paula and 4 other women over 50 power hike up the steep desert trails while swapping stories, I thought: THAT’S how I want to age. Who cares about my dark eye circles when my legs can take me to the bottom of the Grand Canyon?

Here’s a conversation with Paula from almost a year ago if you need your own nudge to age fantastically, rather than gracefully: