notes on aging, by me (aging woman)

what i like, what i don't like, and what doesn't matter at all

i feel exceptionally qualified to make this post on aging, having aged quite a bit in the last few years. just five short years ago, i was only 32 years young. but now, now I am a disgusting 37. I was going to spend the day nursing my hangover by rewatching gallery girls, a doomed single-season reality tv show about 5 vapid art hoes that I know in my bones would secretly be loved by Werner Herzog. but instead of watching Maggie’s gross boss make her count the pebbles in his bonsai tree planter because she refused to give him a blowjob for the 20th time, i’m writing this stream-of-consciousness post documenting all my thoughts on “getting old.”

On aging anxiety:

when david cronenberg released “the fly” in 1986, the year before my birth, it became an instant classic. the Fly’s protagonist, Seth Brundle, inadvertently melds his DNA with that of a common housefly because he’s a fucking awful scientist who didn’t check his rudimentary teleportation pod for pests. shortly thereafter, he begins a grotesque transformation from man to fly, during which time he loses his hair, teeth and fingernails and becomes a shadow of his former, sexy Jeff goldblum self.

when the film was released, many viewers interpreted seth’s transformation as a metaphor for the nascent aids epidemic, which was then just becoming a public health crisis. however, cronenberg himself later clarified that the transformation was intended to be a metaphor for the aging process generally and the inevitability of our own physical deterioration.

me in line at the botox clinic, people letting me skip ahead like a wheelchair kid at Disney

i want to say that anxiety about aging is nothing new, that it has has existed since time immortal. at least since our ancestors first slithered out of the boiling sea, and then gazed back into its reflective waves and said “o damn” realizing they were, in fact, looking ugly. but I don’t think that is true. I think anxiety over aging is a modern luxury. it’s for people who live long, easy lives and have few other troubles to worry about. I do fall into that bucket so have been waiting for it to hit. every year I wonder, is this the year I’ll feel old? is this the year I’ll look in the mirror and say "yes, I am OLD.” I suspect some day it will come for me but it hasn’t hit yet (sunscreen & Irish Sea moss), but what a beautiful luxury it will be to feel anxious about aging.

On friendship:

without a doubt, the worst part of aging is the natural thinning of your friend group. insane to type but in my mid 20s I saw friends at least 5 times a week. every day i’d get a ping on a massive text chain asking if anyone wanted to grab a drink, see a film, who up, who down, what we doing tonight. while the quality of friendship during this period was quite poor, the quantity was fantastic. but naturally, with each passing year my tolerance for drama and bullshit dwindled. people grow apart. people change. or worse, they don’t change. looking back on a photograph of my bridesmaids from many years ago, i don’t even talk to two anymore. the culling of friendship herd is a natural process, particularly after you deprioritize drinking and partying—the glue that holds so many ill-fated friendships together.

others friends I still love dearly, but speak to a few times a year, though it always feels like no time has passed at all. many have moved away. this city chews people up & sucks them dry. it’s a tough place to thrive in your 30s unless you’re rich or a truly unique type of person. real estate is prohibitively expensive. half an avocado costs $6 at restaurants. it’s hard to get around with a kid. most of my friends moved to midsized cities, some to the burbs. they want a house, a yard, air that isn’t poison, their children not to be giant cokehead idiots. i get it.

i’m lucky that my city friends prioritize friendship—they’re always available with sufficient notice. but we all are just generally less available due to exhaustion. the spontaneity is now gone. outings are meticulously planned weeks in advance. when I type this out I realize I don’t want to hang out more often because I too, am busy and tired. what I actually miss is the way I felt when we were all 24 with dead end jobs, unlimited availability, nothing to do but hang out after work day, and the stamina to rebound and do it all over again the next day. this wretched city was made for that.

On my biological clock:

every time I hear the term “biological clock” I think of “Clocky” from PeeWee’s Playhouse: a sentient anthropomorphic clock that cheerfully advised peewee of the time. I then think about comedian Soupy Sales’ incendiary rant from decades ago about how much he despises PeeWee’s Playhouse, adamantly proclaiming “I don’t like talking clocks. That’s for little kids. That’s not in real life. People say ‘yeah, but you talk to a dog’ ….Alright…because dogs are friends and you talk to your dog. It’s just not real enough for me.”

I don’t like talking clocks

I, too, do not like talking clocks. i hate that my body has one, even though i’ve never really wanted kids. not because I don’t like them (I do) or because I think i’d be a shitty mom, but because the permanency of it terrifies me. I also don’t like carrying things. I don’t a carry purse or bag, I just carry keys and tiny wallet. every day I leave my apartment it feels like i’ve just been released from federal prison and I love that feeling. having to carry things like a stroller, a diaper bag, … a little ziplock bag of cheerios…none of that would suit me. I also don’t want to carry around the baby itself.

but if I do not want one, why, then, do I care so much about losing my ability to have one? it seems so silly to lament the loss of a choice you’ve already convinced yourself is made. for years i was a fake fencesitter, batting off inquiries from nosy coworkers about whether or not I planned on having kids with a “Who knows!” — a response that always made them uncomfortable. as if my reproductive dilemma was a two dollar scratcher… if I can manage to scratch off three ovary symbols and a $money sign$ yes i’ll win a baby4lyfe

inevitably thinking about my biological clock always leads me to the same, even more profound question, which is not “am I too old to have a baby?” but “am I too old to party in Berlin?” i’ve never been to Berlin, it’s been on my list for a while. i’ve just never gotten around to it. but as if the world was reassuring me that I should NOT have children, I recall the deep sadness I feel when I come to terms with the fact that I may never get inadvertently pissed on by leering gays from the Berghain balcony. which is, oddly enough, a sadness I don’t feel when I think about never having kids and or even when I think about dying alone.

On “Invisible Woman Syndrome”:

one of the dumbest white lady things to come out of the internet in the last decade has been “'Invisible Woman Syndrome” a phenomenon in which older women feel like people “stop seeing” them as they age, but really what they mean is that they stop receiving the attention from being a young beautiful woman. i suspect many beautiful women feel a deep sense of loss when their pussy is sadly removed from the pussy pedestal, something that happens to every attractive woman when the clock strikes midnight on her 40th birthday (50th if NYC, LA, MIAMI, DENVER).

I very much urge every person reading this to do their part to cure invisible woman syndrome by being very, very mean to beautiful women (or even children that may someday become beautiful women) early in life so that they don’t develop a crippling sense of entitlement that will make them go on the Internet and whine about being “invisible” for PsychologyToday, as if beautiful women instantly vaporize into a ghostly apparition from a DailyMail haunted house clickbait article when they reach menopause

me, when my pussy is finally removed from the pussy pedestal

On “what’s next:”

What a loaded question…”what'‘s next?” the prevailing trend is to view life as a linear progression of accomplishments, with everyone constantly asking themselves “ok, what’s next?” after you hit the usual milestones: school, marriage, kids, mastery of a skill/trade/career, and then once you accomplish ALL of that, you focus on your children accomplishing those same things. it almost feels like a response to escape the existential dread of your own mortality. “what next?” “what now?” “next chapter?” to feel like you’re hurdling towards death at commendable pace. well, the answer is that nothing is next me for me. just pissing away my time in this city. petting my dog. drinking a beer. working my dumb job. thinking about getting peed on in Berlin. posting on this blog. it’s the same shit I was doing 5 years ago, and it’s the probably the same shit i’ll be doing 5 years now. i am stagnating, just hula hooping through the same old shit, but i’m having a great time.