aging with grace

A little bit after I turned 30, I had someone message me on Instagram and share that she often notices a fear of aging and would love to hear me write on my experience with getting older sometime.

I, like pretty much everyone else around me, have been conditioned to only see aging as a bad thing. To prioritize youth over all else.

In our culture, getting older is synonymous with becoming less relevant, being forgotten, and even disgust for the way the body ages.

Time marches on. You can always rely on time to continue on, to march into eternity.

When I sit here and reflect on getting older, and the endless expanse of eternal time: I see me growing older, dying, being born, being young, growing older, and again and again and again.

Age is not something to be attached to because it slips right through your fingers like a thread.

If you cling to it, you will damage the tapestry you are weaving. I see that each age has something to offer you. Something unique. Something that will never come again.

Each year, you are different. A miracle in your specific never-again-ness.

Each year is a gift. This is how I have come to see age.

I have often found myself saying, “You couldn’t pay me to be 20 again.” And I love saying this. Partly because it contradicts the common narrative- that everyone must want to be 20 again. That 20 was the best.

But was it? Was it really?



When I look back on me at 20, I was beautiful, care-free, passionate, creative, and I was also wounded, barely knew myself, didn’t know how to set boundaries, engaging in toxic and insecure relating, saying yes when I wanted to say no, out of my body for most of my waking life, very fearful and stuck in a deep freeze and fawn and always putting other people before myself.

Yes, my skin was full of collagen, my body was flexible and lean. The spark of my essence was there. But looking at the whole picture- would I really call that the best?

Obsessing over youth comes from the idea that what is most important is external. That what holds value in this society is what is on the outside, what you look like, what your appearance is- even if it isn’t real, even if what is inside does not match or is struggling.

Learning to embrace age has been easy once I have let go of my attachment to the external being the most important and returned to my truth that I deeply value what is on the inside, instead of solely what is external.


How I feel inside myself, how connected I am to myself, how much I feel loved and cared for by myself, and how well I know myself is more important than whether my skin has wrinkles, what my body looks like, or whether my body has a faster recovery time.

The fear around aging often has to do with a fear of death but also a fear of not belonging anymore.

Our youth-obsessed mainstream culture doesn’t know what to do with older people. As you age, you can feel like you are becoming less relevant and will be forgotten. While it is important to acknowledge the reality of the dominant social set up right now, this doesn’t have to be the case for you if you choose to set your own vibe instead of match the mainstream one.

If you are aware society makes belonging harder for older people, as you age, make belonging a priority for you. Investigate and heal how much you are able to belong to your own body. Cultivate a family or a group of people or a place where you can grow in your belonging as you age.

It can be shocking to look in the mirror one day and see how much your face has aged. Or maybe you realize you can’t do the physical things you once used to do when you were younger with as much ease.

The moments of this, of meeting your body as she ages, is an incredible opportunity to practice saying yes to change and allowing it instead of resisting it.

What would our world look like if more people were able to say yes to change?

It all starts with your relationship with your own body. It helps to validate what you are gaining as you age as much as you validate what you are losing with this change.

Aging is a gift. You not only naturally collect life experience that deepens you, but the process of aging necessitates you take better care of your body, if you want to age well, that is. I think that is a beautiful thing.

As Rupi Kaur says in a poem, “I ripen with age.” I become more and more radiant and embodied and well inside the more life experience I have. Youth is absolutely beautiful, and a time that deserves to be validated and cherished for what it is- but not clung to.

If you struggle accepting yourself as you age, I would suggest you start examining and letting go of the socially engrained beliefs that have you attached to the external as what is most valuable or important.

For, truly… the external is not what lasts.

Your body will disintegrate, you will let her go.

What is external is not eternal.

The external comes and goes.

Find what is lasting inside of you, and you will have an easier time allowing your external to age and change and develop as it does, and then eventually, you will also have an easier time letting go of it all when it is time for you to transition out of this lifetime.