I never thought of myself as the sort of person who would feel self conscious about aging, but I continue to surprise myself. I feel like three kids in a trenchcoat pretending to be an adult. I feel unprepared and unsexy. Any words of wisdom? Thanks for being my favorite advice columnist.
I remember scratching my head about how everyone was so uptight about their birthdays. Thirty was… it wasn’t bad. It was just disheartening. Most things got a little easier, a few things got a lot harder. People took me more seriously, for better or worse. The afterglow of my 20s stuck around for a while, but I wasn’t any version of myself I’d ever envisioned. It could have been worse, is the point.
A couple decades later, the age anxiety started making more sense. Turns out as stressful as it is trying to figure out what you’re going to be when you’re grown up, it’s dramatically harder figuring out what you’re gonna be after you’ve grown up. It’s like going from a buffet with too many options to one with too few, where half the dishes are cold and congealed and many of them are gonna give you E. coli.