Y'all Come Sit a Spell

I was scrolling Facebook when a woman dressed up for “old person day” appeared on my screen. She had the cardigan, the scarf, the glasses perched low on her nose, and an expression that suggested she was thoroughly enjoying herself. Someone commented, “I don’t know whether to laugh, love, or cry at that. Getting older sucks.”

I understand the laugh. I even understand the cry. But that last sentence made me stop scrolling.

No, actually, getting older doesn’t suck, Barbara.

Parts of it do. I’m not going to stand here with creaky knees and an achy back and tell you that aging is a nonstop festival of wisdom and comfortable shoes. There are indignities. There are doctors’ appointments. There are mornings when your body files a complaint about something you did in your sleep.

There are losses, too. The longer you live, the more people you may have to miss. No amount of perspective makes that painless. I would gladly give up a few wrinkles if the trade came with getting certain people back.

But the whole thing? The vast majority of growing older is really quite lovely.

For one thing, I’m still here to do it.

That matters more to me with every year. So many people are denied the opportunity to grow older. They don’t get another birthday, another ordinary Wednesday, another chance to change their mind or order dessert. When I think about them, I can’t bring myself to call the years I’ve been given a disaster because my knees make noises.

I’m not saying gratitude cures pain. If your back hurts, your back hurts. You don’t owe anyone a cheerful attitude about it. But I can wish my back felt better and still be glad I woke up in a life that has room for me to do something today.

And there is dessert.

When you’re young, people spend a remarkable amount of time telling you the correct order in which to live. Finish dinner before dessert. Find a respectable job before you make art. Settle down before you travel. Know what you’re doing before you try something new. Be practical, be sensible, and for goddess’s sake, consider what everyone will think.

I spent years considering what everyone would think. Everyone turned out to be a very demanding committee with no clear qualifications.

Getting older hasn’t made every decision easy, but it has made me less interested in asking that committee for permission. I can have dessert first. Sometimes I can have dessert only. I know the difference between a rule that protects somebody and a rule that merely keeps me in my assigned seat.

That freedom is wonderful.

I don’t mean the freedom to do whatever I please without consequences. I mean the freedom to stop wondering, every waking minute, what I’m supposed to do. It takes so much energy to live under that question. What am I supposed to wear? Say? Want? How am I supposed to feel about this? Am I doing fifty-nine correctly?

I have no idea whether I’m doing fifty-nine correctly. I’m having a pretty good time doing it my way.

I’ve reached an age where I can make room for the ridiculous and the serious in the same day. I can talk about grief, write an essay, fuss over a piece of vintage glass, and celebrate a dog’s highly questionable defense in the cracker caper. Nobody has to approve the combination. It’s my life. All of those things belong in it.

The best gift maturity has given me is knowing where to give a fuck.

I still give plenty. That’s the part people misunderstand when they hear me say I care less what others think. I care about people. I care about the work I put into the world. I care when someone is hurting. I care about truth, kindness, good questions, the creatures who deserve a chance, and whether I’ve done right by the people who trust me.

I care about my friends. Some friendships have lasted long enough for us to work together, travel together, laugh until we can’t breathe, and bury people we loved. You don’t get thirty-five years of that by refusing to care.

I simply have a better idea of which opinions deserve space in my head.

That knowledge didn’t arrive with a birthday card. It came from years of getting things wrong, trying again, being afraid, loving people, losing people, and noticing that the world did not end when somebody disapproved of me. It came from discovering that I could give every ounce of energy to pleasing the wrong person and still never make them happy.

I would love to say I learned that lesson the first time. I did not. Maturity is generous enough to let you take the exam again.

There’s a lovely kind of relief in realizing that disagreement isn’t always a threat. I can share what I think and welcome discourse. Someone can read my words and tell me where they see things differently. We might both come away with more to think about. If they don’t like what I write at all, they are free to keep scrolling.

For a long time, I was so afraid people wouldn’t like what I had to say that I barely gave them a chance to hear it. I nearly started a blog years ago. The ideas were there. The bones were there. I just never took the steps that would make it real.

Now I have a blog. I write. I share myself. People read, and some of them come back. New people find their way to the porch. Some agree with me, some may not, and I’m no longer treating either outcome as a verdict on whether I should have spoken.

You couldn’t pay me to trade that for younger knees.

Well, you might be able to negotiate about the knees. I’m willing to hear your offer. But the voice stays.

That voice has lived with me all along. It needed time to become one I could use in public without apologizing for taking up space. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I’d started the blog earlier. Then I look at what I’m writing now and know that this particular place could only have come from the woman I am today.

The years did something good with me.

They’ve done more than give me confidence, too. They’ve taught me how often I was wrong about what a life should look like. I used to think certain choices had deadlines. If you hadn’t begun by a particular age, you were too late. If a plan changed, you’d failed it. If you were still figuring yourself out, everyone else must be further along.

Now I know people are figuring themselves out at every age. Some of us just get better at admitting it.

I watched Michael J. Fox speak about accepting Parkinson’s without surrendering to it. That distinction stayed with me. Life can change in a way you never wanted, and you can grieve what changed. You can also keep looking for what matters to you now. Sometimes the new vision reveals possibilities you couldn’t have seen before.

I don’t want to dress someone else’s hardship up as an inspirational story for my convenience. Getting older can bring illness, disability, and grief. Those things deserve honesty and care. When I say aging is lovely, I’m speaking from the life I’ve been given and the perspective I’ve earned within it. Someone living through a hard season may not feel the same way today. I would sit with them before I asked them to look on the bright side.

I can speak only for myself. And for myself, I refuse to flatten all these years into a complaint.

I know my body better. I know what calms me and what costs me. I’m more willing to protect my peace, and more willing to disturb it for a cause that matters. I’ve learned that joy can show up in small, peculiar forms: a dog asleep nearby, a good line in an essay, a piece of glass that catches the light just right, or the realization that nobody is stopping me from eating the cake.

I’ve learned that plans can change without ending the story. That love can remain after loss, and new love can find a place beside it. That friendship deepens because we keep showing up through the years, not because every year is easy.

I’ve learned that the woman I was twenty years ago deserves a little tenderness. She was trying to find her way here. She had ideas she couldn’t yet carry into the world. I can see what she left me, take her hand, and make something with it now.

I wouldn’t know any of this if I hadn’t gotten older.

So when I see “old person day,” I can laugh at the costume. I can appreciate the woman who put it together and clearly understood the assignment. What I don’t want is for the joke to become our entire understanding of age. An older person is more than a cardigan and reading glasses. She has stories. She has people she loves and people she misses. She has opinions she has spent a lifetime forming, and perhaps a brand-new idea she’s about to try.

She may even have dessert before lunch.

Barbara, I’ll grant you the creaky knees. I’ll grant you the aching back and the days when you look in the mirror and have to get acquainted with another change. You’re allowed to be annoyed. You’re allowed to mourn what has become harder.

But I hope you’ll look at what has become easier, too. I hope you get years enough to know yourself so well that the question “What am I supposed to do?” loses its grip on you. I hope you find people worth caring about, work worth beginning, and the nerve to say what you mean.

I hope you learn where to give a fuck.

Then give those things everything you’ve got. Save a little room for cake.