What type of cheese do you borrow from Utah? Provo-loan!
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this on here before, but I hate the negativity around aging. Like, I get it that youth is pushed as the standard in practically every medium out there, but at the same time…why should we hate something that’s constantly happening to every single one of us?
Anyway, I was thinking today that one of the really cool things about getting older is just how much stuff you’ve experienced and how many memories you have. You don’t even have to experience big, life-changing or world-changing events…the longer you live, the more you experience, the more memories you have.
I remember things many of my students were too young to remember or things that they weren’t even alive for. That’s really quite cool when you think about it.
And think of all the memories you have that you can’t immediately access. I love when a memory of something that I’ve completely forgotten I’ve experienced gets triggered by something random and a little section of my past is remembered. Isn’t that the coolest experience?
Anyway.
Gray Child
So I have no issue with the eventuality of getting gray hairs. So many people freak out about the idea of aging, but I think it’s actually pretty cool. The older you are, the more things you’ve experienced and the more memories you’ve been able to accumulate. I think that’s kinda snazzy.
Thus, I have no issue with the fact that I have approximately 10 gray hairs.
The thing I do have an issue with, though, is the fact that these gray hairs are of a completely different texture than the rest of my hair. Like, the texture of my normal-colored hair is obnoxious on its own, but the gray hairs are like wiry and stick out whatever way they want to. That makes me want to pull them out when they get long enough, and I often do. Again, it’s not because they’re gray, but because they’re such a different texture than the regular hairs.
Is this happening to anyone else? Are your gray hairs a completely different texture than your “regular” hair? Because it’s driving me crazy.
Aged Cheese
Something that seems like a sensitive topic for a lot of people is the topic of aging. People don’t like to be called “old” or be told that they look older. People seem to want to conceal their ages the older they get.
I understand this, to an extent. We as a society value youth and young people and see being young as an advantage over being older. Youth is desirable, both at a societal level and (most likely) at a biological level. Youthfulness suggests health and fertility, and that’s what we need in order to keep the species going.
But on a personal level, I don’t see aging in a negative light. I’m not “old” (at least, I don’t think I am!), but I’m definitely not what I’d consider to be a “young adult” anymore. I think I’m finally in the “adult” camp. But that doesn’t bother me. In fact, I kind of like the idea of getting older. Amassing memories, experiences, stories, successes, failures…it’s kind of cool. It’s kind of cool to know that you’ve been on the planet longer than someone else and have seen things that a younger person could not have possibly seen just due to their age (the one I’ve been thinking about recently, as bad as it sounds, is 9/11; I’m just starting to teach people who weren’t even alive for that).
It’s just kinda cool.
Anyway.
RANKITY RANK RANK
Alright, so I want to show ya’ll two different pictures of me.
The left one is a picture of me taken in 2006. I’m going to guess this is sometime during my senior year, probably around March or April. I was experimenting with some makeup in my room – I never actually really wore any back then – so ignore that.
The other picture, the one on the right, was taken basically 10 years later: May 2017.
I feel like I look really different, but is that just my imagination? I mean, ignore the makeup in the first picture (I wish I was good enough at Photoshop to Photoshop it out and not make it look obvious)…the shape of my face has changed quite a bit. Some of the change might be due to a weight difference (I was likely heavier in that old pic than in the new, but I’m not 100% sure), but I think it’s a pretty big difference.
The skin around my eyes is a little different, too, and the tip of my nose looks bigger now (in my opinion), but I guess that’s a decade of age difference for ya.
Weird.
Aged Cheese
We’re in that time of the year where a lot of my friends have their birthdays. My birthday’s not until February (or I guess I could say my birthday was back in February, whatevs), but whenever I see a lot of other people getting a year older, it always makes me think about myself getting older as well.
I actually don’t have any issues with the idea of getting older (at least, I don’t have any issues with it yet, haha). In fact, I kind of like the idea. I like the idea of amassing your own stock of memories and your own history and your own place in all of the events that have happened since your birth. I like the idea of being able to say “I was there” or “I remember that” about events that keep getting pushed further and further into history due to the passage of time.
I mean, in a few years I’ll be 30 years old. Even with just that amount of time, I feel like I have so many memories and so many experiences. That’s really cool to me. And what’s even better is that I’ve got this blog, this record of (some of) my experiences that I can go back and look at and read when I’m older and want to “revisit” my life.
So yeah. I like the idea of getting older. I’m not afraid of it.
Along that same line of thought, I’m really excited about the idea of growing old alongside my wonderful husband. My soulmate. My grandma and grandpa on my dad’s side didn’t have the perfect relationship by any means, but whenever I think of living a life alongside someone, my mind always goes back to them. They were married for more than 50 years and were able to grow old together. I like that. I like knowing that our relationship is strong enough to plan on experiencing the rest of our lives together.
And that makes me super happy.
Eigenblogger 