Having chronic back pain is also giving me a lot of angst because it's kinda like... making me realize for the first time what it actually means to get old. I mean this particular issue may or may not be something that's directly "age-related" in medical terms; but it is age-related in the fundamental sense that this is what aging is: your body gradually breaking down over time in ways that can't be repaired. It might have started happening to me in a noticeable way a bit earlier than it does to some people, but everyone will eventually have to deal with some kind of constant or frequent back pain/knee pain/etc as they get older. And when you're young you don't really understand what that means, because it's so often just treated as a joke... the old person going "ow, my back!" is a stock punchline. But I'm suddenly realizing that it's not actually funny. Being in pain all the time is fucking awful and horrifying.
And it's kinda forced me to recognize the true horror of what aging actually is, which is just like... the slow process of dying. Like we talk about "dying" as a state that someone enters only toward the very end of their life; but it's really a process that begins not long after you reach adulthood, in which your body just very gradually starts to break down over time as the various pieces of it stop working, a process that's agonizingly drawn out over several decades until it's finally become too broken to function at all anymore. You are dying all the time, not just in the sense that you are getting closer to the hour of your death, but in that you are experiencing the actual process of dying as you age and your body deteriorates and gradually becomes less and less functional and more and more painful to inhabit, in ways that can sometimes be slowed through medicine but cannot be halted or reversed. This is some serious body horror shit, but it's real and happens to everyone.
People talk about aging like "it's natural, it's just a part of life, so it's no big deal", or like the main thing people fear about it is losing their looks, which is shallow and silly -- but it is a big deal. It's just one more way in which human existence is irreparably fucked. And I'm not okay with it.
