I’m not old—far from it—but the pressure of aging gracefully never seems to leave. My hips hurt, and my back hurts, and I’m losing hair, but I still have acne and a full face, like a pre-teen. I have hair on my body, but I shouldn’t, like a baby. I need to have a soft, high voice, and I do, but it gets loud sometimes, and even though that is childlike, it’s a bad childlike.
I don’t feel like a woman most of the time, but I look like one, a young one, a beautiful one, apparently. And I need to act like one, and be like one, and be one. And I need to never age like one.
“I look like a baby,” I say.
And people always respond, “You’ll love that in a few years.”
I want to age, and I don’t care if it’s graceful.
I never thought I’d make it this far, and I never thought I’d have dreams of a distant future. I want to age, and grow old, and never be ready to die like I once was. I want my hair to gray, to get crow’s feet around my eyes from smiling too much. I want sunspots to show that I’ve lived, like I’ve never lived before.
I’m not old, but I want to be. Not now, but I want to live these years as they come, soak them in like a sunny day, turn them into healthy skin and bones and whatever else I need to live long.
I want to live.
That’s difficult to say, or it used to be, but it’s true. So maybe aging doesn’t suck, but the societal expectations around it. I expected brittle bones and aching joints, but I didn’t expect the world around me to say, “Now do it with grace.”
editing zt for the second book and it’s kind of amazing to look back at
like half of it i’m like ‘oh holy cow this is really good and funny and beautiful with great colors and wow did i do that?’
and the other half i'm like ‘lol what a joke who would read this garbage’
