Aging

Recently, I've discovered that I'm getting old.

This shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone, especially me. Unlike everybody else, I never wanted to grow up and kind of dreaded my birthday every year. By the time I was in college, I would occasionally calculate how many more years I had left to act like a kid and not be totally creepy about it. I finally gave up trick-or-treating at 25, when I started to look like I was older than 15. Although I never wanted to get older, I always looked much younger than I actually was, so it was simple to trick myself into believing I was still at an age where I could get completely giddy over going through the drive-thru and get away with it.

It wasn't until I was 26 that I finally accepted that I was... 26. At that point, I had to. If you're looking for a quick way to kill any stray idealizations about the happy lives of people under the age of 18, go spend a few months with juvenile delinquents on suicide watch and report back. I guarantee that you won't be the same person you were before you went to jail. After three months inside locked doors, not only did I rapidly age into my twenties, but I also started finding these annoying grey things hidden away in my hairline. Drat.

So I'll be 28 in a little over a week.

I am starting to majorly gray at my roots. My grandma was totally gray by 30, so I'm told, so I guess I have hundreds of thousands of small reasons to feel blessed that I am aging gracefully. It didn't help matters that I only started worrying about things like how my hair looked and how short I looked in that length of jeans until just about a year ago, so every new part I try out makes me look grayer than I actually am. My hair is also thinning near the top of my scalp, which might be even worse than the grays, since it makes me look like George Washington (seriously - we both have triangle head, him because it was stylish, me because I can't get my thin flyaways to do what I want).

My joints are getting stiffer by the day. It feels like they get locked into place if I sit or lie in one position for longer than five minutes at a time. I'll come down the stairs in the morning limping like I've pulled a muscle - not too likely, given that I snooze like the dead. Sometimes I'll be walking along and all of a sudden my knee will just give out and I'll stumble and be awkward like that. When I was younger, I used to joke that all my aches and pains were just my arthritis flaring up - but then I was told it really was arthritis, Lyme disease arthritis-like symptoms. Ten years later, I'm wondering if my stiffness is the real thing or just a sign of getting older and melding more freely with the couch. Who knows.

And of course, the irony inherent in all my aches and pains of growing older is achingly obvious - I'm not actually old. I'm a youngin', in fact! If the stats play out right, I have a good fifty years of getting older left to live. But right now, I'm at the oldest that I've ever been in my life, and my future is measured not in years, but in boxes of hair color and bottles of anti-inflammatory meds. Seriously, just bury me already.