Well, it happened: I turned 60. It was shocking when my husband did it this past July, but I wasn’t the one having to have all the feels. I just watched from the sidelines, tossing bland reassurances his way and snuggling deeper into my cozy, enviably young, 59-ness.
It’s not like I didn’t see my turn coming. At 17, I could feel the unmistakable drumbeat of time thumping in my chest. By 20, I’d been expelled from college, waylaid by an eating disorder, and I realized the thumping in my chest wasn’t time but depression. Years would pass before I could get my sea legs, before I felt like time was expanding, rather than collapsing, on me in waves.
My sense of personal time has felt different in every decade. Some years I felt mostly young, like there was plenty of time to find my way, make a path, change course, make a new path. Some years the tide of my anxiety washed in unfailingly at 3 a.m., awakening me to a laundry list of frightening realities, one of which was the fact of my aging. These last few years there’s been a tug-of-war between my intellect and my body, with my brain whining that I’m decrepit, while my body makes a case for its stubbornly good health. Throughout the old-feeling years and the young-feeling years, one thing remained constant: I knew that at some point I’d be old for real, most likely before I was ready.
I definitely don’t feel ready. Sixty feels calamitous. Not surprisingly – because the world has a way of reflecting back to us whatever we are feeling – the last few weeks of my 50s were filled with calamity. I locked my keys in my car, got a wicked fever from my COVID-19 booster shot and broke a tooth. Two days later, I caught my hair on fire at a party, and a few days after that, I hit a pigeon, broke the same tooth again and was told I need surgery on both of my wrists. I’m not superstitious, but I have to wonder if these are clues to what the next decade has in store.
I know that people handle aging differently. As a hyperactive 10-year-old, my husband would be bouncing around his living room in a desperate search for something to do while his parents watched sleepily from their recliners.