Getting old isn’t as fun as everyone promised me it would be.

Sometimes when I’m bored, like when I’m in the waiting room before a colonoscopy, I like to play a little game (in my head, don’t worry) called All the Ways My Battle Worn Body is Falling Apart with Age—starting from my head (oh, there’s a lot going on in there), all the way to my toes (the hands of time did not forget to ravage them, either). This is an abridged version of the list because I don’t want this to turn into an I have more aging ailments than you pissing match that I will just win in the end anyways:

☠️ Achromotrichia: a word that sounds more appropriately dire than “gray hair that requires expensive upkeep every six weeks.”

For such a vain person I want a lot of credit for sharing this accidental selfie with you. My chins also want credit.

☠️ The neck—just the whole damned neck region: you know when you accidentally hit FaceTime on your phone—you’re never sure how that happens, you just know you’re all of a sudden watching a horror movie shot from an inordinately unflattering angle?

First thought: “Who is that withered, washed up actor in this low-budget terror film?” It’s you, stupid. Withery you.
Second thought: “How severely dehydrated must my skin be to look this much like a catcher’s mitt?”
Third thought: “Why didn’t anyone tell me I had so many chins?” I totally get that it’s not the job of the guy at the meat counter to tell me about all my chins. But I thought I had friends. I’m side-eyeing the people I used to call friends. I am not even going to mention chin hair here.

☠️ Jowls: one Sunday morning I looked in the mirror and saw jowls looking back at me. I did not have jowls when I went to bed the night before. The internet begged to differ, telling me “jowls don’t just appear overnight; as skin ages, the body produces less collagen and elastin, causing it to thin and lose its ability to ‘snap back’.” I grabbed the skin under my arms—where the flappy wings are, you know?—and there was no snapping back there either. The collagen supply chain issue in my body is also responsible for rosacea; another one for the list!

☠️ I now have Raynaud’s syndrome, Dowager’s hump, Morton’s neuroma, Grover’s disease… an alarming number of conditions named after dead white men.

☠️ Receding gums: my dental hygienist keeps asking me if I’m taking out my aggression with my toothbrush and I remind her that no, I’m doing that while grinding my teeth to stumps in my sleep.

☠️ Nearsightedness and farsightedness: they were having a BOGO special so I got them both! I now have reading glasses stashed in odd places, just like your mother does.

☠️ Menopause: I’m not quiiiiite there yet, but that day is coming soon, and you’ll hear from me when it happens. (All my friends who have been through it are like, “bitch, just so you know, it’s going to take more than ‘one day’ for your reproductive organs to revolt and then devastate every other system in your body. That shitshow will wreak havoc for years.”) Yaaaaay.

☠️ Dementia: I’m not even going to joke about this one because my dad is a new member of the Dementia Club (dues are free because members keep forgetting to pay—bahaha), and every time I (lovingly) poke fun at his forgetfulness (never to his face—I’m good like that), I then go ahead and forget something important later that day. Or I forget something silly, like the name of the TV show we’re watching. The point is that karma is very active and vengeful when it comes to dementia. Make fun of Alzheimer’s and karma will slap you with a momentary fugue state just to humble you.

☠️ Joint pain: after I’ve been sitting for a while, which is one of my hobbies, I look like I am walking for the first time on prosthetic legs. Actually, that might not be such a bad solution. Some of my friends are getting their hips and knees replaced, so why don’t I just proactively get some fake legs? And if they’re making fake necks now, can I get one of them too, please? Ideally the model with a single chin. I’ll pay extra for that.

☠️ Alright that’s enough for now. This list is exhausting me (energy dips with age) and you don’t have time for the entirety of my decaying body journal. (But for the record I WAS JUST GETTING WARMED UP.)

What now, after all this bitching and moaning?

(Curmudgeonliness also increases with age.)

I’m actually very okay with growing older, other than how it’s ravaging the insides and outsides of my body at a rapid and uncontrollable pace… and other than how I mercilessly make fun of said devastation. But conceptually, I’m accepting of aging. I believe wisdom is a byproduct of age. I respect the perspective that can only come from being around for more than a half century.

I don’t bat an eyelash with every passing year I age, and it might be because I am so deeply steeped in this belief that time is ticking and I just want to make the most of it, regardless of how jowly I am. I have a heightened interest in living and appreciating my Mondays, precisely because I’m so obnoxiously focused on it ending.

Here’s the scoop when it comes to our attitudes on aging:

Research shows the way we think about getting older is ginormously important. More positive self-perceptions of aging are associated with better psychological well-being, healthier behaviors, better recovery from disability, and even longer life. A bigtime study found that older adults with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived 7.5 years longer than those with more negative views, even after controlling for age, gender, socioeconomic status, loneliness, functional health, and mothballs in sweaters.

No turkeys were harmed in the making of this blog post.

So are you willing to embrace the inevitability of aging with me? Sure, we can poke fun at our blurring eyes and wayward hairs and erectile dysfunction (*oooh, she went there*) and crepey skin and arthritic joints and—sorry, things were getting dark there—and use these foibles as helpful daily memento mori signals of our finitude. Aging is a slow but certain reminder of how temporary we are, how precious we are. Guys: look how PRECIOUS this neck is!?! One glimpse of that in the mirror and I’m motivated to live like I mean it. Without a scarf.