Aging: A Personal Reflection on What Was and What Is

The passage of time changes our bodies, but it also changes our perspective.

Reaching the age of 50 last year made me reflect on my life. The things I accomplished, the items I crossed off my bucket list, the dreams I never fulfilled, my regrets, the moments that brought me joy, the pregnancies that changed my body, the joys of parenthood, the trials of life, and the grief of loss. I mean everything.

Some memories make me proud, while others still bring me to tears. But it was the life I lived, and every experience carried a lesson. Some lessons I welcomed, some I endured, some I fought, and some I eventually accepted. Not every lesson was one I wanted to learn, but each one shaped the person I am today.

I remember my first day of college distinctly and the people I met. I still find it hard to believe that day was over thirty years ago. Sometimes I wonder how those years passed so quickly and how fifty seemed to creep up on me. But it didn't creep up on me at all. It came slowly and deliberately, building on one experience after another.

I realized I have lived a thousand lives since that day in 1992 when I started college. I earned two master's degrees, moved to a new country, experienced a whirlwind romance, married the man of my dreams, and then felt the grief of his death. I had two children, stayed married for twenty-two years, lived in Canada for ten years, went through bankruptcy in 2002, and eventually found financial stability over the last decade. I have lived a life where many of the things that happened to me are not experiences everyone has. That is how I reached fifty.

Not in a jet speeding toward its destination, but through ordinary mail. Sometimes moving steadily, sometimes flying along, sometimes getting beaten up between other letters, stamped, boxed and thrown into wagons, shoved into a mailbox, reaching grubby hands, torn out of its envelope, and finally opened and read like a collections letter. It wasn't a quick journey. It was a long one, marked by every stop along the way.

The Mind — Who I became

I am not the person I was in the 1990s. I am not the person I was in the 2000s. I am not even the person I was in the 2010s. Neither am I the person I was during the first five years of the 2020s. I am the culmination of all those people I once was.

I remember there were times when I realized I wasn't the same person I had been before. I would find myself facing situations similar to ones I had experienced years earlier, yet my reactions would be completely different. Those moments reminded me that I had changed, often in ways I hadn't even noticed.

When I look back at how I navigated relationships, both intimate and social, I know that if I had to do them today, they would look completely different. I no longer feel the need for the social approval I sought when I was younger, nor would I bend in the ways I once did. With age came the realization and acceptance of who I am, what I value, and what I am willing to tolerate.

Looking back, I also realize that aging didn't stop me from embracing new chapters. Just as I thought I was entering a season of maintaining what I had already built, I found myself beginning again. At fifty-one, I started a new private practice. Years ago, I might have questioned whether I was too old to take such a leap. Today, I know that growth doesn't end simply because we reach a certain age. If anything, age has given me the confidence to trust myself more than I ever did before. It reminded me that aging isn't only about looking back. It's also about having the courage to keep moving forward.

I am by no means done evolving. I still have much to learn, but I am in a far better position to make decisions than I was even a decade ago. I know my boundaries, when to draw a line, how to respect other people's boundaries, and when to walk away if things don't work. I think age has also brought me greater courage because, at this point in my life, I feel I have less to lose, even if that is only my perception.

I am no longer striving to build a life. That already happened, unbeknownst to me. Now I am striving to become a better version of myself.

The Body — How time changed me

As I moved from my twenties to my thirties, then to my forties, and now into my fifties, I see a completely different version of myself. I am not just talking about my personality; I am also talking about the physical changes that come with aging. I went from running up the stairs two steps at a time to making sure I place my feet carefully when I walk down them. I am not so old that I am unsteady, but I certainly don't want to fall and break a bone. I broke my ankle in 2014, and I remember how difficult that was. For the first time in my life, I gained so much weight because I couldn't walk for three months.

Of all the changes I have experienced, the most prominent have been the physical ones. When I had my first child, I lost all the pregnancy weight very quickly. I was also going to the gym regularly and was able to run on the treadmill at a fast pace for fifteen to thirty minutes. I can't run like that anymore, but I am still able to walk uphill on the treadmill at a good pace. I do, however, miss being able to run like I once did.

Then came my second baby, ten years after my first. That was when I found it much harder to lose the weight, though I slowly did over the years. By the time she was five, in 2020, I weighed less than I had before I became pregnant with her. I felt healthy and looked good.

Then came the pandemic. Although it didn't reduce my physical activity, I believe it increased my stress levels. I slowly started gaining weight, and by then I was also over forty-five. The next four to five years were the most stressful of my life, and chronic stress makes it much harder to lose weight. In fact, increased cortisol can contribute to weight gain, and that is exactly what happened to me. The weight came on despite maintaining the same diet and exercise habits that had always worked before. I realized I was aging. My metabolism was no longer what it had once been, and the hormonal changes that came with midlife only added to the challenge.

Last year, after I turned fifty, the hot flashes and other symptoms of perimenopause began. They eventually became significant enough that I started hormone replacement therapy last month. Looking back, I wonder how much of my sleep problems over the past few years were related to perimenopause. I am now sleeping slightly better than I have in quite some time.

When I was younger, I used to look at people in their fifties and think they were old. I wondered why they walked more slowly, why they took so many medications, and why they seemed to struggle with things that came so easily to me. I didn't take a single daily medication back then, and I thought losing weight was simply a matter of eating less and exercising more.

Now that I am around that age myself, I understand. I am slower than I used to be. I started taking daily medication last month for the first time in my life. I have learned that, as we age, the body doesn't always respond the way it once did. Sometimes the same effort no longer produces the same results.

The Heart — What I loved, lost, and discovered about my own resilience

Over the years, from 1992 to today, almost three and a half decades have passed, and with them my heart has evolved in ways I never anticipated. If you had asked the eighteen-year-old me in 1993, hypothetically, how she would respond to the situations I would later face in my personal life, her answers would have been completely different from the choices I actually made many years later.

The decisions we make at any given moment are a reflection of who we are at that point in our lives. As we continue to evolve, it is only natural that we make decisions we might never have made years before. I know that if you had asked the younger me whether she would have stayed in the kind of marriage I had, she would have answered, "Absolutely not. I would have walked away the first time it happened." But that isn't what I did.

By then, my life was different. I wasn't simply dating someone. I was married, I had children, and I had elderly parents to think about. So my heart tolerated what it never would have tolerated a decade earlier. And when life became difficult, it learned to compartmentalize so I wouldn't fall apart.

As I grew older, I also hesitated to leave because I believed I would be alone for the rest of my life. But after I made the decision to leave my marriage, my heart no longer feared being alone. I learned that I could be alone and still be okay. Having someone to share my days with is now the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.

So when things don't go the way my heart wants, it has learned to stay strong. It has learned to expect that disappointments are a part of life and adjusts its expectations accordingly. It no longer falls apart. It's as though it has developed shock absorbers, for lack of a better metaphor.

Life has a way of teaching us lessons we never expect to learn. It places us in situations we never imagined we would face and asks us to make decisions we never thought we would have to make. Looking back, I realize my heart did not simply grow older. It grew wiser, stronger, and more resilient with every experience it endured.

The Spirit — How I learned to find meaning in it all

Time didn't simply make me older. It introduced me to versions of myself I never knew existed. It also taught me that life wasn't measured by the milestones I reached, but by everything that happened along the way. When I was younger, I thought happiness came from reaching the next milestone: finishing school, building a career, getting married, having children, and buying a home. Looking back now, I realize life wasn't waiting for me at the next milestone. It was happening in between them, between love and heartbreak, birth and death, joy and grief, and everything else that makes a life.

Throughout my life, my spirit has evolved just as much as my mind, my body, and my heart. If there is one thing aging has taught me, it is that peace doesn't come from having life unfold exactly as we imagined. It comes from learning to embrace life as it unfolds.

That is what aging has come to mean to me. It is becoming someone I never imagined I would become physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, while slowly accepting that every stage of life offers an opportunity to learn, grow, and evolve.

As we age, we don't become someone entirely new. We come to realize that every version of ourselves still exists within us. The hopeful college student, the young wife, the mother, the woman who struggled, the woman who grieved, and the woman who is starting something new at fifty-one all still live within me. None of them were mistakes. Each one had a purpose. Together, they became the person writing this reflection.