Unpopular opinion: wrinkles are a privilege

Fifty be looking like: no filter - literally and figuratively!

Next week I’ll be fifty. Five zero. FIFTY.

To be honest, I have no idea where the time went.

It seems like only a few years ago I was young and carefree, charting my career, travelling with wild abandon, partying in the back streets of Soho and Sydney… nek minnit I’m FIFTY.

For years – maybe even decades – my mum has been telling me she feels like a young person trapped in an old person’s body, and I’m starting to understand what she means.

In my late teens, I recall thinking that once I’d completed my degree, I’d marry my then boyfriend, and have two kids by the time I was 28. Like somehow education, matrimony and procreation were the be-all and end-all of life. JAYSERS.

February 1998: newly landed in Australia

Needless to say, my Stepford life did NOT go to plan. (Thank gawd for that! Could you even imagine?!) I am so grateful for the incredible adventures and romances and experiences and connections I’ve collected along the way.

But these days NGL, I look in the mirror and well, I look like an old version of me. I got up the other morning, my face creased from the pillow, puffy eyes, frizzy hair, gravity pulling everything towards the ground – boobs, jowls (!), belly (FUPA! HTF is that even a thing?!) – FML, wrinkles and saggy skin having a party everywhere.

Yet, every time I notice another age-related decrepitation (and it’s often ^🙄), I force a smile and remind myself, growing old is a privilege that not every person experiences.

For me, September is a month of many birthdays. Except four of those birthday celebrations will be minus the people. As I turn fifty, I reflect on beautiful friends who didn’t make it to this age, their lives cut unfairly short. Folk in the prime of their lives, with partners, children, livelihoods and passions, and still so much living to do.

But while ageing is a privilege, the flipside of that is I feel we’ve become so focused on longevity at almost any cost that we forget we’re supposed to die.

For many of us, death won’t occur simply when we’ve finished everything we want to do. The idea that we live, in good health, up until we are ready to die isn’t the reality for most people. And while healthy living can help in the present, it's no guarantee against the ravages of many illnesses that don't particularly care how well you've eaten, how much you've exercised or how diligently you've looked after yourself.

1979, aged three

Around 446,000 Australians are currently living with dementia, with that number projected to be over 1 million by 2065. Sure, that's a little way off but as we celebrate longer lives, we also need to talk honestly about what those additional years might look like – because lifespan and health span aren’t the same thing.

Surely no-one wants to die ‘young’. But our fixation on measuring a good life by its length – quantity rather than quality – deeply disturbs me.

A friend who works in aged care has a fiercely independent 95-year-old client, who is desperately fighting ageing with everything she’s got. And while the client is quick to highlight that her own parent lived to 104 – she somehow neglects to mention that the last few years of her mum’s life were spent in terrible pain, begging for it to end.

This makes me sad. Not that we die, but that we’ve somehow come to regard staying alive for as long as humanly possible as the ultimate goal, without always stopping to ask what we want those additional years to look like.

No-one wants to say goodbye to the people they love, but trust me, watching someone you love endure a slow and debilitating decline can be bloody hard too.

Personally I think Paul Kelly summed it up perfectly when he said “if you’ve got to 70, and if you die, you haven’t been cheated. The rest is just gravy.”

So, as fifty comes hurtling towards me, I’m trying to look differently at the bits that sag, wrinkle and ache, and instead consider what parts of life are most important to me.

What living do I still want to do with the time I have left, recognising it could all end tomorrow? What have I been putting off that deserves to move up my list? 

What am I currently giving my time to that I should care less about?

Asking these questions helps give me perspective. It reminds me what matters, what deserves more of my time - and what deserves considerably less.

And to the beautiful people I wish were growing older alongside me: rest in love, my dear friends. 🚀💕