Inconveniently Alive
A birthday letter from beyond the edge of the map.
When I was younger, old was always somewhere ahead of me.
It moved like the horizon.
At twenty, forty looked old. At forty, sixty looked old. Sixty-nine lived somewhere beyond the edge of the map, where I assumed women had become calmer, tidier inside, and less surprised by their own longing.
I was, of course, very young.
And very wrong.
Because here I am, newly sixty-nine, and I am not sure what it is supposed to feel like.
I keep waiting for some official aging department to deliver the memo.
Something stamped and notarized, perhaps.
“Dear Ma’am,
Please find enclosed your new identity, several opinions about fiber, and a revised list of acceptable dreams.”
So far...
nothing.
Instead, it feels mostly like being me.
Still unfinished.
Still curious.
Still occasionally bewildered by technology, my own emotions, and why I walked into the kitchen.
Still capable of deep thoughts and ridiculous thoughts, sometimes in the same breath.
Maybe that is one of the surprises of aging.
The ages we fear from a distance do not arrive wearing costumes.
They arrive as Tuesday morning, a half-finished cup of coffee, a body with opinions, and a self you are still getting to know.
I thought, when I was younger, that age would arrive as a category.
A clear border crossing.
One day you were young, and then someone handed you a passport to old, and there you were, expected to know the language.
But from the inside, it is not like that.
From the inside, age is less like a country and more like weather.
Some days bright.
Some days foggy.
Some days windy enough to rearrange your hair and your theology.
Some days tender.
Some days wildly ordinary.
Some days you wake up feeling about forty-seven and then your knee offers a brief TED Talk on reality.
It is not one thing.
Maybe that is what younger me could not have known.
We imagine aging long before we have any real evidence.
We imagine it from movies, jokes, warnings, birthday cards, medicine commercials, family stories, and whatever fear happens to be wandering through the room.
We are handed so many flimsy little stories about older women.
That we fade.
That we shrink.
That we become less interesting, less desirable, less useful, less necessary, less fully ourselves.
Or else we are praised only when we seem to defy age entirely, as if the best thing a woman can do with her later years is appear to have misplaced them.
What a strange little trap.
Be invisible, or be astonishing.
Fade quietly, or be “amazing for your age.”
But what if we are not here to be either?
From the outside, later life can look like one long narrowing.
From the inside, it is much stranger than that.
Yes, some things are harder.
The body develops opinions and delivers them without concern for timing.
Grief has left its fingerprints.
Time feels less theoretical.
There are losses no cheerful saying can pat on the head and send away.
But there are other things, too.
There is relief.
There is clarity that used to be buried under pleasing, proving, pretending, and trying to earn a place at tables that may not have even served food we liked.
There is a quiet little freedom in realizing not every opinion needs your attendance.
Not every room needs your performance.
Not every invitation is a summons.
Not every old story is a law.
There is the strange pleasure of becoming harder to impress...
and easier to delight.
A ripe juicy peach.
A good laugh.
The right sentence at the right time.
A friend who says, “Me too,” and suddenly the whole room exhales.
Maybe that is part of what I did not understand when I was younger.
I thought getting older meant wanting less.
But now at sixty-nine...
I still want.
I want ease.
I want beauty.
Purpose.
Meaning.
New experiences.
More aliveness.
I want conversations that go somewhere real.
I want tenderness that does not have to prove itself.
I want delight that wanders in barefoot and unannounced.
I want freedom.
Not the shiny kind from commercials, but the everyday kind.
The kind where your own soul can finally put its feet up and stop asking permission to exist.
I want to make something true with the time I have.
That sentence feels especially alive in me right now.
Not something impressive, necessarily.
Not something polished enough to win the approval of the imaginary committee that lives in so many of our heads and keeps clearing its throat from the balcony seats.
Something true.
Something that says:
I was here.
I paid attention.
I loved what I could.
I learned what I could.
I turned toward the light when I remembered.
And when I forgot... I tried again.
Maybe that is why this birthday feels less like an answer and more like a doorway.
I cannot tell you exactly what it feels like.
Maybe because I am still inside the question.
Maybe because every age looks different when it is no longer a number on the far horizon, but the actual ground under your feet.
You do not arrive at it as an idea.
You arrive with grocery lists, old griefs, small hopes, unpaid bills, favorite mugs, stubborn dreams, and whatever courage you managed to gather before breakfast.
You arrive as yourself.
Still changing.
Still carrying contradictions.
Still able to be startled by beauty.
Still able to want more life.
And this is what I wish younger me had known.
The future self she was so quick to flatten into a stereotype would turn out to be a whole woman.
Messy.
Tender.
Funny.
Tired sometimes.
Brave sometimes.
Occasionally dramatic for no clear reason.
Still learning where to put all her longing.
Still making peace with what was.
Still reaching for what might yet be.
She would not be finished.
Not even close.
So if you are younger and afraid of aging, please be careful who gets to tell you the story of your future self.
Do not let a culture that barely listens to older women convince you it knows what your life will feel like from the inside.
And if you are already here...
in your sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, or somewhere beyond the age you once imagined...
maybe we get to remind one another.
Not that aging is easy.
Not that loss is not real.
But that becoming doesn’t expire.
That delight can still find the side door.
That courage can show up with bedhead.
That wisdom may come, not as a grand pronouncement, but as the blessed ability to say,
“Oh honey... absolutely not.”
...and mean it.
Still the possibility of waking one morning and realizing some part of you has quietly begun to bloom again, without asking whether it was too late.
I cannot tell you exactly what it feels like.
But I can tell you this.
I am not finished.
I did not shrink on schedule.
I am inconveniently alive.
With you beyond the edge of the map,
Katherine
Soul Letters
Soul Inquiry
What in you is inconveniently alive right now?
Or share whatever this stirred in you. I’m here.