The women in my life...OR...On getting older

I love wrinkles. Is that weird? It’s true, though. Perhaps that’s a little strange, and it’s rather counter-cultural, I know, but I look forward to them someday. Wrinkles reveal about us that we have a story. They tell the story of love, experience, and learning, and they expose to us the truth about beauty—the truth that youth is a lie and we have forgotten, in our American culture, that the ultimate goal in life is not to stay young, but to mature and grow wise and to share that wisdom with others.

A woman I know who has been a great guide for me in my life once asked me why it is that I have a special affinity for certain women in my life. It has taken me a long time to understand how I would answer that question, because it has taken me until now to be able to answer it. I am not going to list these women here. If you keep up on my blog, you will know who I’m talking about.

I am an emotional person. We are all emotional beings, but some of us more so than others. As much as I hate it at times, I wear my feelings on my sleeve and I tend to wear my vulnerability (though not necessarily my transparency) there too. These women, I’ve noticed, help keep me stable. They help keep my perspective clear, because over self-analyzing can get you into a mess of trouble and really skew how you see the world, as it puts you in the center of it where you don’t actually belong.

At twenty-seven years old, I am glad to be older than I was a year ago and especially a few years ago, but I find that at times I ache for the clarity that forty-five and fifty and sixty will bring me. I long for the experiences I can look back on, for the relationships that, while new now, will have rich history in the future. I long for the day when I can be so comfortable in, so used to, my own skin that being me won’t feel so strained. I long for the day when I don’t care anymore what so many people think and when being myself feels freer than being accepted. I especially long for that day.

These women hold me in check. Not by holding me accountable, necessarily, but instead by unabashedly being who they are made to be. They exemplify the hope that I will not stay as I am today, but that I will develop into my own skin and not simply learn to love myself the way God does but to learn how not to forget it.

Today, I love who I am. This is true most of the time. But I struggle with reconciling who I am with the worlds I make my home in. And so here’s to growing up and to wrinkles that will calm me down and especially to those women who have shown me that it is, indeed, a lot more fun to get older than younger.