Wednesday Factoid: Getting Older

Today's Wednesday Factoid is: What's the best and the worst thing about getting older?

Let's start with the worst. Well, there are certain things that will happen to you if you live long enough. Most notably, death. If you're still alive yourself, you are outliving people you love, and the road toward people succumbing to death is often not super sudden, so you have to watch the generations before yours, full of people you love, declining and passing away. Sometimes it's just depressing to see celebrities and entertainers you grew up with passing away, but other times it's more personal and it's a friend or a family member. Obviously since I recently lost my grandfather, that's been on my mind. 

And I'm not gonna get too personal with it, but supporting my mom has been taking a lot out of me for years, just worrying about her and trying to help because she doesn't have any other local support. Providing company and moral support and technological advice is easy, but she also has to turn to me when she can't pay the hospital or taxes or whatever, and the likelihood that that will get better as we both get older is very, very low. Not knowing how to help her and not having the resources to help some other people in my life is certainly the biggest bummer of my current stage in life.

The best thing is definitely being able to call the shots on more aspects of my daily existence. I decide what I want to handle that day, what I eat, what the plans are, when I'm going to bed. This has really been in my face a lot lately because I interact with a ton of young people and so many of them are controlled by other people (mostly parents, but some are in school and there's a lot of structure there too). Of course, for most people the disadvantage of this freedom is that they're tempted to just never do the un-fun stuff, like cleaning and paying for boring-but-necessary stuff, but I've never had that problem of procrastinating until it's critical (or just waiting for someone else to rescue me from it). 

I love having options and deciding what my priorities are, and not having to justify them to anyone. I make the money, so I decide how to spend it. This week I decided it's time to buy marker ink refills because I like to draw frickin' cartoon characters and that uses up my ink. I can buy toys or clothes or whatever, or decide yep, we're going to the movies or we're buying expensive supplies for a silly baking project. It's up to me, and I don't have to ask or explain. My life is MINE. And yeah, I mean, this is all considering I have to work 40 hours a week (and spend some extra hours commuting). But there are 168 hours in a week. If I include 2 hours a day for commuting and 8 hours a day for sleeping (which I really never do), I would still have 58 hours a week to do whatever I want. That's significantly more hours than I spend at the day job that keeps the roof over my head and my Copic markers box stocked. 

I have evolved a sense of confidence that also encourages me to claim that time without any shame. I haven't been talked into routines or projects or commitments that I generally hate doing. I can (and do) say no. And even though it's sort of a bummer to be 40 and have people judging me for not having what you're "supposed to" by 40 (you know, I'm supposed to drive a car, be married, be in the process of raising my children), maturity has brought me the self-assurance to just shrug about it. Who cares? Nothing's going to happen if I don't do what other people expect 40-year-olds should do. I want what I want and my life is mine. I want to enjoy it and at my current age I have the means and the opportunity to do so. 

Yeah, that rocks.