Getting younger

I started getting thinner just as I entered my fifties. Since then I have been getting younger… fitter, healthier. More attractive, I think.

It’s weird… I spend my twenties and thirties feeling miserably ugly, crippled by my own certainty that I would never deserve or earn the real love of anybody. I thought, and I still think it’s true, that the state of my body was an outward sign of an inner turmoil. How could anyone let themselves get in that state? How could anyone love someone, put their future happiness in the hands of, anyone who allowed themselves to get to such a desperate and long-lasting low point?

I hardly ever had days when I felt great, physically or about myself, and no amount of cheerful bonhomie, generous socialising, reckless drinking and ambitious over-working could, I think, disguise that fact. If anyone ever was interested in me, romantically or physically, I was unable to see it. I would talk myself out of ever allowing myself to suspect it, for fear of clumsy destruction of carefully cultivated friendships.

I was good at friendship, of girls especially, and cast myself into the friend zone deliberately, while secretly falling a bit in love with almost everyone I formed a close bond with.

So now… I have been out of that life for a while, partly by choice but largely because of circumstances. My friendships have been neglected and most have withered. Some, many in fact, were built on a false premise and it’s probably best to let them fade away. In the absence of constant nurturing by me, true friendships sustain. Some others I really miss and it may be too late to recover them.

Meanwhile I have turned into the person I wished at the time, and would wish now if I allowed myself ever to look back, I had been in my twenties. Slim. Not recoiling from accidental glimpses of myself in the mirror. No longer avoiding cameras. Fit, able to run and keep up with (even beat) my kids in a race. I look younger, I feel younger, I probably have more life ahead of me than I did ten years ago.

I’m 53 going on 26. Shame about the girls. But how joyful not to have to worry about all that ever again!