"I Used to Be Fun"
Rethinking narratives around aging, weather, and stories of tomorrow
A dear, newish friend of mine likes to quip: I used to be fun! You don’t even know how fun I used to be! Today she is a busy writer, mother, and person with aging parents. She is juggling a lot. Still, I assure her that she is still Very fun!!! And she is. Sometimes when I am standing half-dressed in my closet trying to figure out how to escape myself, I think: What would she wear? The outfit I select is inevitably more colorful. Because isn’t it true? Didn’t I used to be more fun, too?
Then again: what is fun? When I was 22 I was better at staying up late, but you know what else I was? Insecure! Overly invested in other people’s opinions! A timid communicator!
Now, with my 33rd birthday a few weeks away, I am less interested in nostalgic reminiscences of 3 a.m. college parties than in finding models for how to embrace getting older. I’m a millennial with a cranky lower back, a mostly-aspirational earthquake survival kit, a budgeting app I’ve paid for but hardly know how to use, and perma-climate-dread. I’ve written about the idea of attuning ourselves toward rather than running from, and also my efforts at dreaming better about the future amidst global dread, but I’ve shied away from acknowledging the cringe-y, narcissistic underbelly of tomorrow-brain: that it’s not just a changing earth that freaks me out, it’s my own body and life. “There is a lonely absurdity in the idea of racing against the clock at the end of time,” writes Jenny Odell in Saving Time. And yet.
The how-to-age-gracefully question has felt inescapable this summer. Aging is in headlines and in the algorithm. When Biden finally dropped out of the presidential race, I felt deeply relieved. Not just politically, but personally. Because I am hungry to see people owning up to the years in their life, in a society perpetually trying to sell us ways to pretend those years are not there. After all, however relieved I am to be in my 30s, don’t I sometimes try to hide from passing time? Isn’t that what I’m doing when I wave the red-laser-wand over my serum-glossed face? Trying to convince my cheek that time has not passed?
When I was 27, a peer told me she got “preventive Botox.” It had never occurred to me, back then, to think of my brow. I was worried about where I was going to live, how I was going to pay rent, if I was making a good impression on everyone I met (lol). I paid no attention to the lines that were or were not on my brow until the guy I started dating, then almost 40, told me how amazing it was: my smooth forehead. His biggest mistake, though, was waxing one day about the ‘reasons why I like to date women who are in their late 20s...’ Until that point, I had thought my age was incidental. A body likes to believe it is an exception to the rule.
Five years later, I am much more aware of my brow. Sure, the lines are a little deeper, but mostly the messaging is just a lot stronger. To be a 30-something woman on the internet is to be told every day how I am losing youth. The logic of the algorithm is that it tells us we have problems then pushes items promising to “solve” it. But the other day a carousel of iPhone memories sent me a photo of myself at 27. I was outside in the snow, red-cheeked, a glowing baby. I was surprised, though, to glimpse a crease in my brow. It had existed then, I just had never clocked it. I hadn’t yet been told the story that I should try to fix it. (Woe that now even preteens are buying anti-aging serums, and cc:
, whose writing on beauty culture has molded my brain).I recently interviewed a geographer who studies how Americans have viewed weather through history. Storms are not inherently ‘bad,’ he told me—they become problems when they interfere with certain societal expectations of efficiency and comfort. In a world of horse-drawn sleighs, for example, fresh snow makes travel easier. In a world of cars, it’s a burden.He challenged me to consider how much our dread about climate change is inherent to the weather itself, and how much it is learned. I wanted to counter with an immediate Have you seen Oregon’s smoky skies?! but he had a point. We all witness change, but until we are told a story about it, it’s relatively neutral. An observation—‘hydrangeas are drooping’ or ‘smile lines are deeper’—elicits more alarm when we are told it is the beginning of the end.
This summer, I, like nearly every other writer-woman I know, read Miranda July’s All Fours. It’s a novel about marriage and motherhood and desire, featuring a perimenopausal artist rewriting her narrative of what it means to grow older in her body. Without spoiling the book, I will say that the arc of her discovery has teeth in real-life research. As the 2024 Gallup/Oxford/UN World Happiness Report writes: “Given the social, functional, and cognitive losses tied to aging, the general public, including older adults themselves believe that life satisfaction decreases with advancing age. Yet, a number of empirical studies…have shown that life satisfaction either rises or stays constant as one ages.”
Life gets harder; our enjoyment of it need not.
My sister, who has worked as a caretaker for people with dementia, recently mused: Wouldn’t Americans have an easier time in aging bodies if our cultural imaginations around aging were better? In Shanghai I watched older women gather for group dance classes in parks. In Rome, older men played chess together in the squares. Instagram tells me aging can be countered with creams, as if crow’s feet—and not, say, a lack of ‘third spaces’ and abysmal long-term care options in America—are what make aging so hard.
We need systemic reforms, not just new narratives about body change. But aren’t stories helpful along the way? You have no idea how fun I’ll be when I’m 75, I want to tell my friend. No *you* have no idea how fun *I’ll* be, she’ll say, and we’ll grin, smug, sold not just on the other’s pending fun-ness, but on a future worth fighting for—one where climate and caregiving policies will allow us all to have more fun.
The other day, a friend said that he could see I, Erica, being part of a “cool older-middle-aged couple” with my boyfriend, Sam. “Why?!” I asked, but the answer didn’t matter. I was drunk on delight. It felt like the most buoying compliment we could receive. Not that we looked cool in some recent photo, but that we would be cool in some future image not yet taken, decades down the road.
I don’t know what my life will look like in one year, five years, or thirty years. I know that I will never again be this ache-free. That sea levels will never be this low. That I’m probably still going to want to scavenge figs from neighborhood trees, make brown butter zucchini cake to eat at 3pm, and watch movies over multiple nights (I am a sleepy pup!).
Scientists will tell you that we can’t tackle our warming future by focusing exclusively on either mitigation (lowering emissions) or adaptation (dealing with the change that is already here). You have to do both. You have to reach out our hands in the dark, fumbling for the shape of the thing you want to find. And then you have to keep going even when you bump into the shape of what is waiting there, instead.
Thank you as always for supporting this newsletter, which is such a helpful incubator for me to spin-out new thoughts. It was on more of a hiatus than I intended this summer due to health and life shake-ups, but my next essay—on hunger and ambition—is already in-progress. As is work on book two! So stay tuned.
More things:
I’m very, very, very excited to be a newly contributing editor at Orion Magazine. Subscribe! And stay tuned for a future essay ft. mushroom foraging and terror :)
I’ve recently read some excellent things by people I’m lucky to call friends.
’s memoir-with-recipes-and-ideas, Group Living. Georgia Cloepfil’s lyrical pro-soccer book, The Striker and the Clock. ’s forthcoming, earthshaking novel about motherhood and survival and ambition, Tilt. ’s essay about desire and dinosaur bones in the Sonora Review. ’s newsletter on wandering uteruses.Books on my nightstand: Laura Marris’ The Age of Loneliness.
’s The Science of Last Things: Essays on Deep Time and the Boundaries of the Self. Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season. Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension.I got to profile the brilliant animator Rose Bond for a collaboration with All Classical Radio, and she reminded me that when we peer into other people’s windows, the reflection we are met with is our own.
For Portland Monthly, I had fun writing short essays about the revelations of solo travel (ft. the smart advice of
!) and DIY creative retreats.I have an essay about time (in bodies and landscapes) in the BEAUTIFUL HARDBACK EDITION of Emergence Magazine and you can listen to me read it here.
An excerpt of the beautiful Emergence pages.
On the calendar:
September 26, 11am PST: Join authors Doreen Cunningham, Catherine Munro and I for a Zoom panel on “a deep dive into our wild natures—within and around us—and the animals that call us home.”
October 5: Bambridge Island Book Festival talking with Jane Marie and Diana Helmuth on their new books about MLMs and WITCHCRAFT. Can’t wait.
October 24: I’ll be at Bryant University in Rhode Island! 5 p.m. lecture.
November 1: There’s an original *jazz composition* about Wolfish and other Oregon Book Award winners/finalists, including
’s chicken book! Join us!November 16-17: I’m teaching a WEEKEND MEMOIR BOOTCAMP, live in Portland. Spots still available, do reach out if you have questions.
Until next time…thank you as always for your support (reading! sharing! kicking some coins to keep this viable!). Enjoy the last of the tomatoes. Get out the vote. Happy Birthday to all you fun Virgos and soon-Birthday-Libras.
xxE
"Because I am hungry to see people owning up to the years in their life, in a society perpetually trying to sell us ways to pretend those years are not there."
I feel this deeply myself. And I agree with you that a new story about aging having worth is necessary for so much, especially with the increasing loneliness we're seeing among older folks.
this was so interesting to think about how we frame these conversations. and I DID used to be more fun but I also was drunker and anxious so cheers to getting older and staying a good amount of fun 😀