Call Your Mom, Text Your Cousin, and Embrace the Gift of Aging (No More Botox!)

No one tells you that growing up feels a lot like jet lag. You wake up one day in a life you apparently built, surrounded by people you apparently love, and still, you feel slightly disoriented. Like someone forgot to hand you the itinerary and you probably should’ve accepted that free coffee on the plane instead of just asking for water.

You start realizing that time isn’t some big dramatic thief; it’s a slow pickpocket. It doesn’t snatch entire years, it just takes things in small doses. The way your mom’s knees used to move easier. The way your best friend’s laugh used to echo through your living room. The way you could once drink endlessly on an empty stomach and not feel like death the next morning.

Somewhere between all the milestones, we started confusing motion for meaning. New jobs, new cities, new hobbies that cost too much, and collecting experiences like we’re auditioning for a highlight reel. And still, none of it feels like what we imagined.

Adulthood isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about realizing you’ve become someone entirely new and pretending it was on purpose.

It seems like everyone’s obsessed with “healing” these days but healing from what, exactly? Being alive? Sometimes it feels like we turned emotional growth into a competitive sport. God forbid you just exist without announcing your enlightenment on the internet.

We’ve turned self-awareness into a performing art, peeling back layers until the feeling itself is too sterilized to feel human.

But maybe the whole point isn’t to fix everything. Maybe it’s to accept that life’s a little leaky, that you’ll never have all your emotional plumbing in order. Maybe showing up when you’re tired, weird, and halfway through your own unraveling is enough.

Lately, I’ve been noticing how time unfolds in strange ways. My parents feel smaller (I mean, shorter, sorry Mom and Dad). My friends, softer. We talk more about back pain than dreams.

Yet there’s a quiet beauty in it, in realizing that life doesn’t really slow down for us. It just starts walking beside us instead of ahead.

And somewhere along that walk, I started noticing something else: the war on aging. I can’t scroll for five seconds without someone hawking “preventative Botox” or “anti-aging serums” like they’ve discovered a cure for death.

I’m sorry, but if your biggest fear is looking like someone who’s lived, the problem isn’t your wrinkles, it’s your perspective.

When did we start treating life experience like a disease? There’s a bizarre cultural panic that youth is the only currency worth having, and it’s bankrupting us emotionally. Watching people inject, peel, and plump themselves into oblivion isn’t self-care, it’s self-erasure, with good lighting.

And it’s dangerous, too, this obsession with looking twenty-something forever.

It teaches young men and women that their worth expires with their baby fat, and they’ve got a decade to figure out life before the curtain closes.

But the truth is, the people so desperate to stay young are the ones who never learned how to grow.

I don’t want to erase the years from my face. I want to earn them. I want to look like someone who’s lived, who’s laughed so hard she cried, who’s cried so hard she laughed again. Every line is a record of time survived. Trying to smooth them out is like deleting your own story and pretending it was never worth reading.

Losing people I loved who were too young, cracked something open in me. It shaped a whole new perspective on aging, on how much of a true gift it is to live another day and, God forbid, wrinkle a little.

When you lose friends before they even paid off their student loans, or graduate from college, you stop treating aging like a curse.

You start seeing it as a privilege because not everyone gets to unwrap another year. Every birthday becomes less about dread and more about awe. Wrinkles start to feel like evidence: I was here, and I kept going.

Maybe that’s why I’ve started carving out time for the people who built me. Calling cousins just to catch up on nothing in particular. FaceTiming my mom to hear about the weather. Showing up for family even when I’m bone-tired or my brother’s testing my last nerve.

Because I never want to wake up and realize I lost the plot of someone’s life just because I got too busy pretending to be an adult. Staying close takes effort, but distance is built in silence, and I’d rather be a little inconvenient than disconnected.

I show up for those in my life not because I have the time, but because I don’t.

I’ll inconvenience myself for the people who make this strange, fleeting ride worth it. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: the years move fast, but the moments that save you never do.

And maybe that’s what growing up really is, not the end of something, but the slow, steady beginning of everything you thought you had all the time in the world to do.