Before I turned thirty, I heard it over and over again: “Enjoy it now, because once you hit thirty, everything changes.” The everything that people were talking about? My body. My body, your body, everyone’s body—and apparently they all just flip their lids on the eve of your twenty-ninth birthday. Or so I was told.
The reality? Nothing changed when I turned thirty. Except for gaining a few new expertly placed gray hairs (they’re all clustered in the same spot and lead me to believe I may be growing a bold gray streak), my body stayed more or less the same. You know when things did start to get wonky? Thirty-one.
As far as I know, there’s nothing major going on internally… things are just changing, and I didn’t realize it could start happening so fast. Here’s one clear example: After four months of periods that kept arriving a week early, I finally Googled “31 and period keeps coming a week early” and found that OH, HI, that is a totally normal thing that can happen in your thirties. Apparently periods also get more intense, and just generally suck until you enter into the fun fest known as menopause. Great.
So I started asking around. And while a good chunk of the APW staff is younger than me, a few people are older than me. And Meg, who’s thirty-six, volunteered that for her, thirty-five was some sort of tipping point. She says now she has to worry about her knees, and her skin losing elasticity… and really, we’re just talking about mortality, right?
Now I’m curious: What else should I be looking out for? When will I realize that what I call back pain now is a mere shadow of what’s to come? In other words, when do people start physically feeling their age… and what does that feel like?
If you’re THIRTY or over, hit me: how did your body change? When did those changes start? Just how fun is the physical part of aging, really?
