Aging in Reverse
A part of the Summer Solstice Celebration at VibeCamp 2025 (FiveCamp)
Behold: I have migrated over to Substack after attending both LessOnline and VibeCamp like a complete and utter cliché. I expect this blog to be somewhat of a travelogue/memoire kind of thing wherein I finally have a place to chronical all the long, strange trips I’ve been on. I simply have so many stories to share and I can’t wait. Stay tuned!
But first, I am posting the speech I gave at this year’s VibeCamp Summer Solstice Celebration (put on with my husband, the writer of Living Within Reason and one of our friends). The theme of the show and VibeCamp in general (FiveCamp) was finding your inner child. This was particularly powerful to me this year and the entire show was pretty emotional (in the best way).
Many, many years ago, I was chatting with one of my parents’ New Age friends at a dinner party. I was likely 6 or 7 at the time and I was trying to make some kind of point and I apparently began an anecdote with “Back when I was 100…” The New Age friend decided that I was undergoing some kind of past life regression and labeled me officially as an Old Soul™. As a kid, I didn’t really understand or mesh well with my peers, always feeling considerably more comfortable with Boomers than kids my age. I was adultified pretty quickly at home and perpetually felt old. It’s not that I felt more mature. I simply didn’t understand how to be young. I carried a weight on me; a responsibility that felt at odds with youthfulness.
My parents raised me in a home where the prevailing religion was astrology. My mom had my chart done when I was born and the astrologer claimed that she, her father, and I were all close friends in a past life. This explained why my grandfather, though barely present in my life, always had a soft spot for me; that I had a celestial kinship with a man who had been scheduled to storm Normandy on D-Day, but got out of it because he dropped something on his foot. It also explained why she and I (both Aries) shared a deep connection and wrestled with the same issues. We were both Old Souls™; both doomed to struggle and rage against that struggle, never to find satisfaction due to the fire of our astrological signs.
Becoming a mother myself helped to bring the relative insanity of my upbringing into focus. I came to the conclusion that I could neither be the best version of myself, nor be fully present for my daughter, my husband, my friends, my music, my anything while attempting to maintain a relationship with my parents. So, I stopped. I cut them off after yet another particularly loaded and weird visit. And folks, this was one of the greatest decisions of my life. As my new reality began to settle, as I did the work to change the way I thought about things like obligation and duty, I was struck by the amount of brain power I had been devoting to my mother for decades. So many waking moments devoted to wondering when I would have to respond to her bids for attention and very specific modes of affection. So much time and mental real estate wasted on the conflict between my happiness and her expectations (which were seemingly always at odds). Cutting contact eventually felt like years off of me. I got smarter. I got more flexible in my thinking. I got physically healthier. I got hotter (if I do say so myself). The world went from sepia tones to technicolor, like Dorothy walking round Oz after being tossed out of the Dust Bowl. For the first time in my life, I felt the energy of great possibility. I felt the true power of “You can just do things”. In effect, I had gotten younger.
I turned 45 years old this year and I have never felt more capable or more full of life than right now. Five weeks ago, I was in the hospital after having almost died after aspirating while under anesthesia for a routine exam. I believe that I survived it, at least in part, because I spent the last year aging in reverse. The lightness and health I cultivated by finally cutting the crap gave me a cushion to keep breathing when my lungs didn’t think that they could. I am so happy to be here, in front of all of you, feeling delight, the excitement of possibility, the anticipation of joyfulness, and pure, unadulterated gratitude for this time I have.
When I look at old pictures of me, especially those when I was a teenager, I can see the world wariness and the profound weight of how life felt for me then. Sure, I had smooth, unwrinkled skin. But the smiles in the photos were forced and barely hid a profound sadness. Now I look in the mirror and love the lines on my face, hard won and made indelible, by laughing and making funny faces despite the sorrow, knowing that I’d get here someday. And I look at those photos and think “Ah, I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.”1
This is, of course, the chorus for Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” (which was the song we all sang following my speech). I have always identified thoroughly with these lines as every day I feel a little bit younger than the day before, even when I was an actual kid.