Getting Older Isn’t So Bad After All

By Nikki Slusher

This January was a big milestone for me. On New Year’s Day, I turned 27 and finally hit the middle age part of adulthood. This transition has led me down a path of reflection, understanding, and taking every opportunity that comes my way. There’s something bittersweet about entering your late twenties as a woman. Society tells us that once you’re above 22 that your value starts to decrease rapidly, or that we are no longer desirable. I was dreading every second leading up to my birthday because I wasn’t ready to enter that phase of life. As a young woman who grew up in the age of social media, you could say the emphasis on beauty and preserving your youth have drastically increased. In fact, I had to remove myself from the constant checking of my newsfeeds and comparisons to my friends’ lives. They all seem so happy and perfect online that I felt like I was watching everyone take off while I’m still on the ground suffering from engine failures.

So when the inevitable happened and I turned 27 something inside of me changed. That morning I looked in the mirror and the person looking back at me still looked…well, like me. I was, and still am, the same person. I had to grasp the concept that I spent so much time worrying about a number for what? In fact, my 27th year around the sun has been exhilarating. I’ve stopped caring about what people think about me. I’ve also experienced tremendous success in my career over the last two months. Instead of losing a piece of myself, I’ve won more value in my life. The metamorphosis I had been fighting all along was one that I had deeply needed for quite some time.

I’m not sure what comes next in my journey, and I’m still changing every day to become the woman I strive to be. I’ve learned a lot about myself in this short time; and maybe that’s the point of this thing we call life. We continually wake up and follow our routines until something halts us in our tracks and opens our eyes to what we’ve been missing in front of us this whole time.

It was never about the parts of me that I would lose. Instead, it was always about discovering the pieces of myself that had been missing the whole time. While society may define beauty from a physical perspective, I’ve come to realize what the word “beauty” means to so much more than what I can offer on the outside. Life is like a song, if you skip a beat then it messes up the whole tempo; and from now on I’m sticking to my own rhythm.