On getting hotter as you get older, and it’s not because of Pilates
The other day, someone told me they were floored to learn I was 35, not 25. They said that while I did look young, it was my energy that felt young. Then she quickly clarified: youthful and vibrant, not immature.
What caught me off guard wasn’t the compliment, I have realized lately that that is how I feel. But it was the realization that five years ago, no one would’ve said that. Yes, I’ve always had a bubblyness to me, but it rarely made an appearance as I got older and felt cynical and jaded.
Time felt like it was slipping through my hands, and all I had to show for it was a LinkedIn profile that looked impressive, but didn’t feel like me anymore. I felt like I had outgrown it but didn’t feel like there was something to grow into.
I wasn’t giving off vibrancy—I was giving off burnout. I was not the kind of person you’d converse with in line at a coffee shop.
Even at dinner parties with friends or celebrations, I’d smile through the conversations feeling present in everyone’s life other than my own.
For so long, I didn’t get what people meant when they said it’s possible to get hotter with age. I could kind of grasp it thinking about it in terms of confidence, and then I figured, too, that as you get older, you can just afford more maintenance like regular facials and Botox.
But what they don’t tell you is that no matter how much Pilates you do or how many steps your skin care routine has, so much has to do with the energy that you exude. The kind that isn’t performative or forced - anyone with good spidey senses can see right through that.
I don’t know that I can pinpoint everything that got me to make this shift as in some ways I feel I’m actively still in the process, but I do know that for one, I had to let go of the overachiever inside of me. The one that felt like I always had to prove myself, whether it was proving why I deserved the job I was in, proving why someone should choose me as a partner, for a brand collaboration, the list is exhaustive, as was the feeling of this burden.
Another emotional shift that helped me make this shift into more youthful energy was learning to take up space. There’s lightness that reveals itself once you start saying no to things and people that don’t feel good to you, but it’s really hard to say no when you’re afraid of taking up that space - when you’ve trained yourself to just go with the flow all the time. For so long I thought being the go with the flow person is the person who is vibrant and youthful, but it’s quiet exhausting and aging when you’re going with someone else’s flow, not your own flow.
I’ve developed a strong optimism about life, one of the most significant contributors to aging backward. After all, aren’t we all the most optimistic before we’ve lived much of life?
But this time around, the difference is that it’s not blind optimism or naivete. It’s optimism that comes from understanding your past experiences and how they’ve made you who you are today. Optimism makes you trust yourself and trust in what might or might unfold in the future, and that you’ll be ok either way. In other words, it is finding that sense of yourself, loving yourself, which creates a sense of calm and ease that others can feel.
