I Feel Better Than I Did in My 30's

And Aging Is Why

By Deidre Lopez

I’m less than a week away from my birthday, staring down the last stretch of my thirties like it’s both a milestone and a mirror. I told my husband, “I want to feel like I did in my thirties.”
And he nodded, thinking I meant physically: the workouts, the consistency, the energy and yes, that was part of it.

But the moment those words left my mouth, something inside me cracked open.

Because I remembered a morning not too long ago, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, staring at a body I had spent decades criticizing. A body I called “gross” more times than I want to admit. A body I pinched, hid, starved, shamed, compared, analyzed under bad lighting, and never (not even at my thinnest) believed was enough.

And it hit me with almost comedic cruelty:

Even when I was the smallest version of myself -
in my teens, my twenties, even my early thirties -
I spoke to myself with the same impatience, the same disgust, the same “not enoughness” that followed me like a shadow.

Never thin enough.
Never cute enough.
Never sexy enough.
Never enough.

It was never actually about the body.
It was about the conditioning.

It was about the cultural whisper, the one so quiet and so constant that it becomes your own voice:

“You’re never enough.”

Not as a woman.
Not as a mother.
Not as a partner.
Not as a daughter.
Not as a friend.

Not giving enough gifts.
Not hosting enough holidays.
Not earning enough.
Not parenting perfectly enough.
Not achieving enough by a certain age.
Not aging slowly enough, gracefully enough, invisibly enough.

At some point, “they” the infamous “them” convinced us that they get to define enoughness.
And we swallowed it whole.

The Time I Didn’t Think I’d Even Want to Reach 40

There was a time in my life when I didn’t think or maybe even want to make it to 40. It felt ancient back then. Like the beginning of the end. The age where everything supposedly starts sliding downhill.

Forty was the finish line, not the beginning of anything.

And now?
Some mornings I wake up and genuinely feel like I’m still in my twenties. Not in a “my joints agree” way, they definitely don’t, but in the sense that time somehow folded in on itself when I wasn’t looking.

Because in the moments that life was sucking the air out of me, time stood completely still.
Pain freezes you.
Joy speeds you up.
And somehow you wake up one day and realize both happened in the same blink.

That saying “the days are long but the years are fast” is painfully, beautifully true.

And honestly, I need to ask:

Whose horrific idea was it to track age in years anyway?

Why aren’t we tracking:

• stages

• seasons

• transformations

• versions

• initiations

• awakenings

Who decided:

• we’re “too old” to have kids at 40

• we’re magically mature at 21

• we know anything about life at 18

• our eyesight should start failing now

• our “prime” has an expiration date

• certain ages equal certain milestones

Who made the rules?
And why did we accept them?

Age has been used like a scorecard: a way to rank our beauty, our relevance, our timeline, our milestones, our worth.

But what if the truth is this:

Age doesn’t define the stage.
The stage defines the age.

We all know people who:

• had babies at 42

• changed careers at 39

• fell in love at 60

• reinvented themselves at 55

• discovered peace at 70

And yet we keep chasing this number as if it dictates our identity.

Somewhere along the way, our power slipped away as quietly as the fog does in San Francisco when the sun comes out; soft, subtle, but dramatic.

Maybe it’s time to take it back.

The Checklist We Never Agreed To

Somewhere along the way, women were handed a checklist we never consciously signed up for:

• Be youthful

• Be beautiful

• Be desirable

• Be agreeable

• Be chosen

• Be a mother

• Be a wife

• Be nurturing

• Don’t age

• Don’t wrinkle

• Don’t soften

• Don’t sag

• Don’t lose your value

And men?
Their checklist is different, but the pressure is just as relentless:

• Be successful

• Be strong

• Don’t cry

• Don’t fail

• Provide

• Achieve status

• Show power

• “Be somebody” by 40

  

Both lists have one thing in common:

They keep us chasing things we don’t actually need while ignoring the one thing our soul DOES need:

To find ourselves.

Not the version curated
or inherited
or performed
or expected.

But our real self. The one who doesn’t surface until life has carved and softened and strengthened you with time.

And finding that version of yourself requires aging.
It requires living.
It requires heartbreak and healing and laughter and all the fires you’ve had to walk through just to make it to another birthday cake.

Youth cannot give you that.
Only time can.

The Lie of Youthfulness

Let’s be honest:
Youth isn’t the peak.
Youth is the draft version.

Yet entire industries profit from convincing us that the goal is to stay forever suspended in a decade we barely understood the first time around.

Botox.
Fillers.
Lifts.
Lasers.
Serums.
Diets.
Filters.
A thousand-dollar promise to erase what life has so beautifully written on your skin.

Not because women hate aging but because women have been conditioned to fear the consequences of aging.

But here’s the truth that no one says loud enough:

We were praised the most during the years we knew ourselves the least.

I look back at my twenties and thirties and think:

God, I was beautiful…
but I didn’t know it.
I didn’t feel it.
I didn’t live it.
I didn’t own it.

Now?
Now I am beautiful in a way youth could never replicate.

Now I’m beautiful because I’m becoming.

It Takes a Village - Not Just to Raise Children, but to Raise Us

We love to say, “It takes a village,” but we only ever use that phrase around child-rearing.

But the truth is bigger:

It takes a village to raise the young,
to support the adults,
to guide the aging,
and to hold the elders.

We used to live in intergenerational wisdom.
We used to sit at the feet of those who came before us.
We used to learn from their mistakes, their stories, their depth.

And they used to lean on the young for energy, newness, curiosity, creativity.

Now we’ve separated ourselves by decades like we’re organizing a closet.

Young people there.
Adults figuring it out over here.
Older adults neatly tucked away over there.

And we wonder why we feel unmoored.
Why no one knows how to age.
Why no one knows how to transition.
Why everyone feels alone in every stage.

When you’re young, you need the guidance of the ones ahead of you.
When you’re in your thirties and forties, you need both wisdom and reminder.
When you’re older, you become the guide but you still need the spark of youth to stay open and alive.

We were never meant to age alone.
We were meant to age in community; to be held, to be taught, to be humbled, to be reminded.

We’ve forgotten these roles.
And because of that, we’re floundering.

The Beauty of Becoming

Here is the truth aging has given me:

I have less patience for nonsense
and more patience for what matters.

I want depth over drama.
Connection over performance.
Truth over image.
Rest over restriction.
Joy over comparison.

I want to FEEL good more than I want to LOOK young.

And the beautiful thing?
You cannot fake this.
This kind of freedom only comes with age.

I don’t want the body I had in my twenties
or the face I had in my early thirties
if it costs me the wisdom I have now.

I don’t want her insecurity.
I don’t want her confusion.
I don’t want her self-criticism.
I don’t want her desperate need to be chosen.

I want the woman I am becoming, the one I spent decades searching for without knowing it.

What No One Tells You When You’re Young

No one tells you that aging is:

a grounding,
a softening,
a strengthening,
a deepening,
a shedding of everything false,
and a claiming of everything true.

No one tells you that you don’t meet your real self at 20. Or 30. Sometimes not even at 40.

You meet her when you stop performing.
When you stop apologizing.
When you stop begging to be “enough.”
When you stop chasing the version of yourself you think the world wants
and start becoming the version you were born to be.

Aging doesn’t diminish you.
It reveals you.

Full Circle

So, as I head into this birthday, I don’t feel the dread society told me I should feel.

I feel arrival.

I don’t want to go back.
Not physically.
Not emotionally.
Not spiritually.

I don’t want the girl I was.
I want the woman I’ve earned.

The one with laugh lines and stories. The one with stretch marks and strength. The one with boundaries and clarity. The one with more softness and more fire than she ever had before.

I don’t want to look like my past.
I want to be my present.

Because the truth is simple:

We don’t age into decline.
We age into becoming.
We age into ourselves.

And maybe aging isn’t the loss they warned us of; maybe it’s the becoming they never did.