Growing Old - Part 1

There are things that are part of growing older that everyone will experience at some point, things that despite the fact that everyone goes through them they are rarely talked about.  This post is therefore dedicated to four things that I have experienced as I have grown older that I don't feel anyone adequately warned me about when I was young.

Extended Sickness

When you are young you tend to bounce back from illness and injury quite quickly.  This is something I think we all take for granted.  The worst you ever feel in youth is when you get a bad flu or a cold that leaves you feeling exhausted or perhaps you'll be unlucky enough to break a bone or sprain something and require a stay in hospital.  In any case these things often serve more as an inconvenience than a long term problem.  That's not to say that no-one ever experiences severe sickness or injury in their youth, beyond the immediate risks posed by Covid-19 there aren't as many prevalent diseases that exist that threaten young people - unless of course you boycott vaccines then there's quite a few.

As you get older there will come a point where you will experience extended sickness for the first time, hopefully not Covid-19 but it's still a possibility; this sickness will be marked as a period where whatever the infliction you are unlucky enough to acquire will end up taking more than a few days to recover from.  For some of us that extended period can be years as it was in my case with Sarcoidosis, and I still have to deal with the repercussions even now, whilst for others it may be months or as little as a few weeks.  In any case, the recovery period is more than just a few days where you are out of commission but rather a period where any strenuous physical or mental tasks become insurmountable and as a result you have to strive to recover not only physically but mentally as well. 

Your first period of extended sickness is marked by the realisation that in those times of vulnerability you depend entirely on other people at your lowest point.  For some of us we are lucky to have friends and family as a support system to help get us through, for others it falls on partners or on professional help to alleviate the pressures, and for the most unfortunate with no support at all they are left to climb the highest mountain, a feat that unfortunately some do not manage, a feat which thanks to Covid-19 many more people are now aware of, we can at least hope that the enhanced support those who were most vulnerable were offered by their communities doesn't disappear when any sense of normality returns.

Your first experience of extended sickness is really the first time you are forced to confront your own mortality and realise just how close you are to death at any given moment.  That sounds grim but this can be a very positive experience if you focus on the endurance and the survival instinct that takes hold, it can be quite dark for some of us when we realise that instinct isn't there.  This is something that is echoed by the threat of sickness without actual infection but this experience however is less intimate as it is driven by anxiety and anticipation as opposed to the experience itself.

Aches and Pains

On a related note, sticking with the theme of health and well-being, at some point you will begin to experience the true definition of aches and pains.  In our youth for most of us the worst experience of pain we will endure is a migraine, either random or part of a hangover, or a physical pain caused by a sprain or a breakage.  There will come a day when you wake up and feel every muscle and bone in your body ache.  This is entirely normal, this is wear and tear and part of the body's ageing process.

When you experience these aches and pains for the first time this is usually the moment when most people accept that the carefree and reckless lifestyle choices they have made up until that point need to be re-evaluated.  We become more aware of how much or how little physical activity we engage in, we focus more on our diet and what we choose to put into our body.  For some this leads to lifestyle changes in an attempt to alleviate the strain we place on our bodies but for others this focus is short lived and old habits return and we learn to live with those aches and pains.  You begin to realise that the wide array of tablets you can purchase over the counter aren't simply sold for people treating headaches and hangovers or the symptoms of colds and flu.  You begin to realise just how dependent society as a whole is on painkillers - which eventually lose their potency which leads many to stronger variants which contributes to problems present in wider society such as the opioid crisis - and yes the political ramifications of all these issues are also something you become aware of with age, politics is inescapable.

Tiredness

There is a bell-curve of sorts that exists when you chart levels of energy and alertness against age.  Babies sleep the most at one end, with the centre of the curve rising so that the hours spent awake and alert rise with age to a point where they peak then start to decline once more.  The curve flattens out again as the older you get the more sleep you need to remain conscious and cognizant.  There will come a point where your natural stores of energy won't be enough to sustain you.

It's important to acknowledge here that most people erroneously think they sleep in excess regardless of age, what most people don't realise is that sleep patterns are often offset with the time you go to sleep being much later in the night or early hours of the morning and the time you wake sliding further into the daytime it can appear that you sleep in excess if you're waking at 2pm in the afternoon but if you didn't fall asleep until 6 in the morning then you're only sleeping 8 hours which is actually a normal amount of sleep.  When I write here about the amount of sleep you need I am referring to the absolute values not the time and place where they are racked up.

The first moment of realisation that occurs is when you develop a dependency on a stimulant, usually caffeine [if we go down the legal route] or amphetamine [if we go down the (usually) illegal route] as part of our daily routine.  Most people when they realise they have this dependency attempt some form of detox for a time but as with the lifestyle changes mentioned above this usually results in either a wholesale change or defeated acceptance that this dependency is their new reality.

In any case there will also be a moment where you will attempt to sleep in excess or sleep more often taking naps in an attempt to counter this tiredness which again usually has limited success, the former can actually make you feel worse, and the latter minimises your potential productive periods as the wake cycle takes several hours after waking before peak performance occurs and periodic napping can actually prevent you from ever reaching that state.  Once again you realise that the abundance of energy drinks, and over the counter stimulants that you can purchase exist out of necessity not simply sporadic use but a dependency that society as a whole possesses.

Hair - too much and too little

In your youth at some point the discussion of baldness and balding is raised, the common trope of asking whether the grandfather on your mother's side was bald arises as a predictor of whether or not you will go bald with age - which is unreliable for what it's worth baldness is determined by a variety of factors and this indicator might align and might not.  Whilst everyone obsesses over the idea of going bald, little focus is given to hair growth in other places beyond our adolescent obsession with public hair.

At some point you realise that hairs begin to grow in annoying places, nose hairs and ear hairs in particular are the most annoying.  This is something I never experienced until my 30s when I noticed a single stray hair in my ear which caused increasing irritation until I plucked it.  Grooming becomes more of an effort with age, the amount of time you have to devote to maintaining your body increases.

These four things are just the tip of the iceberg really, there's a lot more to growing older than these annoyances, but they serve as examples of things no-one warned me about when I was younger which I now find myself discussing with others only to find everyone I speak to has gone through them.  One of the most frustrating things about growing older is that question of normality and finding out what is and what is not, or at least what do the majority of people experience.  Turning to Google et al is not usually an option because most of these questions lead you to medical sites like NHS Choices or WebMD which although they can be symptoms of diseases or underlying health conditions, in most cases they are just part of growing older and not something you can actually do anything about.  Yes you can make your life a lot easier by making certain changes but a lot of these problems will never completely go away once you start to experience them.