Strength, and the appointment you keep not making

THURSDAY, 10 SEPTEMBER

/ pick an option

choose one now, read it last

three today. do not weigh it up, take the first one.

one. the mirror, and the half second before you recognise yourself. two. the thing your body used to do easily. three. the tiredness that arrives at a particular hour now and never used to.

yours is at the bottom. the card comes first.

strength gets read as endurance, which is how most women read it about themselves too, and that reading is where the trouble starts. it is not the card of gritting your teeth. it is the card of getting a large thing to cooperate with you rather than overpowering it.

the large thing today is your own body. it asks for more than it did. more warming up, more sleep, more notice, and it has far less patience for being ignored, which after decades of ignoring it successfully feels like a betrayal rather than a message.

it is a message. an inconvenient, badly timed, non-negotiable message, and decline is not what it is announcing. bodies that get listened to at this age do considerably better than bodies that get overridden, and the listening is not a spa treatment. it is mostly boring and mostly logistics.

thursday still has room in it. one thing you have been overriding, and one small concession to it, is a better use of today than another round of comparing this body with the one you used to have.

what is worth leaning into today: cooperation. the walk instead of the workout, and the appointment you have been meaning to make since june.

what is worth staying away from: reading every new limit as the beginning of the end. some of them are, and most of them are a fixable deficiency somebody could name in ten minutes.

my advice for today: make the appointment. the one you already know about. not because something is wrong, but because unnamed worry about your own body is heavier to carry than almost any answer you could be given.

what has your body been asking you for. one line, and no need to justify it to me.

option one. the mirror

there is a half second now between looking and recognising, and in that half second you see yourself the way a stranger would.

that gap is not vanity and it is not something to talk yourself out of. it is grief, in a small and repeated dose, and grief in small repeated doses is easy to mistake for a character flaw. so treat it as grief. it does not need fixing, it needs acknowledging, and it eases considerably once you stop being embarrassed about feeling it. the women who make peace with this almost never do it by deciding they look wonderful. they do it by looking for longer, more often, until the face stops being news.

option two. the thing your body used to do easily

you know the one. the stairs, or the weight you used to carry in from the car in a single trip.

the loss is real and no argument makes it not a loss. but here is what is usually also true. the capacity did not vanish, it went unused, and a great deal of what feels like age turns out to be eighteen months of not doing the thing. that is worth testing gently before you file it under gone. start absurdly small, smaller than feels dignified, and see what comes back. some of it does.

option three. the tiredness that arrives at a particular hour

it is not the old tiredness. it lands earlier, it sits heavier, and sleep does not clear it the way it once did, which is the part that unsettles people most.

two things are worth separating. some of this is the ordinary arithmetic of a body that recovers more slowly, and it responds to earlier nights and to less compensating with caffeine. and some of it is a thing with a name, something dull and treatable like iron or a thyroid, which hides very well behind the assumption that this is simply your age now. do not carry it as an inevitability without having it looked at once.