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The Scariest Thing About Aging
It’s not fear of mortality
There’s nothing more secure than the power of blissful youthfulness, the kind that happens to everyone during that magical phase in all our lives, when the road to endless possibilities is luxuriously outstretched with seductive foreverness.
Looking back, it doesn’t seem like it was two decades ago, when I arrived in New York City, fresh off the Greyhound that took a couple of days to drive in from the city of my college graduation. I can still feel the night breeze on my bruised shoulder in the summer of my emancipation from the stifling grip of the Midwest.
My parents had been emphatically against my relocation to the romanticized metropolis that resembles the beautiful chaos of Lagos, where I grew up. But you can’t dissuade the self-centered motivations of a twenty-three-year-old English major, who harbors dreams of being an actress someday.
As mid-lifers, we are now aware that “someday” sometimes never comes, and with each significant birthday that passes, adjustments have to be made to accommodate the major disappointments of unrealized goals, that run the gamut of never finding “The One” to the lack of concrete accomplishments that will outlive flesh and blood.
2020 has been the most traumatic year of my lifetime, and it’s not because the…
