The question came, quiet and earnest, from someone whose love for me is a palpable thing: “Do you see yourself beating this? Do you see yourself growing old?”
The second part of that question settled in my chest like a misplaced stone. It’s the kind of query you immediately recoil from, not because the truth feels irrelevant, even insulting, to the life you are actively living. I have thought about it, of course – who wouldn’t? – but I usually stop myself. The answer, if I’m honest, is No.
And yet, that “No” feels like a lie, or at least a misinterpretation of the terms.
It’s a strange thing, this definition of “old”. I look at people in their seventies and eighties and they do not look “old” to me. They look like people who have lived longer, whose faces are simply maps of resilience, joy, and sorrow. They are still learning, still loving, still doing. Maybe if you reach your nineties, you earn the title, but anything less than that just feels like a magnificent middle ground.
Perhaps that’s why the question troubles me. It’s not about the years.
I know I will age. I will gain new lines around my eyes from laughter, or maybe from sleepless nights spent in wonder. My hair will go silver. My body will change. This process – this aging – is a gift of continuous experience, a slow, beautiful becoming. It is the texture of a life lived, and I claim every year of it that I can have.
But growing old? That phrase carries a different weight. To me, “growing old” sounds like a surrender. It implies a kind of internal shutting down, a retreat from curiosity, a dusty acceptance that the best days are behind you. It suggests a time when you start simply waiting for the end.
And that is what I refuse to see. That is the answer I cannot provide.
I will not grow old. I will age. I will age with defiance, with passion, and with the full, vivid knowledge of how precious and brief and utterly present every moment is. I don’t see a distant, faded future; I only see the next morning, followed by the one after that, each one a chance to live fiercely.
Maybe its a good thing that I can’t picture the traditional image of being “old”. Maybe that refusal is my own small act of rebellion, my way of saying to this disease, or to fate, or to the cultural expectation of what a long life should look like: “I am not done being vital. I am not done being me.”
The question still bothers me, perhaps it implies a choice between ‘beating this’ and ‘growing old,’ when what I truly want is to simply live, right here, right now, as fully as possible, for as long as I am able. I don’t know the end of my story, but I will make the words I’m writing today count.
