Your Youthful Mistakes Can and Will Be Used Against You

Thank goodness I’m old enough to have missed this.

The consolations of aging have always been in the eye of the beholder.

Virginia Woolf, at 50, wrote in her diaries of feeling “poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.” She did not believe in aging, she said, but rather “forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.”

One needn’t contemplate the angle of the planets to find solace in aging. More prosaically (and perhaps also more poignantly) there are things like grandchildren and retirement and retreat from vanity. There’s the defiance of fatuous social norms now popularly referred to as “not giving a fuck.” (I think Woolf may have been getting at something along those lines.) I am now the age Woolf was when she talked about altering her apsect to the sun. And while I don’t know enough about astrology to connect the dots of my memories to trail markers of the earth’s orbit, I’ve lately become aware of a sort of baseline visceral sensation hovering over my emotional life. Again and again, this sensation conjures the same sentiment: I’m glad I lived when I did. Specifically, I’m glad I was young when I was.

As I talked about with Andrew Sullivan recently on his podcast, life these days often feels to me…