The meaning of the word badass is evolving for me. It's not just about knowing that I'm not gonna live forever. It's more, or it's additionally, living in this aging body with the conditions I've got. As you'll see in the video, I'm discovering the profound badassery in simply showing up.
What does it mean to age like a badass? For me, it's about redefining strength, resilience, and determination. It's doing tai chi, walking, and even taping my lips closed to optimize my breathing. Trying new things, like pruning trees and setting up a compost system, things I wouldn't have attempted before.
But being a badass isn't just about physical feats. It's also about emotional resilience. Losing my younger sisters, Marcia and Barbara, reminded me of how fragile life is. Despite the grief and uncertainty, I continue, refusing to give up or give in.
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This aging can be so isolating — you don’t have to do it alone. We don’t have to do this alone. Like redwoods that grow in a tight circle so they can support each other despite their shallow root systems.
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Here’s the transcript of the video if you’d like to read along:
This is an experiment, but isn't everything? The longer I sit with the title of this blog, this Substack — Aging Like a Badass — the more I realize this is not the definition of “badass” that came to mind when I thought of it.
I'll tell you what’s really badass about every day doing what I can to improve my strength, my flexibility, my stamina, and my endurance…. What's badass, some days, is even trying. What's badass is that with every day I'm getting closer to my expiration date — aren’t we all? And I'm still doing tai chi and I'm still walking every day.
And I'm still taping my lips closed when I'm sleeping or napping (there are pieces of tape all over the place around here) or sometimes just working at my desk — just to make sure optimizing my breathing for focus and all the other little but huge things that come my way by doing these practices.
I was talking my physical therapist about that today and while I still have to stop and slow down and get over the feeling like to gasp like a fish because I just don't have the strength to walk quickly or dance or whatever it is I'm efforting to do…. Maybe those are not the best measurements for me!
Maybe it's really important for me to notice the kinds of things I've been doing and the kinds of that i no longer immediately think “I can’t” when I think about them. In the last few months since I begin this journey, this experiment, I've done things I would never have tried, I think, in the past, like pruning trees and hauling bales of straw and setting up a driveway compost system.
Connection to my competence has improved. The knowing that “I might be able to do it, so why not try?” is getting stronger. My ability to figure things out is growing too.
And the last thing I wanna say about what's badass about I'm up to these days is about my sisters. My sister Marcia, who died in 2020 in the height of the pandemic after a stroke, and my sister Barbara, the baby, who died in 2022 eight weeks after getting a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. And here I am in 2024 and there are days where I wonder if I'm gonna make it out of this calendar year alive.
So it feels like a definition of badass that’s come to me includes being the oldest of three sisters and somehow still being here and not giving up or giving in to those feelings of despair and grief that could easily convince me that there's no point.
I'd love to know what you think. Please come and reach out to the community. We don't have to do this alone and I'm so glad about that.
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