My dear Dawn,

You and I have conversed and commented on each other's work over time. I am in the process of finally, finally pulling away from Medium, but before I finalize it (not yet but soon) I wanted to respond to this.

First, there is not much anyone can say to you or anyone else about aging well. I recommend you go find your spirit animal, as someone kindly called me the other day. You need an example of someone who is living a life you admire, then research how they do it. I guaran-damn-tee you that they are not wasting their time with Botox or bullying themselves about the one thing that none of us can stop.

They are likely doing what they do without much attention to wrinkles (WE HAVE EARNED THEM) or weight, for the abject fear we have of not looking twenty will eat us alive forever. We aren't twenty, and the truth is that for many of us our bodies do indeed change later in life. Shy of liposuction, hey, part of the joy of getting older is to know that there are certain angst-driven issues that deserve to be kicked to the kerb. The perfect body is among them.

What IS perfect as we age is treating ourselves with respect and love, finding ways to be functionally fit without trying to whip ourselves into a size 2. I've been a size two for years, not now. Not once in my life did beauty or a tiny ass make a single bit of difference in my happines,s for I was forever TERRIFIED of a single ounce.

Do I really want to carry such awful fear into my last years?

Nope. But that's me. I will never Botox myself. I use creams to say soft, not fight wrinkles. I am done with weight loss programs. DONE.

We are not our bodies. Lemme say that again. WE ARE NOT OUR BODIES. No matter what you do, you will deteriorate. You can slow it down, but you will die a billion times over for the rest of your life, Dawn, if you worship youth and beauty. They are going to leave us . What you CAN have are fitness and freedom, adventure and laughter, and a slew of options that giving up all the empty promises of anti-aging offer us. They are all lies. Always were lies. That we believe there is such a thing speaks to the unspeakable terror of ageism.

Why would you berate your gorgeous, wonderful self with ageist thoughts when you are a learner, Dawn?

Learning how to walk into the aging you like the Goddess you are is the whole point. Part of that is letting go of what was and embracing with great respect and curiosity what is, and what you are becoming.

I turn 70 next month. I cannot wait. I just can't wait. I spent my 60s doing extreme adventure travel. The price I paid, well, I am getting surgery on both hands and feet, so far two down and two to go, so that I can go back to Mongolia by late summer. I want to climb Kilimanjaro again.

I don't expect anyone else to do what I do. But I do know one thing: I'm too old for this "I need to look young shit."

But I am not too old for anything else.

I plan to try martial arts. I am going to look into a paragliding license. Why not?

" It is never too late to become what you might have been"- George Eliot

Don't believe the lies. Write your own story. Find examples of badass women whose lives you respect and ask yourself: if I gave up worrying obsessively about my face and my body, how much freedom would I have?

Trust me. You have no idea until you feel the wind in your beautiful, softly aging face and you stretch out your wings, Dawn.

As long as we are earthbound by worries about changes that ultimately we cannot stop, we will die far sooner than we need to from worry alone.

Go find your way to fly.