Feeling old?

I can’t believe that I’ll be fifty years old soon. In less than two years.

I thought I’d start to feel old when my body starts falling apart, but no. My tummy has started getting bigger – without me really gaining weight (I think we can blame sitting on my ass all day almost every day because of Covid for that). My skin is started to have old people’s “stains” and has started losing elasticity. My hair loss has become significantly noticeable. However, I’m taking all of it surprisingly well.
Well, you won’t see me shirtless anytime soon. That ship has sailed, I’m afraid.
I guess I’m OK with all of that because I never was really obsessed with my body in the first place.

My mind? I’m terrified of dementia, Alzheimer’s, and such, but so far so good (I hope I still have a few decades before needing to be worried about those, keeping fingers crossed). My kids regularly remind me that my memory is shitty compared to theirs, but dudes, you’re kids, your memory is supposed to be superhuman. Remembering and learning things, that’s what kids do.

No, what has really started making me feel old are the waves of nostalgia that have been hitting me in the past few weeks for some reason. Homesickness and my mom sending me my photo albums from the early 90s may have played a role.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt nostalgia before. It really is a new feeling for me. Those memories from 20-35 years ago that come out of nowhere and that make me greatly miss certain things from the past or just make me feel sad for no reason. The very fact that I have memories that are this old is making me feel weird.

An example. This song:

I never was a Dire Straits fan. I mean, I like them, but I never really listened to them beyond when they were on TV or on the radio. So, as you can imagine, I haven’t heard them in quite a while (probably not since the early 2000s).

The other day, for some reason, the song showed up in my music stream.

I was hypnotized, I listened to it as if I had never listened to it before. And it made me so incredibly nostalgic about that time period. About nothing in particular, really. Just a general and a vague feeling of sadness about the past.

I guess this is what nostalgia is.

I guess this is how I felt old for the first time in my life.