I heard a line in a song the other day.
“I used to be young.”
And I swear to God
that line hit me so hard
and I hate how much it stuck with me.
Because it’s not just poetry.
It’s a receipt.
I used to be young.
Past tense.
And nobody tells you
how quietly youth leaves.
You just wake up one day
in your late forties
and realize—
oh.
This is it.
This is the age
where the math starts getting uncomfortable.
Because when you’re twenty
life feels infinite.
When you’re thirty
you still believe you’re building something.
But somewhere in your forties
you start noticing the exits.
You realize
some doors in life didn’t close.
They expired.
I used to be a professional wrestler.
Sixteen years.
Sixteen years of lights, crowds,
and putting my body on the line
while strangers screamed my name.
And now?
Now I watch wrestling on TV
like it belongs to a different lifetime.
Like I borrowed someone else’s youth
for a while
…and eventually had to give it back.
I used to think
life worked like a story.
You go through the hard chapters
and eventually something makes sense.
Eventually the struggle means something.
Eventually the right people stay.
But life doesn’t owe you that kind of narrative.
Sometimes it’s just a long road
with a lot of wrong turns
and a few bright moments
you didn’t realize were bright
until they were gone.
My dog Clutch
had these golden eyes.
I used to call him
my sun-eyed boy.
That dog loved me
in a way that made the world feel survivable.
If you’ve ever had a dog like that
you know.
The kind that looks at you
like you hung the moon.
He’s gone now.
That’s the other thing
about getting older.
Your world gets smaller.
Not dramatically.
Just slowly.
People disappear.
Animals disappear.
Whole versions of your life disappear.
You start measuring time
in goodbyes.
Goodbye to the body
that used to bounce back.
Goodbye to the years
when everything still felt possible.
Goodbye to the version of you
that believed
the best parts of life
hadn’t happened yet.
And somewhere in the middle of all those goodbyes…
you realize you’re still here.
Most people reinvent themselves
in their twenties.
I did it in my forties.
But reinvention late in life
comes with a hard realization:
you don’t get the years back.
You just start the next chapter
closer to the ending.
I used to be young.
And nobody tells you
that one day
that sentence
becomes true.
