The Queenager

We get better with time? I’m not sure how I feel about the saying anymore. I have gotten to the point in my life where I’m not sure we get better with time. I’m beginning to think that the better is a form of settling. Or perhaps it’s a form of acceptance? I don’t know. But what I do know is my knees don’t feel better. This past weekend I found three gray hairs. My first. And every time I work out my body hurts for days afterwards and I work out five days a week. This basically means I’m in constant pain. So, I don’t feel like I’m getting better. LOL. However, I am beginning to appreciate this time in my life much more than my previous decades I suppose.

I mean there is a lot to appreciate. I feel more liberated than I have in a very long time. Ever, actually. I am at a juncture in my career that is amazing. The success that I am having is what I have always wanted. I’ve also gotten to the point where I’m not as affected by how people feel about me. Because no matter how kind you are or how good of a person you are, there is always going to be someone who doesn’t like you or who you just simply don’t vibe with. Before that would really bother me. I would obsess over why a person didn’t like me. However now, I just take it on the chin and keep it moving. I took a page out of Zora Neal Hurston‘s book on this one. She says, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?

And that’s how I feel. So, ultimately I don’t feel like I’m getting better
but I do feel like actually maybe I need to re-define what it means to get
better. Are there ways in which I have gotten better? Yeah, I suppose so if I
reread what I’ve written up top I guess I have gotten better. I’ve gotten
better at navigating this life. But there are still things that bother me that
I wish didn’t. I wish I wasn’t so impacted by racism. I wish it wasn’t so hard
for me to navigate spaces as a Black woman. I wish gendered racism wasn’t a
thing. But it is. I wish that I wasn’t living in a city that is anti-black. And
I really, really wish that I didn’t allow societal norms or expectations of who
I should be or what I should be or what I can do at my age impact me. So, it’s
not necessarily that I’m refuting that we get better, because in someways we
absolutely do get better. But in many ways, society’s social constructs still
have such a huge impact on how I exist and how I can be in a space.

So now I wonder about the identities of the person who said “just like fine wine we get better with time”? A part of me feels like they had to have been a man. And not just a man but a white man. Because I can’t imagine that a woman and especially not a Black woman came up with that.