I think the experience of getting older is becoming a superset of all of your past selves, not replacing them with newer versions. I'm in my 40s, and I have th

I think the experience of getting older is becoming a superset of all of your past selves, not replacing them with newer versions. I'm in my 40s, and I have thoughts and feelings that my in my 30s wouldn't relate to or understand. I have a sensation of time and patience that would be alienating to my younger self. Time feels frighteningly finite in ways it never did before. But I also still fully remember what it was like to be in my 30s, that heady mixture of feeling like I'd blossomed into a certain level of competence and maturity while still feeling like I was in the full flush of health and with most of my life ahead of me. That 30-something me is still inside me, alive today. And I'm still the 20-something me, excited to get out of the house and experience new things, reckless enough to want to do things to excess because I hadn't experienced that many consequences yet, still romanticizing romance itself. And so on. We never stop being our previous selves, we just invite more new selves into that growing collection.