The mirror finally stops lying somewhere after seventy, revealing truths you've spent a lifetime carefully avoiding—and the reflection is both more forgiving and more honest than you ever imagined.
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At 72, I finally admitted something to my therapist that I'd been dancing around for two decades: I never really liked hosting those elaborate holiday dinners that everyone praised me for.
The revelation came tumbling out during a session about boundaries, and I sat there stunned by my own words.
How had I spent forty years orchestrating these productions, accepting compliments through gritted teeth, all while dreaming of a quiet Christmas morning with just a book and a cup of coffee?
This is what the seventies bring you - not just wisdom, but the courage to finally look at the truths you've been stepping around like puddles on a rainy sidewalk.
After watching so many friends reach this decade, and now living it myself, I've noticed we all seem to excavate the same buried treasures of self-knowledge that we spent our younger years carefully avoiding.
1) You were never actually responsible for everyone else's happiness
Remember that weight you've been carrying? The one where you believed that if your sister was upset, your husband was frustrated, or your adult children were struggling, it was somehow your job to fix it? Somewhere around 70, that delusion finally cracks open like an egg.
I spent decades believing that my worth was directly proportional to how content I could make everyone around me. During my teaching years, I'd lie awake worrying about students who seemed troubled.
When caring for my husband through his illness, I convinced myself that if I just tried harder, loved better, researched more, I could somehow outsmart Parkinson's disease.
The truth is, we're all just humans stumbling through our own journeys, and nobody appointed us as emotional CEOs of everyone else's life.
The freedom that comes with this realization is extraordinary. You can love people deeply without taking on their pain as your personal project. You can offer support without drowning yourself in the process.
2) Most of your fears never actually materialized
How much time did you spend worrying about things that never happened? If you're like me, the answer makes you want to laugh and cry simultaneously.
In our seventies, we finally get the cosmic joke - we spent decades preparing for disasters that existed only in our imagination.
I worried endlessly about my children's futures, about financial catastrophes, about saying the wrong thing at faculty meetings. I rehearsed conversations that never took place and prepared for confrontations that never materialized.
Now, looking back, I see that life's actual challenges were almost never the ones I'd spent energy anticipating. The real difficulties always came from unexpected angles, rendering all that preventive worry useless.
3) Your body was never the problem
Virginia Woolf wrote, "The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder." She might have been talking about how we finally see our bodies in our seventies - with both joy and sorrow for all the criticism we inflicted on them.
Do you know what I see now when I look at photos from my forties? A lovely woman who spent far too much time cataloguing her supposed flaws.
Those thighs I despised? They carried me through countless school hallways. The arms I thought were too soft? They held grieving students, embraced my husband through his final months, wrote thousands of comments on essays that maybe, just maybe, made a difference.
4) You had more power than you thought, but in different ways than you imagined
This one's tricky because it involves holding two truths simultaneously. First, you discover you had less control over external events than you believed.
But second, you realize you had tremendous power over your responses, your boundaries, and your choices - power you often didn't exercise.
Why didn't I speak up in those department meetings when I disagreed? Why did I let that friend consistently cancel plans at the last minute for fifteen years?
Why didn't I pursue writing earlier when the urge was already there, whispering? The answer isn't self-blame; it's recognition. We had more agency than we knew, but we were too afraid or too conditioned to use it.
5) Perfect love doesn't mean absence of anger
Here's something nobody tells you when you're younger: You can be furious with someone and still love them completely. You can feel resentment and devotion in the same breath.
In fact, if you've cared for someone through a long illness, you know these emotions aren't opposites - they're dance partners.
During my husband's illness, there were moments when I felt such anger - at the disease, at him, at myself, at the sheer relentlessness of it all. I thought this meant I was failing at love. Now I understand that love isn't a pure emotion existing in isolation.
It's messy, complicated, and includes the full spectrum of human feeling. Those moments of frustration didn't diminish my love; they were proof of how deeply I was engaged in the struggle.
6) Most people weren't thinking about you nearly as much as you feared
Remember all those times you replayed conversations, wondering what people thought? That presentation where you stumbled over your words?
The party where you told that joke that fell flat? In your seventies, you finally understand that everyone else was too busy worrying about their own stumbles to catalog yours.
This isn't depressing - it's liberating. We spent so much energy performing for an audience that was barely watching. They were all starring in their own plays, just as anxious about their lines as we were about ours.
7) Happiness was always a choice, not a destination
When I wrote about finding purpose after retirement, I touched on this idea, but it bears repeating with a different lens. We spent decades believing happiness was something we'd achieve once we reached certain milestones.
Once the kids graduated. Once we got the promotion. Once we retired. Once, once, once.
But happiness was never waiting at a finish line. It was available in small moments we rushed past while racing toward that imaginary destination.
It was in the morning light through kitchen windows, in unexpected laughter during difficult times, in the weight of a sleeping cat on your lap while grading papers.
Final thoughts
The seventies don't bring perfection or complete peace - anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But they do bring a certain clarity, like cleaning glasses you didn't realize were smudged. You see yourself more accurately, with both more compassion and more honesty.
The tragedy isn't that we avoided these truths for so long. The tragedy would be reaching this age and still refusing to see them.
So here's to the courage of finally looking directly at ourselves, wrinkles, mistakes, beauty, and all. The view, it turns out, is actually quite spectacular.
