Disappearing vs Aging

Someone once told me, “As you age, you disappear unless you fight to stay visible.”

At the time, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I still think about that sentence.

Does disappearing mean people notice you less when you walk into a room?

That younger faces command attention more easily?

That your opinions sometimes land more quietly than they once did?

Probably. That part is real.

But disappearing is not the same as being erased.

Aging changes how attention moves toward you — and what you do with it once it arrives.

With time, you gain the ability to step forward or hang back deliberately.

To observe instead of perform.

To speak because you mean something, not because you’re competing for space.

In youth, attention is often automatic.

With age, attention becomes selective — and so does your appetite for it.

And then there is the larger truth we tend to avoid because it makes people uncomfortable:

We are all moving toward disappearance.

That’s what death is.

You live on only in memory.

So perhaps the goal isn’t fighting disappearance at all costs.

Perhaps the goal is crossing the finish line intact.

With strength.

With clarity.

With love and ideas and integrity that outlast the image.

We aged.

We’re still here.

And one day, we won’t be.

The question is how fully we inhabit the middle —

and what we leave behind when we’re gone.

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