Aging as Excavation: Becoming Who You Were Before
At thirty-nine, I’m finally becoming who I was before I learned to be someone else.
Childhood pressures, social expectations, and the desperate need for approval taught me to perform versions of myself that others would accept. I learned to hide curiosity that seemed excessive, tone down intensity that made people uncomfortable, suppress questions that revealed too much wonder. The process was gradual—small adjustments made in response to subtle feedback. A raised eyebrow when I asked too many questions. Awkward silence when I expressed enthusiasm others didn’t share. The sense that my natural self was somehow wrong, too much, inappropriate for the social contexts I needed to navigate.
By my twenties, the performance was seamless. I’d internalized which parts of myself were acceptable and which needed hiding. The curious child became the competent adult who asked only appropriate questions. The intense feelings got channeled into productivity and achievement. The wonder got redirected toward pursuits that seemed serious and worthwhile rather than childish and frivolous.
But aging strips away performance. Energy becomes too precious to waste on pretending. Time feels too limited to spend it being anyone other than exactly who you are. The calculation shifts: in your twenties, you have decades to build and maintain social capital, so the investment in performance seems worthwhile. By your late thirties, you start counting what remains rather than what stretches ahead, and suddenly the energy spent pretending to be someone else feels like waste you can’t afford.
The masks become heavy. The effort required to maintain them starts exceeding their value. You catch yourself mid-performance and wonder why you’re still doing this—still moderating your enthusiasm, still hiding your actual interests, still performing the version of yourself that you thought others wanted to see. And slowly, sometimes suddenly, you start letting the performance drop.
The person emerging now feels familiar—like meeting someone I knew long ago and forgot about. The child who asked too many questions, who felt everything deeply, who believed stories mattered more than status. That person was real, authentic, unfiltered by social calculation. Then he learned to edit himself, to become more palatable, more acceptable, more appropriate. The editing became automatic, unconscious, so complete that the original person disappeared beneath layers of learned behavior.
Now he’s returning. Not unchanged—he carries the experiences and understanding that came from decades of living. But fundamentally recognizable, as if the essential self was always there, waiting beneath the performance, ready to emerge when circumstances finally allowed.
This isn’t nostalgia for childhood innocence. The child I was had his own problems—naive, unformed, lacking the perspective that only experience provides. But he also had something I lost somewhere in the process of becoming an adult: permission to be fully himself, without apology or explanation. The questions weren’t excessive to him; they were natural. The intensity wasn’t uncomfortable; it was honest. The wonder wasn’t inappropriate; it was the only reasonable response to existence.
What if aging isn’t decline but excavation—uncovering the self that existed before we learned to hide it?
We frame aging as loss: loss of youth, beauty, energy, time. And these losses are real. But what if aging also involves recovery—recovering the self we buried under expectations, recovering the authenticity we sacrificed for acceptance, recovering the person we were before we learned to perform?
The excavation metaphor fits because it suggests the authentic self isn’t created but discovered, not built but unearthed. It was always there, buried under layers of socialization, hidden beneath performances that once seemed necessary for survival. Aging removes these layers—not through some noble process of self-actualization but simply through exhaustion, through the recognition that you don’t have energy to waste anymore, through the freedom that comes from caring less what others think.
And perhaps this explains why some older people seem more themselves, more at ease, more content despite physical decline. They’ve stopped performing. They’ve let the excavation happen. They’ve returned to some essential version of themselves that was there all along, waiting to be rediscovered.
The child who asked too many questions is asking them again. The person who felt deeply is letting himself feel without apologizing for the intensity. The one who believed stories mattered more than status is writing stories again, caring less whether they’re impressive and more whether they’re true.
This is what the old people tried to tell me: that you spend your youth becoming someone you think you should be, and if you’re lucky, you spend your later years becoming who you actually are. That the journey isn’t linear progress but circular return—back to the self you started as, enriched by experience but fundamentally recognizable.
At thirty-nine, I’m still in process. The performance hasn’t completely dropped; decades of habit don’t disappear overnight. But I feel the excavation happening—the layers thinning, the authentic self becoming more visible, the energy for pretending gradually depleting until only truth remains.
And here’s what I’m discovering: the person I was before I learned to hide is still interesting, still worth being, still sufficient exactly as he is. The modifications I made—the toning down, the hiding, the suppression—they weren’t improvements. They were compromises made in exchange for acceptance, and now that the need for that particular form of acceptance has faded, the compromises feel unnecessary.
Maybe this is aging’s gift: not wisdom exactly, but permission. Permission to stop performing, to return to yourself, to excavate what was buried and let it breathe again. The crow’s feet and gray hair are the price of admission to this freedom—evidence that you’ve lived long enough to stop caring whether you’re living correctly according to others’ standards.
The child I was is becoming the adult I am. Not by rejecting experience or denying time, but by integrating the journey into the essential self that was there from the beginning. The questions are more sophisticated now, informed by decades of possible answers. The intensity is more focused, channeled through understanding rather than scattered by confusion. The wonder is deeper, enriched by having seen enough of the world to know how much remains unknown.
This is what aging makes possible: not decline into diminishment, but excavation toward authenticity. Uncovering the self that existed before we learned to hide it. Becoming, finally, who we were all along.
