As I get older I feel like a stranger in my own body — is aging just loss?

The short answer No—or not only. The body isn’t turning on you; it’s keeping the record honestly. The stiffness and the aches and the wear are not betrayals but marks of use—every one of them a place you were, a thing you did, a load you carried. There’s a plain dignity in a thing that shows where it was used, the way a stone step is worn hollow by the feet that needed it. You aren’t becoming a stranger to yourself. You’re becoming legible.

The longer answer

Go into any very old building and find the stairs, and look at the stone. In the middle of each step there’s a hollow—a smooth worn dip where a few hundred years of feet have come down in the same place, wearing the stone away a footfall at a time until it curves like a shallow bowl. Nobody carved that hollow. It isn’t damage, exactly, and it is certainly not neglect—it’s the opposite of neglect. It’s the record of use, written into the hardest thing to hand by the soft, repeated passage of the people who needed the stairs.

And it’s beautiful, that hollow, in a way a fresh-cut step never is. It’s honest. You can see, standing there, exactly where the weight went, exactly how the thing was loved by being used. The wear is not the ruin of the step. The wear is the step’s biography, and the reason you’d sooner run a hand over an old worn stair than a new machined one.

I’ve come to think of an aging body the same way, because the alternative reading—that aging is simply loss, a subtraction, a slow robbery—seems to me both miserable and untrue. The stiffness in the morning is the record of every load those joints ever carried. The lines are set into the exact places the face most often went. The hands that don’t quite work as they did are the hands that did the work. None of it is betrayal. All of it is use, written into the material—the same hollow worn into the same stone by the same faithful passage.

We’re taught to read these marks as damage and to want them gone: sanded out, filled in, the step made to look uncut again. But a body with the wear taken out of it wouldn’t be young—it would be anonymous. A stair nobody had ever climbed, proving nothing, holding no one’s passage. The wear is what makes it yours. It is where you were used, and being used, over a long time, by things and people who needed you, is not the tragedy of a life. It’s close to the whole point of one.

Whether what comes after the wearing is anything, or only the stone gone smooth and then gone, I can’t tell you and won’t pretend to. But while it wears, it is not losing you. It is writing you down. It may be so. It may not.