The Older I Get, The Less I Feel The Need to Prove

On survival, self-worth, and the things age teaches quietly

This article is also featured on Substack

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As I get older, I find myself caring less about being impressive and more about being at peace.

There was a time in my life when I believed I had to earn love by overextending myself. I thought being needed equated to being valued. I believed that if I loved deeply enough, sacrificed enough, remained loyal, explained myself clearly, or made myself smaller and easier to embrace, things would eventually turn out the way I hoped.

I also believed a lot of the things many of us are taught growing up. That success, money, relationships, status, achievement, or building the “right” kind of life would eventually make me feel whole. That happiness was something waiting for me somewhere in the future if I just worked hard enough, got enough right, or became enough for it.

I don’t resonate with that as much these days.

As we age, life has a way of humbling us. Not always through a single catastrophic event, but rather through years filled with loss, grief, responsibility, exhaustion, disappointment, and change. This process leads to the realization that the world is far more complex than we understood in our youth.

People talk a lot about heartbreak, but not enough about the strange transformation that comes after it. The moment you realize love alone cannot save a relationship. The moment you understand that history and chemistry are not the same thing as compatibility. The moment you stop romanticizing suffering and start asking yourself why you believed pain was something you had to tolerate in order to deserve connection.

The moment you realize the job you gave your whole life to would replace you in a week if you disappeared tomorrow. The moment you understand how much of life encourages people to sacrifice themselves in exchange for approval, security, status, or the illusion of stability.

I think the older you get, the harder it becomes not to notice how many people are running themselves into the ground trying to earn a sense of worth that was never supposed to be conditional in the first place.

The older I get, the less interested I am in proving my worth through exhaustion. I am less willing to abandon myself for the comfort of others. I am less impressed by chaos disguised as passion or loyalty that only flows in one direction. These days, I care way more about peace, honesty, reciprocity, and about feeling safe enough to exist fully as myself.

I care about relationships where care flows both ways, instead of one person slowly disappearing, trying to hold everything together.

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Section 1: When Everything Cracked Open

For me, it felt like somewhere between my late twenties and early thirties, everything I thought I understood about life cracked open.

My relationships shifted. The future I once imagined for myself started unraveling. Even my sense of identity no longer felt solid in the ways it once had. The things I had built my life around suddenly no longer felt stable enough to keep building on

I had gone through a high-risk pregnancy at thirty-two with a child I had spent fourteen years praying and fighting for. At the same time, I was raising two teenagers, struggling through postpartum depression, facing one medical issue after another, and slowly losing touch with myself somewhere beneath the weight of all of it.

My marriage was struggling to stay together. We were fighting more. The cracks that had once been easier to ignore were becoming impossible not to see.

Depression was no longer something I could quietly bury while pretending I was okay. I no longer had the ability to endlessly swallow criticism, passive cruelty, tension, or the constant chaos of people moving in and out of my life and home.

Most of all, I could no longer survive the loneliness of feeling more alone around other people than I did by myself. Like a ghost living among the living.

Then I found out my older children had been harmed when they were younger, and I do think there are words strong enough to explain what that kind of grief does to a parent, especially when you spent years trying so desperately to protect them from exactly that kind of pain.

That was the part that shattered me the most. Not just the heartbreak, but the helplessness of realizing I could not protect the people I loved from every terrible thing this world is capable of.

The truth had come out years later, and instead of support, there was silence. Disengagement, defensiveness, and people taking sides. The kind of reactions that make already devastating situations feel even lonelier to survive.

I was exhausted emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically exhausted. My marriage was struggling. My depression was getting worse. I was trying to hold my children together while quietly falling apart myself.

Existing became heavy. Relationships became heavy. Expectations became heavy. Even ordinary days started feeling difficult to move through.

I think that was the beginning of realizing I could not continue living the way I always had. Something in me had reached its limit.

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Section 2: The Things Survival Changes

I think survival changes people in ways that are difficult to explain unless you have lived through it yourself.

Not just the dramatic moments either. Not just the obvious losses or catastrophic events people can point to and say, “That right there changed me.” Sometimes it is years of carrying way too much for too long.

I spent years functioning while exhausted. Years suppressing my own needs because everyone else’s pain, emotions, demands, or crises always seemed louder and more urgent. I spent years convincing myself that being strong meant enduring things quietly, years swallowing my feelings to keep the peace, keep the family together, keep the relationship stable, and keep myself useful.

At some point, survival mode stops feeling temporary and becomes part of who you are.

Hyperawareness settles into the body, and tension gets noticed before words are even spoken. Keeping the peace becomes instinctive, and shrinking yourself becomes normal. Emotional responsibility quietly lands on the shoulders of the person most willing to carry it.

For a long time, I mistook those things for love.

I thought it looked like endless understanding, patience, and endless sacrifice. I thought if I could just hold enough together, explain myself clearly enough, try harder, change who I was, help enough, forgive enough, stay calm enough, maybe eventually I would feel safe too.

Still, survival has a way of eventually collecting its debt.

Over time, though, the weight of things starts showing up in quieter ways. The body grows tired. The mind begins resisting things the mouth still agrees to. Exhaustion slowly replaces denial. Feelings you once pushed aside become harder to ignore.

Eventually, something inside you starts pulling away from environments your fear is still trying to hold onto.

The older I get, the more I realize how many people were taught to abandon themselves long before they were ever old enough to understand what it would eventually cost them.

So many people grow up learning that love, acceptance, belonging, or safety depend on how much discomfort they can quietly endure without becoming inconvenient to others. I do not say that with bitterness anymore. Mostly just sadness.

Once you begin recognizing those patterns, you start understanding why so many people are emotionally exhausted, disconnected, reactive, lonely, or quietly drowning beneath lives they never fully stopped to question.

I think unhealed pain has a way of continuing on unless someone finally stops long enough to face it. It shows up in relationships, families, communication, silence, emotional distance, and in people trying to love others while still carrying wounds they never fully learned how to hold themselves.

I can see now how many people are still surviving inside relationships, environments, expectations, and identities they outgrew years ago. Not because they are weak, but because survival teaches people to tolerate things long after they should have been allowed to rest, heal, or leave.

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Section 3: The Strange Grief of Outgrowing Yourself

One of the strangest parts of getting older is realizing grief is not always about losing other people, though there sure is a lot of that too.

Sometimes the grief comes from looking back at older versions of yourself and finally understanding how much they were carrying.

There are moments now where I think back to the girl and young woman I used to be and feel an ache in my chest so deep it catches me off guard. Not because I hate her or think she was foolish. Mostly because now I can see so clearly how hard she was working to hold everything together. Relationships, the family, and other people’s emotions. The constant pressure to keep the peace. The fear of failure, rejection, conflict, and abandonment. The exhausting need to be lovable enough, useful enough, patient enough, understanding enough to finally feel safe.

Oh, how I cringe and grieve for the girl who asked, “How high?” whenever someone said, “Jump.”

Looking back at her now hurts in the same way it hurts to watch someone desperately overextend themselves for love when you can clearly see how little they were receiving in return.

Constantly being giving, helpful, and kind felt like a way to become irreplaceable. Loyalty seemed to mean enduring difficulties silently, and understanding other people’s pain required ignoring her own. Eventually, it became clear that being low-maintenance, self-sacrificing, accommodating, and endlessly understanding made her seem easier to love.

I think a lot of people learn that lesson far too young. Especially people who grew up feeling like love could disappear if they became too emotional, too difficult, too needy, or too honest about their pain.

The danger in learning those lessons young is that eventually they stop feeling temporary. They start becoming the way you move through the world.

You become hyperaware of other people’s moods, reactions, needs, and discomfort. Keeping the peace starts feeling safer than honesty. Adjusting yourself becomes automatic. Over time, some people get so used to carrying things silently that they slowly lose touch with their own needs in the process.

The problem is that survival patterns do not always disappear once the danger passes either.

More often, they quietly follow people into adulthood, relationships, friendships, parenting, and nearly every space where vulnerability exists in everyday life.

Then one day, exhaustion finally catches up.

Things that once felt tolerable begin feeling heavier. Silence becomes harder to maintain. Small comments hurt more than they used to. Feelings long pushed aside slowly rise closer to the surface. Eventually, some part of you begins questioning why survival has required so much self-abandonment for so long.

I think that is part of growing older too. Realizing the soul has limits, even when the heart keeps trying to override them.

The older I get, the less I admire that kind of suffering.

Not because love is not valuable. It matters deeply. Still, relationships without reciprocity become grief eventually. Care without respect becomes exhaustion. Connection without safety slowly turns into survival.

I think age strips away certain illusions whether we are ready for it or not. The illusion that self-sacrifice guarantees loyalty. The illusion that being needed is the same thing as being cherished. The illusion that staying longer automatically makes something healthier.

These days, I find myself less interested in being chosen and more interested in whether something feels mutual, honest, calm, and sustainable.

The truth is, I didn’t really know what peace felt like for most of my life. Not real peace anyway.

The kind where silence doesn’t feel threatening, and your body isn’t constantly bracing for tension, criticism, chaos, or emotional demands.

I think the first real glimpses of it for me, came after my divorce. At first, it almost felt unfamiliar, like my nervous system did not fully know what to do without all the noise surrounding it.

Now, peace feels sacred to me because I finally understand how hard it is to find when you have spent most of your life surviving instead of living.

Section 4: The Older I Get, The Less I Need to Prove

I think one of the biggest things age has taught me is how exhausting it is to spend your life performing for acceptance.

Strength gets performed. So do happiness, patience, forgiveness, stability, confidence, and even healing sometimes become performances too. Meanwhile, underneath it all, there can still be a person quietly struggling to hold themselves together.

At some point, I just got tired.

Tired of explaining myself. Tired of shrinking myself to make other people comfortable. Tired of feeling like my worth depended on how useful, agreeable, selfless, productive, attractive, emotionally regulated, or accommodating I could be for everyone around me.

Eventually, I realized I no longer had the strength to keep wearing masks, or pretending, or performing versions of myself just to hold everything together. Something in me finally gave out. I had to stop fighting so hard to preserve a life that was already quietly crumbling beneath me.

As painful as it was, I think I needed things to fall apart. I needed to see what was still standing once the performance, the survival patterns, and the illusions were stripped away. I needed to figure out what was actually real enough to carry forward with me into the next version of my life.

Now the older I get, the less interested I am in proving that I am worthy of taking up space.

There was a time in my life when rejection felt catastrophic. Criticism could ruin my entire day. Someone being upset with me felt unbearable. Other people’s opinions felt almost like instructions for who I was supposed to become.

Now, I have just realized most people are simply carrying around their own pain, projections, fears, wounds, expectations, and unmet needs. Much of what people say or do has far more to do with their internal world than it does with mine.

That realization changed something in me.

Not in a cold or uncaring way. I still care deeply about people. Probably too deeply sometimes. Still, I no longer feel responsible for managing everyone else’s emotions at the expense of my own well-being.

There is also something strangely freeing about getting older and realizing perfection was never attainable to begin with.

People will misunderstand you. Some will reduce your entire life down to one mistake, one season, one coping mechanism, one opinion, one failure, or one moment they witnessed. Others will throw your past, your flaws, your worst moments, or the things you already punish yourself for like weapons meant to keep you ashamed and small.

Eventually, something shifts though.

You get tired of flinching every time someone points at a scar you already know exists. Tired of defending your humanity like you are on trial for being imperfect. Tired of acting shocked that you are flawed when every single person walking this earth is flawed too.

Instead of running from those parts of yourself, you slowly begin accepting them as part of your story.

Pain does not disappear, and mistakes do not suddenly stop mattering, but shame loses some of its power once it is no longer being hidden from.

I think that is part of what becoming “bulletproof” actually is.

It is less about becoming hard and more about reaching a point where your imperfections no longer make you feel unworthy of love, respect, peace, or belonging.

The older I get, the more I realize there are consequences and rewards attached to nearly every decision we make, whether we want to acknowledge them or not.

At some point, adulthood stops feeling like waiting for someone to come save you and starts feeling like realizing you and you alone are responsible for your own life now.

Your healing. Your choices. Your boundaries. Your future. Your recovery after everything falls apart.

I pray it is not like this for everyone, but for me, one of the hardest realizations was understanding that once you have nothing left to give, once you are truly struggling, overwhelmed, emotionally depleted, financially broken, mentally exhausted, or down so deep you barely recognize yourself anymore, it is often solely on you to dig your way back out of the hell.

That realization felt terrifying and hurtful at first after giving so much of myself to everyone and everything in my life.

Then strangely empowering.

Because as painful as it is to realize nobody is coming to rescue you, there is also freedom in realizing you are not powerless either.

Rock bottom forced me to meet parts of myself I never would have discovered otherwise. Resourcefulness. Resilience. Creativity. Endurance. The ability to rebuild slowly, imperfectly, and sometimes while grieving the entire time.

I think getting older teaches some people that strength is less about avoiding damage and more about surviving life without completely losing your humanity in the process.

The older I get, the more I realize there is no finish line where suddenly everyone approves of you, understands you, validates you, or finally sees your heart correctly.

That realization used to scare me.

Now that feels freeing too, because if perfection is impossible anyway, then maybe life is less about proving your worth and more about learning how to live honestly. Maybe peace matters more than image. Maybe authenticity matters more than approval. Maybe being deeply loved by a few safe people matters more than being endlessly palatable to everyone around you.

I wasted so much of my life believing I had to earn rest, softness, care, and belonging.

These days, I think existing should already qualify us for those things.

Section 5: Time Changes the Weight of Things

I think one of the quietest but strangest parts of aging is realizing how differently time begins to feel the older we get.

When we are younger, life can feel endless. There is this unconscious belief that there will always be time to figure things out later. Time to fix relationships, or become who you want to be, say what you mean, leave what hurts you, rest, heal, or start over. Maybe that is part of why so many of us move through early adulthood believing life will unfold in a relatively predictable way.

We grow up carrying a very specific idea of how life is supposed to go. Go to school, fall in love, get married, have babies, build a life, grow old together. Those expectations get planted so young that we rarely stop to question them or ask ourselves whether we even fully understand what those things actually require emotionally, mentally, financially, or spiritually.

Nobody really explains how much of adulthood is spent realizing life and people are far more complicated than we imagined when we were young. Love alone does not protect relationships from stress, trauma, grief, resentment, exhaustion, mental health struggles, family dynamics, or the slow ways people change over time. Sometimes two people can care deeply for each other and still slowly hurt one another. Sometimes love is present while the relationship itself quietly becomes unsustainable beneath the weight of everything surrounding it.

Then one day, without warning, time starts feeling visible.

You see it watching your children grow faster than your brain can process. You see it looking in the mirror and noticing traces of every exhausted version of yourself still living in your face and body. You realize that entire years passed while you were just trying to survive.

The older I get, the less interested I am in wasting time pretending. I can’t pretend to enjoy relationships that drain me, or pretend that constant chaos is normal. I’m no longer capable of pretending I’m okay with things that hurt me just to avoid disappointing other people or making things awkward. Eventually, time starts feeling too precious for that.

Loss has a way of teaching us just how fragile everything actually is. Relationships end. Parents age. Children grow up. Bodies change. Entire versions of your life can disappear before you even fully process that they were happening.

I believe that grief transforms people in subtle ways. At times, it softens them; other times, it hardens them. Often, it just leaves them feeling exhausted. Nevertheless, grief also removes the illusions we hold.

It reveals that appearances are not as important as inner peace. It shows that constantly sacrificing yourself does not necessarily make you more lovable. Finally, it reminds us that there may not always be more time to become the person we aspire to be.

The older I get, the more I realize life is happening right now. Not someday when everything is finally fixed, or when I become perfect. Not when everybody approves of me either. It’s happening right now, inside the mess, the rebuilding, and the uncertainty.

I wasted years believing life would begin once I finally became “enough.” Now I think being alive is already enough reason to participate in your own life.

There is something deeply sad about realizing how many people spend their lives waiting to finally deserve peace, joy, love, rest, or happiness, as if those things are rewards handed out only after enough suffering has been endured.

Now, I find myself wondering if they were never rewards at all, but gifts quietly being offered to us every single day. Small moments of beauty, connection, softness, laughter, safety, creativity, rest, sunlight, music, love, and presence.

I think so many of us miss them because we are trapped in the pain of the past, the fear of the future, the pressure to survive, or the constant belief that life is supposed to become something else before we are finally allowed to feel okay inside of it.

So we walk right past the very things that might have reminded us life was still trying to love us the entire time.

Small, quiet, ordinary gifts. The warmth of sunlight through a window. A genuine laugh. A quiet house after chaos. Music. Art. Rest. Safety. A deep breath. The feeling of being fully yourself around someone who does not require performance from you.

I think God tries to hand us those moments all the time. Little reminders that life is happening now, reminders that we are already worthy of love, peace, softness, and belonging exactly as we are.

I think there is something sacred about finally loosening your grip enough to let yourself receive that.

Closing Reflection

I don’t think getting older has made me fearless.

If anything, I think it has just made me more aware of how fragile life actually is. i now recognize how quickly things can change, how deeply people can hurt each other and how grief never fully leaves once it touches certain parts of you.

As I’ve aged, I’ve become softer in certain ways. I am gentler with myself and more understanding of other people’s humanity. I also have more compassion for the younger versions of myself, who were doing their best with the awareness, wounds, survival skills, and love they had at the time.

There are so many things I would tell her now if I could.

• She does not have to earn love through suffering.
• Exhaustion is not proof of worthiness.
• Constantly abandoning herself for other people will never finally make her feel safe.
• Peace matters.
• Rest matters.
• She matters.
• Life is not a test she has to pass in order to deserve peace and belonging.

Because the older I get, the more I realize so many people are walking around carrying the quiet belief that they are somehow behind, broken, failing, unlovable, too damaged, too late, or not enough yet for life to fully begin.

Meanwhile, life keeps trying to meet them anyway.

In ordinary moments, small moments, in those unexpected moments. Through laughter, connection, nature, art, silence, music, love, breath, grief, rebuilding, and even survival itself.

I don’t think healing is becoming some perfect untouched version of yourself.

I think it is learning how to remain open-hearted despite everything life has done to you. Learning how to sit beside your own humanity without constantly trying to punish it. I think it’s finally understanding that being imperfect does not make you unworthy of peace.

I think you hear a lot of people joke that the older you get, the fewer fucks you have left to give, and now here at 38 it definitely feels that way.

Honestly, I think part of that comes from just surviving as well. By a certain age, most people have already been humbled by life in one way or another. Grief. Illness. Loss. Rejection. Heartbreak. Failure. Fear. Regret. Survival.

Eventually, you realize everyone is out here carrying something. Everyone has insecurities and flaws. Everyone is out here trying to survive life the best way they know how.

Money does not exempt people from suffering. Status does not exempt people from grief. Even the most beautiful, successful, wealthy, admired people in the world still experience loss, fear, loneliness, aging, disappointment, and death.

No one gets out of this life untouched.

I think that realization changes what starts feeling important.

More things do not automatically create more peace. More status does not automatically create more fulfillment. More external validation does not automatically create self-worth.

The older I get, the more I think a meaningful life is probably made up of much quieter things than most of us were taught to chase. Connection. Presence. Safety. Laughter. Purpose. Rest. Love. Moments where you can fully exhale and simply exist as yourself without feeling like you need to earn the right to be here.

Maybe what I am most grateful to have learned is how to find beauty even inside the chaos of life. I realize those are the things that actually stay with us in the end, and maybe that is why the older I get, the less I need to prove and the more I just want to live.

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Thank you so much for reading.

With Love, Peace, and Light

Wendi Kehn

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