The Dagmar Perspective

If you’ve been following along to my blog posts this year, you may have noticed that I disappeared for the past couple months. My last post went up in September, and it’s now January…. Although the pause wasn’t intentional, and it also wasn’t because I ran out of things to write about. More like, life got busy and have been using my free time to focus on investing in my health (will explain more below).

So before anything else, I want to say: sorry for the unexpected silence! And also say, I’m back!

I also want you to keep me accountable during 2026. Blogging brings me great joy and I want to continue writing in my free time. As a new year’s resolution, I’m committing to posting two blog posts a month. (Ok, January will probably only get one unless I manage to sneak another in before the end of the week) But starting in February, I’m officially back in action! To ease myself back in, I figured I’d start with a shorter post and something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: getting older and the unexpected ways your body starts to fail you.

Now that I am in my mid to late thirties, my body has been very clear that something is changing. In my twenties, I had what felt like unlimited energy. I could stay up until two or three in the morning, wake up at seven, and function completely fine all day. I could sustain that kind of sleep schedule for an alarming amount of time with seemingly zero consequences.

Somewhere after thirty, that stopped being true.

Now, if I don’t get at least seven or eight hours of sleep, I’m completely dead the next day. Not just tired, but completely useless and non-functional. And to make matters worse, my ability to sleep well has slowly disappeared. In my twenties, I would hit my head to the pillow and sleep like a brick, straight through the night, waking up to one alarm. These days, I wake up multiple times for reasons that feel ridiculous (I need to pee, I need water, the blanket feels wrong, the blanket is suddenly too hot/cold, etc.). And when morning comes, I need at least three or four alarms to get up, and even then my body will happily ignore them in favor of fifteen (or sixty…) more minutes of sleep.

And then there are the aches. I can wake up having slept on my back wrong and feel like I’ve seriously injured myself for the next week. Jump off a curb too quickly? Aches the next day. Pick up a heavy box? Guaranteed aches the next day. I used to think people who complained about random aches and pains were being dramatic. Aging was something that happened to other people. My body would never do that to me, right??

Alcohol has also become a completely different experience. In my twenties, I could drink five or six drinks and wake up the next morning totally fine. I genuinely thought hangovers were an urban myth because I had never experienced one. Now, if I have more than one drinks, I feel physically ill that night, and the next day feels like I’ve been hit by a truck. I’ve never been a big drinker, but now drinking feels like something that needs to be carefully planned around my schedule. 

Let us not forget the journey with my face. I did not understand the importance of skincare in my twenties, and I lived accordingly. No sunscreen. No moisturizer. No routine beyond an aggressive acne face wash with benzoyl peroxide, which I later learned does absolutely no favors for your skin. Years of neglect, sun exposure, and picking at acne have done their damage. Although I now have a multi-step skincare routine in an attempt to save what’s left of my youthful skin, the crow’s feet, forehead wrinkles, sun damage, and acne scars are definitely here to stay (and likely get worse with time despite my efforts).

The biggest disruption, and the one that honestly explains why blogging stopped altogether for a period of time, has been my carpal tunnel. I originally developed it in college from using my laptop in impressively non-ergonomic positions, like writing entire essays in bed. I’d always had mild numbness in my hands, but about two months ago it got significantly worse. Around the same time, I started working with a personal trainer, and I’m fairly confident that exercises like push-ups and weight lifting put additional strain on my wrists and pushed them to severe pain.

Very quickly once I started with my personal trainer, I noticed I started dropping things frequently and my hand strength was quickly decreasing. One of the victims of my lack of dexterity was my phone, which the back glass panel shattered…twice. Then I started waking up every morning with numb hands. I pushed through it at work, answering emails and getting things done, but the idea of sitting down to write on a computer in my free time felt physically painful. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t lift a heavy pan, squeeze the shampoo bottle, hold utensils or chopsticks, grip the steering wheel properly, or open most wrappers/containers. At that point, I canceled my personal training sessions in early January and finally accepted that something needed to change.

When I first started noticing all of these signs of aging, I panicked. Aging had always felt abstract to me, like something that happened slowly and quietly to other people. Suddenly it was happening to me in very real and noticeable ways. I felt like I was transforming into the person I didn’t think existed, the person I thought was just… old.

It took a lot of intentional mental shifting, but I’ve come to accept this stage of life, and even appreciate it. I’ve changed my lifestyle to better support what my body needs now instead of fighting it, and while that shift wasn’t easy, it’s made me happier and far more functional. These aches and changes mean I’ve lived. They mean I’ve had experiences, learned lessons, and made it through enough life for it to leave a mark. This body has carried me through everything so far, and it deserves a little more appreciation than I’ve given it.

One of the biggest changes I’ve made is treating sleep like a non-negotiable. I’ve learned that I need about two hours to wind down at night, so I start slowing things down by nine at the latest. I aim to be in bed by ten and asleep by eleven. That change alone has made a huge difference in my energy and ability to function. The tradeoff is that I no longer make weekday evening plans. Monday through Thursday are reserved for routine and rest. It was a hard boundary to set, but I’ve found a lot of comfort in the stability of knowing exactly when I’m going to bed.

To address the aches and the carpal tunnel, I’ve added a few simple habits to my evenings. I take a thirty-minute walk around my neighborhood most nights, which helps my body and my brain decompress. I stretch for a few minutes before bed, and even that small effort makes a noticeable difference in how I feel in the morning. Most importantly, I started wearing wrist supports at night. For a relatively small investment, they’ve made a huge difference. Slowly but surely, I’ve regained hand strength and reduced numbness, and I can once again do normal things like open water bottles, type without pain, and hold my phone without fear.

Aging definitely takes more effort than it used to, but the investment is worth it. Instead of fearing how else my body might fail me, I’m trying to look forward to the experiences still ahead of me and trust that my body, with the right care, is prepared to handle them.

And with that, I’m really glad to be writing again.