Thin Skinned

My skin seems awfully thin lately.

That's not a metaphor implying that I'm easily offended or hurt. My skin actually seems to have become thinner lately. Easier to tear and bleed. Last night, I tore skin to the point of bleeding by trying to open a bottle of salad dressing. Seriously -- ripped holes in my thumb and middle finger when they caught on the plastic hinge and the little leverage tab opposite.

I've also got a paper cut on the index finger of the same hand.

They're minor wounds, admittedly, but they sting like the dickens. I wondered briefly if there was something about losing weight that makes the skin thinner and more prone to damage, and then I realized it's far more likely to be something infinitely more sinister: age.

Modern society doesn't think of the 30s as being particularly old, but in all honesty, it's on the downside of peak physical condition for most humans. It's only in the last hundred years or so that our life expectancy has reliably gone much past 60, and evolution takes more than a few generations to adapt to that kind of thing. Much past 30, and the body begins, slowly, to fail -- that's a fact, even for people who take very good care of their health. It's rare for professional athletes to stay in the game much past 35 (depending on the particular game, I know). All other factors accounted for, the risk of birth defects jumps surprisingly once the mother passes the age of 35. (Which is why my insurance classed my pregnancy with Alex as "high risk" -- not my weight, not genetic factors, just my age.)

The organs work a little slower than they did ten years ago. New cells get built less readily, so healing takes a little longer. (That includes healing the micro-tears that are the result of strength exercises, which is why building new muscle is harder after 30 than it is when you're young -- and it offers a double whammy of reasons to avoid ramping up an exercise regimen too quickly.)

And the skin... it thins. It becomes less the tight, rubbery, quick-to-heal wrapper of a child, and more the loose, tissue-y, delicate shroud of the old.

All of which sounds pretty depressing, but I'm actually not feeling too bad about it. It's annoying, and perhaps just the slightest bit funny...

I like to laugh at the ridiculous ways I've injured myself. In college, I wound up on crutches as the result of a game of Frisbee (and not even Ultimate Frisbee -- just tossing a disk around with a couple of friends). I can still see the faint scars on my arm from a terrible pizza injury, a decade ago.

But I think "multiple wounds from salad dressing" has to top them all.