Annual Performance Review With My 31-Year-Old Body
I thought our mission was clear: maintain peak 23-year-old fitness for the next fifty to seventy years.
Hi, welcome! You can have a seat or stand, whichever is feeling better for our back today.
As your manager, I want to kick things off by saying thank you for your work over the past year! We weren’t run over by a bus and that’s not nothing, so let’s celebrate the wins here. That said, I think we can both agree this was a particularly tough time for you, my body.
I thought our mission was clear: maintain peak 23-year-old fitness for the next fifty to seventy years. This may seem impossible, but I ask a lot of you because I believe in your potential. Recently, though, I am wondering: do you even enjoy working for me anymore? Because — more and more frequently — it feels like you are actively trying to sabotage Our Life LLC.
Tasks that were previously easy for you are suddenly problematic, i.e. getting up out of a moderately deep couch (and while we’re on the subject, I find the accompanying groans unnecessary). Similarly, I am seeing a falloff in energy levels — coffee consumption is up, yet I still find myself yawning at 9, 8, sometimes even 7pm. As your manager, I need you to understand that 8pm is not an acceptable bedtime; that is “RuPaul’s Drag Race” time, the one time of the week I demand we stay awake for.
On that note, there are operations we used to execute together on a daily basis, like bending our knees, but the physical reliability of our knees is increasingly scattershot. If we are at a bar and “Get Low” comes on, I want to feel confident that I can drop it — both to the window and to the walls.
You fell short of last year’s goal of getting eight hours of sleep every night. I understand this body has undergone a 30 percent increase in wakeful hours due to TikTok scrolling, as well as a 40 percent decrease in exercise — and while I hear your feedback that you believe this is my fault, I would contend that these are roadblocks to which you should be able to adapt.
I see in your self-evaluation you wrote down a goal for next year: “Do a split.” I love this goal, it’s so fun and creative, but I do think we need to be realistic about scale. Would you be willing to start with a smaller physical goal — like taking a hot shower without having to lie down for 20 minutes afterwards? Or waking up before noon on a Saturday? These are appropriate, achievable aims that I think are more suited to where you are in your career.
To end on a high note, I want to say I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made on teeth grinding! I know that introducing a nighttime mouthguard was not a fun process, but you committed to it, and incidents of spitting it out on the pillow while asleep have dropped to historic lows. In light of the dentist’s warning that we are losing an “alarming” amount of enamel through jaw-clenching, I will hold up my end and limit future consumption of the New York Times Opinion section.
I truly believe that 32 can be our best year yet, and I’m hoping to see a little more effort and responsiveness from you moving forward. As a thank-you for participating in this frank conversation, I’d love to treat you to some mini Cadbury eggs. We won’t be eating the big ones anymore, we all remember what happened last time.
Caroline Ulwick is a writer, comedian, and producer living in Brooklyn, New York. She has been published in McSweeney’s, The Belladonna, Points In Case and Slackjaw. You can catch her live sketch comedy at BoogieManja with her team “Cliff Hanger,” online with GOLD Comedy’s team “No Worries If Not!”, or at her improv performances around the city. Find her on TikTok and Instagram.
