Jamie Lee Curtis is getting candid about what it’s like getting older in Hollywood, saying, “I’m pro-aging! I feel more alive today than I ever have, even with COVID.”

On Saturday, Curtis was recognized with the AARP Career Achievement Award at the Movies for Grownups Awards. In an interview with the magazine, she expressed how lucky she is to “continually have had an opportunity to expand.”

“I’m talking about expanding intellectually,” she added. “I’m an autodidact and an opsimath — a late-in-life learner. I feel very fortunate that I’m having more creative opportunities — I’m getting to do what I’ve wanted to do since I was a teen. I’m starting to produce and direct things.”

The actress, who received her first Oscar nomination for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, recently took to Instagram to reflect on her 2008 cover for AARP: The Magazine. “A fun #fbf when I was the @aarp Cover Girl and people lost their MINDS that I was TOPLESS!” she wrote in the caption. “A perfect statement about how weird people are about older people having any sexuality whatsoever.”

Born to actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee has built up quite the credits during her career. After making her acting debut at 19 in a 1977 episode of the TV series Quincy, M.E., she went on to star in an abundance of projects, including True Lies, Freaky Friday, Scream Queens, Knives Out and the Halloween franchise. She also produced three Halloween films and directed an episode of Scream Queens and Anything But Love.

But among all the projects she has worked on, Curtis told AARP that it’s all been about finding her bigger purpose as a creative. “If you had said to me when I was 18, ‘What do you want to do or be?’ I didn’t have a clue,” she said. “I would have said something like, ‘I’ll be a cop.’ … But I never would have known that I was a creator — I would have never known who I am today. And it’s been through the process of elimination of things that didn’t suit me, that didn’t fit me.”

“And now I have emerged,” she continued. “I know who I am. I know what I look like, I know what I look good in. I know what I think. And it is in that immersion of coming into my own self that I’m having this moment. Professionally, emotionally, spiritually, physically.”

While she has received several nominations and awards throughout her career, including taking home two Golden Globes, it wasn’t until she played Deirdre Beaubeirdre in Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once that she got her first Oscar nom for best supporting actress.

As the 64-year-old actress reminisces about all she has learned, she says, “That’s the beautiful gift of aging: The things that are unimportant slip away. That is the essence of the truth that sets you free to manifest your destiny. Carpe diem — seize the day. And I am seizing the day daily because I have no fucking time to waste.”