Additional Thoughts on Getting Older
Or Maybe Getting Wiser?
Dear Friends,
First of all, welcome to my new subscribers. I’m so glad my DIY Ritual Guide resonated with so many people. What’s evident from the comments and emails I received is that people have space in their lives or their hearts for new ways of marking the passage of time and life that are not tied to painful or outdated belief systems. I am working on my ritual for my 50th birthday. It will involve going into the ocean. It won’t be much of a hardship since I will be in Hawaii that weekend. I’ll keep you posted on the rest of it.
One thing I haven’t sorted out about becoming 50 is whether I am getting older or growing up. Up until a few weeks ago, I would have said, ruefully, that I was getting older, and I didn’t like that. Now I think I frame it as I am growing up.
A part of me has always felt like I am nineteen years old. When I was nineteen, I had been out of my mom’s house for a year. I was already friends with the man I would later marry and I still see him almost every day (or night). We’re both still 19, right?
At 19, I felt a combination of the weight of the world on my shoulders and an unhindered sense of possibility. I have continued to carry that combination up to age 49, but it’s starting to wear thin as a persona. I don’t want the weight of the world anymore, and while my sense of possibility exists, it no longer involves career ambition or crashing disappointment. I want to be somebody new. I have to assume that is what my fifties are for.
Some recommendations that have been feeding my thoughts about this:
Last Friday, the incomparable hero E. Jean Carroll, vanquisher of Donald Trump’s disgusting mouth, was interviewed on the Strict Scrutiny podcast along with her lawyer Roberta Kaplan. The whole interview is hilarious and enlightening, but one thing E. Jean talked about was her decision to sue Trump so many years after the sexual assault. Host Leah Litman asked her what advice she had for other women on standing up to bullies. E. Jean said that before she went through these trials, she might have told women to fight like hell, “Go get ‘em!” but now she counsels caution. “I cannot tell other women to do this. It is very difficult. You have to have ovaries of steel. You gotta think twice,” she says, “They’ll try to demolish you.” She notes that women risk their families and their jobs by speaking up. She asks, will the religious leaders speak out? No. Will the business leaders stand up? No. Will the politicians stand up? No. “So one 80-year-old woman and one 35-year-old attorney have to stand up because no one else is doing it.”
That last line jumped out at me. I got the shivers when I heard it the first time. Growing up/getting older means having less to lose in a battle. I am financially and emotionally secure now in a way I was not at 19. I can fight battles that other women cannot fight right now. Being older means caring less about bullies or people who want to manipulate or use me. Not carrying the weight of the world means not carrying the expectations of others, but it does not mean shirking responsibility for the things that truly matter.
Another insight I came across this week was from Laura Hough. She said:
I had learned to be a person who doesn't want things, certainly doesn’t need things. It's how you survive. If you never have any wants or needs, you never have to worry about those wants or needs being left unmet. You can’t be disappointed. Disappointed seems like the wrong word for the weight of knowing your needs don't matter, the constant reinforcement every time you allow yourself to want something, a little thing, and being denied. But it also meant I didn't even know what I like. I’d never fucking considered the question. How could I? Some part of me thought wanting things made me a bad person.
When I read this, I felt a pluck on a very tight wire inside me. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to figure out who I am, who I want to be, and what it is I want. I had never seen it explained why I didn’t know what I wanted. Here’s the essay the quote is from:
This isn’t to say that my needs in life have not been met. I’ve eaten three or more meals every day of my life and had shelter too. I’ve gotten a great education and decent healthcare. The bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are solid as a rock in my life. But as I climb the pyramid, I see that there are chinks in the rock, places where the materials fell away or never were. This is the consequence of being abandoned by a parent as a kid and of the seemingly positive but insanely high expectations that were placed on me (or I placed on myself in hopes of pleasing an absent parent).
There are other causes too; my point isn’t to catalog them. My point is that my goal for my fifties is to figure out all the things that I never let myself want or need and then permit myself to want them, and then get them.
Whew, this one was heavy, huh? I’ll finish with a recommendation for Gary Gulman’s Born on 3rd Base. It’s hilarious.
