Feeling Old

New blogfriend Julie Leung has a birthday post on "Feeling my age," which by the end of the second paragraph has morphed into, "I feel old." As far as I can tell from her technology-dating (this is what we do instead of carbon-dating: will your fossil be excavated from the 8-Track Tape stratum?), Julie must be . . . 30. 35 at the outside.

Not that that disqualifies her from feeling old. I'll refrain from the obligatory "Oh yeah? Wait'll you're 59, honey!" because I know that "old" is relative: compared to what? When you're 3, a 5-year-old looks "old": terribly mature and tall and accomplished. I remember that when I was in college, people in their 30s looked "old" to me -- faded, creased and worn. And you know you're middle-aged when young people think you're old, and old people think you're young. What with the welter of new age-terms -- "40 is the new 30," "60 is the new 40," "Third Age," "the young old," "the old old" -- with exercise, vitamins, the craze for cosmetic surgery, and the tease of genetic surgery, the numbers are coming loose from their old meanings and moorings. More than ever before, you're only as old as you feel.

Still, 30 is the first age when you can legitimately claim to feel old, and try the word on. Elite athletes are "old" in their 30s. (Olympic gymnasts are "old" in their 20s.) The first sign I can remember that I wasn't "young young" any more was that I could no longer pull all-nighters. Life has drawn its first lines on your face, deepened your eyes, dented your idealism. (At 30, mine was still like a new car with an ugly scratch. It had had a couple of fender-benders, no major collisions yet.) The surprise is that "feeling old" doesn't feel bad. It just feels . . . different, and in some ways, actually better. You can see Julie realizing this as she contemplates passport pictures separated by a decade:

I look at the Julie who had her picture taken ten years ago. She looks younger and thinner. Compared to me today, she looks like a model: imperfections invisible. . . . This Julie looks calm and carefree and Californian. . . . Life in Cupertino is sunny and sweet so far. Yes, I can remember. I can read it in her eyes.

My new picture has a strange expression. I look startled because I was. . . . I look like I didn't comb my hair. I look like I'm about to speak my mind. I look like I tried to get my passport photo taken while my three girls were playing with toys in the ten minutes before my eye doctor appointment. I look like I've lived through battles.

I wish I still resembled the 1995 me. But that seems silly. After all, shouldn't I look like I've lived another ten years? . . . The Julie in the old passport photo had never held her brother while he was dying. That Julie had never held her baby, first inside her and then outside on her chest, in that miraculous moment of meeting someone you already know.

That captures perfectly the mix of regret, discovery, and surprised, defiant pride that is "feeling old."

This is the last year I'll have the luxury of saying, with astonishment, "I'm almost 60!" I remember my grandmother saying, "I feel exactly the same as I did when I was 16, and then I look in the mirror and say, 'Who is that old lady?'" At this age, I discover, you can feel very old and very young from one day to the next. One day it's, "Sex is so over. I'm old now, a watcher from the sidelines. It's not that I don't have any desire. It's that I don't have any hope." The next day, envy for the sex-ridden is replaced by pity, if not contempt, as I view their driven, drunken antics from the self-possessed paradise I last inhabited when I was 12.

(And a really good haircut can still restore a flash of potency, along with Joni Mitchell's prescription: "Happiness is the best facelift.")

Life is an angel you wrestle with again and again that blesses you as it cripples you.

- amba

READ MORE ON THIS SUBJECT AT ITS HOMEPAGE, TIME GOES BY.

Comments

[Ronni Bennett]

What strikes me about this post, amba, is the liberal use of the word "old" with no prejudice.

When I started Time Goes By, I made a deliberate decision to avoid all use of the politically correct, awful euphemisms for old: third-ager, golden-ager, oldster, etc. and certainly not the pejoratives geezer, coot, biddy, old bat, etc.

Instead, I made a point to use "old" and "older" in the same manner "young" is used - as though they were as equally positive in tone and just a descriptor of an era of life.

Then, a remarkable thing happened. After a few months, those words really had become neutral for me, tossed off in any circumstance that requires them without the attachment of any unfavorable flavor.

People commonly like to say at our age, "Oh, you don't look that old." This is meant to be a compliment, but it is really a manifestation of a culture that refuses to accept older people as valuable; that age is be avoided at all costs even if that cost involves toxic chemicals and major surgery.

And I love it when others take up my cause and use "old" as commonly and unself-consciously as any other descriptor.

Because our culture has never done any serious thinking out loud about aging except in its (supposed) negative aspects, it's new territory. I've never been this old before (63) and it's a fascinating to be finding out what's it's really like.

[Tamar]

What can I say? I could just say nothing because both of you write about what I am feeling and thinking - almost to a tee.

What I want to say is that I love you both and am so grateful I found you. Because I did. I found you.

"Life is an angel you wrestle with again and again that blesses you as it cripples you." For this, especially, I thank you.

[amba]

Exactly, Ronni -- no one's ever talked about what it's really like! Old people have either been in total denial, pseudo-young, or they've sort of played along, like some blacks in the early 20th century playing along with the minstrelsy stereotype -- you know all the birthday cards about dentures and walkers. In other words, whether we are playing the stereotype or defying it, the real experience has fallen silently through the cracks. That's why I thought your interview with Hugh Downs was so extraordinary. He talked about how immeasurably much deeper and wider his range of appreciation and of love has become. We as a society are so fixated on how we look from the outside (the "culture of narcissism" Christopher Lasch prophetically wrote about) that we've lost awareness of the boundlessness of our own inner dimension. Like splashing frantically on the surface of a vast and welcoming ocean. Your website, and the exploration and honesty of bloggers like Tamar and Ancient Mariner, is going to do so much to help people stop masochistically imposing these phony limits on themselves and missing what's actually there.

[Julie]

What rich comments! I am excited to see where this journey leads us all as we sharing life together. Thank you.