On Being Old Young
A few weeks ago, during a happy hour after a conference I was attending, a friend made a comment about my age. I should qualify that by saying that an older friend made a comment about my age, something about “when he was my age.” And so I asked him how old he thought I was. He said 33. Which means he actually thought at least 35 or 36, because who guesses a woman’s age out loud and doesn’t subtract at least a few years.
I am 32 years old. Which is young, but old young. Young enough to still have the [very] occasional [read: annual] night out singing at piano bars and dancing until 2:00am, but old enough that my regular bedtime is 9:30pm. Young enough that people in their seventies still refer to people my age as “the kids,” but old enough that I have to go to physical therapy for chronic pain in my neck resulting from over a decade in front of a laptop. Young enough that most of my friends don’t yet have kids, but old enough to have to worry about whether or not I’ll be able to. Young enough to have just bought my first vacuum cleaner this year, but old enough to have woven place mats for the midcentury modern dinner table I ordered online from Home Depot.
My consumer behavior has got to peg me as old young. When I was in my twenties, I would go to someone’s house and see candles and think, “Who spends money on candles? Who has time to shop for candles? How often do you really burn the thing? And how often do you have to replace it with a new one?” Now I’m that girl [woman] whose apartment smells like teakwood and tobacco and resists taking photos of the perfectly perched glass of red wine on the edge of my bath tub, because, honestly, how cliché, and do I really want people to know I take my smart phone into the bath tub? My Instagram Story is essentially a live feed of my 15-month-old puppy [dog], Louie, who also has his own account in a mostly failed attempt to avoid him taking over mine. My mornings often begin with coffee and avocado toast (I live in California, what do you want from me?), but I console myself with the fact that I make both at home. I buy multiple candles at once in case that cute store that sells scarves and succulents and hand-printed cards runs out of the scent I like. I keep the spares in the cupboard in my bathroom.
I go to a book club once a month where my friends and I talk a little about the book but mostly about how impossible it is to be a girl [woman] in the world, and how the American obsession with work might kill us, and how our gynecologists all suck, and how we’re scared we might be missing our lives, and how we’ve decided to finally get laser hair removal, and how our parents want us to own houses and have emergency funds and save for retirement. And how we might suddenly want that too if our generation actually gets to retire at all, and how we’re trying to drink fewer glasses of wine per week, except of course at book club, because that’s just part of the ritual.
I’m young enough to know that most things in life, I will never understand, including derivatives and futures. And I am also young enough to know that I don’t want you to explain it to me. I’m young enough to not know if I want to ever have children, but to desperately want the option. I’m young enough to not know why we spend the best years our bodies have sitting in chairs in front of small, close screens, and the worst years our bodies have sitting in chairs in front of bigger, farther-away screens. I’m young enough to know that global warming is going to be the end of humans and the earth as we know it, and it’s probably too late to stop it. But I’m also young enough to believe we should try.
I’m old enough to know that sisterhood is a requirement for survival, and that true friendship is marked not by shared interests, but by a feeling of ease in being yourselves, together.
I’m old enough to know that your metabolism really does just slow down, and yes, you really do have to start paying attention to what you eat. I’m old enough to know that the most profound moments of your life really do happen when you’re not expecting them or trying to make them happen. I’m old enough to know that every single human born on this earth deserves everything good in life, but very few people get what they deserve, including children.
I’m old enough to know that there are some people you will love your whole life, even when you go years without living in the same city. I’m old enough to know that you can love someone and they can love you, and that can still not be enough. I’m old enough to know that what we so sardonically refer to as emotional baggage is usually just life experience.
I’m old enough to know that books and music and walking outside beneath tall trees can save your life, even when you feel like your life is over. I’m old enough to know that when confronted with mortality, it helps to spend time with baby humans and also baby animals. I’m old enough to know that there is nothing you can say to make it better when someone has died, but that you must show up and hug the people left behind.
I’m old enough to know that exercise works better than anti-depressants, and deep breathing does not work as well as anti-anxiety drugs.
I’m old enough to know that if you’re losing your hard edges and becoming kinder, more forgiving, and less judgmental as you get older, you’re probably doing it right. I’m old enough to know that little will ever matter more than how you showed up (or didn’t), how you loved (or didn’t), and how you made other people feel. I’m old enough to know that all of us contain every version of ourselves we ever were, because we’re every age we ever were inside. I’m old enough to know that the difference between the grief of heartbreak and the grief of someone you love dying is that the first kind passes.
I think I like being old young. If you are young young, I hope you get to look forward to being old young, instead of dreading it like I did. Being old young means being wiser, more stable, more grounded, and more relaxed. It means that you start caring for your body and stop confusing working hard with being good (most of the time). It means, as my friend put it to me when I insisted that the advice his therapist gave him was better than mine, that “therapists are just humans.” I should know. I have two for parents.
And it means accepting that while we can count on suffering and hard times, that doesn’t mean next year can’t be better than last year. And if we can’t accept and hope for that possibility, what are we even doing here?
I’ll be honest and tell you that I’m a little nervous about getting old old, but as my grandmother used to say, I don’t care for the alternative.
