Mid-life confusion and the weird thing about how old you think you are versus how old you are (and how old other people think you are)
A year ago, I was invited by a friend to do a share at CoDA. It’d been a while since I’d sat in a group and I’d never done a proper share before so I thought I’d speak about how the CoDA promises (a list of the good things that come from healing which is read out at the start of most meetings) had been true for me and how I’d found myself on the other side of the codependent crazies.
I love the promises, but to get to this part of the story—the end of the major part of the recovery journey, so to speak—I first gave a sort of precis of the beginning and the middle of my shitty downward spiral towards rock bottom and, rather naturally, some of the recollections made me a bit teary.
Now because it was specifically a share, it meant that people in the group could respond (usually, there’s no reacting to information shared in these particular group sessions) and it was all very lovely.
But then one young woman, in her very early twenties, said something that took me quite by surprise. She said something like: “It’s so interesting and wonderful to me that even at your age you remember so vividly these things that affected you.”
Isn’t that interesting? Even at my age—the ripe old age of 47—I can still remember and feel things.
Even at my age.
I didn’t take it personally. We’re all ignorant in our twenties, even when we’re very smart.
And she was doing that thing most of us do in our immortal, blithe, brilliant youth: think of ourselves as the baseline and everyone our parent’s age and older as the outliers to life, almost inhuman, really. It’s entirely appropriate as a youngling.
But the surprise wasn’t just that I’d been reminded of a young person’s perception of age, it was that it’d reminded me of the disjoint in my own perception of age. It wasn’t just that she was seeing “an old person”, it was that I was seeing a peer.
I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when Mel sent me a link to this article in The Atlantic, The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are, a 2023 article by Jennifer Senior, about this weird disjoint (in “the west” at least).
The article is literally what the headline suggests—the gap between objective and subjective age—and Senior, who’s “53 in real life but suspended at 36”, says: “The most inspired paper I read about subjective age [revealed that] adults over 40 perceive themselves to be, on average, about 20 percent younger than their actual age.”
The article sort of touches on the various reasons for this: Some people are stuck in an age due to trauma or in relation to their parents and so on, or because they’ve stopped, in their minds, at the time they felt the best, when hope for the future was strongest.
When I first read it, I thought, “Oh that’s not me. Not me at all.”
Until the part where she talks about this perceived age disparity that reveals itself when you talk to people younger than you.
“I’ve had this unsettling experience,” writes Senior, “seeing little difference between the 30-something before me and my 50-something self, when suddenly the 30-something will make a comment that betrays just how aware she is of the age gap between us, that this gap seems enormous, that in her eyes I may as well be Dame Judi Dench.”
Even at my age.
I realized then that when I talk to people younger than me, I place myself somewhere at 38 or 39. But they probably see me for what I am. A woman nearing 50. Or 80, depending on how young they are.
I realized then that I have a kind of secondary subjective age. When I’m by myself, in the quiet of my mind, when I think of “me” it’s 42.
And then I realized it’s for the same reasons others might see themselves younger: when hope for the future was strongest.
42 was before. Before I started trying to get The Fulcrum published and came face to face with some hard realities about the publishing world and my place in it; before, when I thought I could still achieve something meaningful in the world; before a health issue reopened some childhood wounds and sent me back to therapy, before Covid, before the local writing economy crashed, before my miscarriage, before my career imploded, before two years of preventable pain because I was totally unaware that it was just perimenopause trying to ruin my fucking life, before my belief that the Good Guys Always Win got smashed to smithereens by the reality called MAGA and Trump and Musk and Netanyahu and Putin and Thiel and Big Fuck You Humanity Business…
Before I realized that I knew nothing about life and nothing about life was certain except love.
At least that much remains true.
Sigh.
Getting older is weird, guys. It’s not like I thought it would be.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have an existential problem with ageing. I like it. I’m thankful for it. I’m more capable than I’ve ever been in my life. I like where I’m at with what I’ve learned and there is no amount of money I could be paid to go back to my 20s or even my 30s. Besides, 48 still feels young in my 90-year-old mind (I have her brewing inside me too, so I have an idea about how she sees things).
But I thought I’d be more, like, certain about shit. You know?
And I have a problem with what people think I am capable of because of my age. I had a twenty-something the other day try to hand-hold me on how to use Google Drive for fuck’s sakes.
And I have a problem with the lack of ritualised milestones for a generally happy but childless, career-fucked, unsuccessful, agnostic middle-age. There are no offspring whose life achievements I can pin my self-worth to, no empty nest syndrome to look forward to or retirement or divorce or becoming a grandparent or a pension-fund payout or any number of way markers that used to signify stepping into “the next phase”.
What are the new milestones?
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
I feel like I might not know how to make meaning in this space. This middle space, this adult-in-middle-age space. What was that song by Britney Spears? Not a maiden, never a mother, not yet a crone?
Something like that.
I have the things I like to do, I have the people I love, I have a partner who is my person, I live a good and healthy life. I have a dog who is more like a shitty cat. The light of hope that I will one day have a proper dog still burns brightly in my soul. I know perimenopause will end soon.
That should be enough. And yet … and yet …
No. I just need to remember that we’re stardust, and consciousness is a gift in itself … eternal consciousness wrapped in slowly decaying meat suits, some newer than others, but all decaying.
Time is, after all, the great equaliser. Even on the smallest of timelines.
Anyhoo.
Writing this cheered me up enormously.
Hope you’re well and all that.
t
Photo by Matt Bowden on Unsplash
TANYA MEESON 