Age-Fluidity

What's my age again?

Here is a picture of my hairdresser (and reality TV star!), Reagan. As you can see, she is extremely beautiful:

reagan.baker_

A post shared by @reagan.baker_

Reagan recently turned 40. And because she is extremely beautiful, I’m sure you can guess the phrase on everybody’s lips when they see her:

HOW ARE YOU 40 YOU DON’T LOOK 40 OMG YOU’RE 40 I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE 40 I HOPE I LOOK LIKE YOU WHEN I’M 40 NO WAY YOU’RE 40 YOU LOOK TOO YOUNG TO BE 40 WOWW BLAH BLAH 40 40 40 ETC ETC AHHH!

It’s the thing to say, right?

Or, at least, the thing our culture strongly supports.

It’s not only that Reagan is beautiful and stylish, but she’s an effervescent champagne cocktail of a person: bright, sparkling, and spilling over the brim with bubbly laughter.

She just recently got married, she goes out on the town donning mini dresses and long gloves, and she’s always either coming back from a dazzling vacation or off to a fabulous party.

So, in a few ways, she’s “youthful.” She doesn’t “seem 40.” She doesn’t “appear to be aging.”

Whatever any of that means.

When I went in for my haircut recently, I asked what it was like turning 40, and just as I was about to launch into the requisite You don’t look 40 etc etc, Reagan told me how meaningless all those ‘compliments’ were.

“I don’t care!” she said. She admitted that, a decade ago, she’d gush to older women about how young they appeared, assuming that her words held the ultimate validation. Now she’s embarrassed thinking back on it.

“I used to think I was making their week by telling them they didn’t look their age! But it’s actually such a funny thing to say: You don’t look like a sad decrepit crypt-keeper who should just give up on life? Like, what is a 40-year-old supposed to look like? And why would I not want to look my age? This is how old I am. There’s no value in not looking like my own age.”

Then we started talking about how funny age expectations are in general.

Reagan recounted how a lot of her younger clients—late 20s, especially—will start complaining to her about their decline in energy: I just can’t go out like I used to and You know I just really want to stay home these days, and go to bed at 9! Haha I’m getting so OLD!

Reagan and I both share a backstory that makes this trope particularly amusing: She came from a strict Mormon background, I came from a (completely self-imposed) strict moralistic-churchy-fearful-modest background. We both emerged from rigidity and become gluttons for life—seizing any and every life-y opportunity available.

We were both FAR less fun/energetic/domestic at 25 than we are now.

We agreed that we’ve had times of life when we’ve been homebodies, and other other times where we prefer to go out and be ridiculous. We talked about how we look much better now than we did at 22, but we were wiser back then.

“Aging” hasn’t meant anything to either of us because, come to think of it, we’ve never identified with our age.

Reagan had a fun phrase for this: age-fluid. It means that the narratives of aging don’t apply to you. (And they probably shouldn’t apply to anyone.)

I’ve been thinking about the age-fluidity lifestyle and I’ve come up with a few tenets, if you suspect you’re age-fluid too:

You keep flipping the script

I think I did my life (so far) backwards.

I spent the first large part of my life gathering completely useless-to-me spiritual and existential wisdom.

Yet, I kept forgetting to take risks, build an identity, connect with my peers, and test the rules. You know, kid stuff.

I made my own uncompromising rules, and didn’t take any risks within them. I didn’t understand who I really was, because I was too busy trying to understand why we’re here. I knew that adulthood was ‘real world’ so I didn’t bother much with people my age, or the things they were into.

I could go into all kinds of supporting anecdotes about how I earnestly suggested the cheerleading team in high school use a Billie Holiday song for a pep rally, or when I directed and starred in a one-woman mockumentary in 4th grade because I wanted to be the next Christopher Guest, or how I started taking Russian lessons after school at 13 because Anna Karenina was my favorite book, or how my kindergarten Sunday School teacher told my mom that I was capable of discussing theology with a biblical scholar…

But these kinds of I-was-such-a-weird-kid examples are tedious to read, and don’t end up serving my point. They’re just somewhat amusing side effects of a youth that I never enjoyed.

Years later, just as most people my age were starting to feel “too old” to go out at night, my meticulously-crafted self exploded into bright confetti.

I felt overwhelmingly young, like I was a character in one of the many 90s fish-out-of-water movie about a jungle-dweller or mermaid or bumpkin released in the modern city for the first time.

All the rules I set for myself disappeared into a cloud of glitter. For the very first time, I had fun. Euphoric, please-don’t-stop-the-music, otherworldly, coming-into-work-late FUN.

As my 20s were on a sharp decline and my peers were starting to complain about their aches and pains and increasing fatigue, I was out almost every night.

What a thrilling and starry time it was, discovering a world that I had judged harshly and simultaneously thought was judging me. (Funny how that works :)

I connected with people more than ever before, but none of them were my age. In fact, a lot of them were older. But they were so much more invested in their own joy than the people my age, who seemed too busy working on their sweater set collection in pursuit of Serious Adulthood.

These days, I like more sleep and I’m craving much less stimulation (listening to the birds chirp is beyond satisfying to me), but it’s not because I have less energy or because I feel “older.”

The common memes about hitting a certain age and suddenly wanting to become a hermit in a cabin and go to bed at 8 have never spoken to me. That was me, in middle school.

Many years later, when others were retreating from it, I started entering an outside world that had always frightened me.

And now, I’m appreciating a step back. These high and low tides have nothing to do with age but with courage, priorities, growth, and how appealing my apartment is at any given time.

(It happens to be clean right now so I’m a homebody for the week.)

You reconsider the relevancy of any rules

You know those lists circling around the internet of people who got their start “later in life,” like Martha Stewart who launched her brand at 47, or Vera Wang who started designing at 41, or Julia Child who made her TV debut at 51?

I’ve found those lists occasionally motivational myself, but it’s a little silly that they exist in the first place. For one thing, by most measures, 51 is young!

Would Grandma Moses, who started painting at 77, find encouragement in this list of people decades younger than her? Maybe? But it’s likely irrelevant.

Same for one of my best friends Jumana, who just turned 50, and I cringe at the mere thought of sharing such a list with her. She is the most world-changing, fast-working, globe-exploring, life-tasting person I know, whose existence expands with more layers and richness and complexity with every single month.

Every time I talk to Jumana, she surprises me with her goings-on: flying back early from Sierra Leone to see the eclipse in Western New York, a group of friends made while dancing through dawn in rural Peru, a new love, a new hobby, a new project, an old passion that has grown into a massive goal. Her glories don’t belong on a list.

I also see hubris in the concept of “late in life.” Late in…whose life? One of my barista colleagues died suddenly at age 23. She became a barista late in her life.

And this is something that all the age-fluid people in my life seem to have in common: They learned early that tomorrow isn’t a given. In fact…

You know that NOTHING is a given

My extremely beautiful hairdresser Reagan had a baby when she was 23. Her adorable precious baby daughter was born with serious disabilities that require her to be on a ventilator full-time. Now, Reagan has a beautiful precious teenage daughter who has never lived at home with her.

She once wrote:

I have this big scar across my lower abdomen because I had to have an emergency C-section, and it’s something I’m weirdly not self-conscious about. It represents my child’s life, and that’s beautiful. We have so many expectations from ourselves for perfection — everything from our appearances to decorating our homes to how the timeline of our lives will go. There’s something beautiful about not getting your way all the time, and choosing happiness despite that.

Whenever I meet someone whose vitality transcends age, I assume they’ve learned how to not get their way.

Jumana and I both lost parents in our 20s, a decade when most of us feel and act thrillingly immortal. While stuck in a grief-trench, I panicked while scanning the perimeter of a dim bar full of flaxen-haired nymphs and their admirers recklessly tossing back liquor, thinking, “Oh my god all of you are going to die some day…” You know, normal 28-year-old thoughts.

A few years later, one of my best friends was on the cusp of getting her dream writing job when she had a stroke, and now she is re-learning how to talk.

I was in the best shape of my life when a freak illness paralyzed me, and I had to re-learn how to walk.

These things happen. Nothing is a given.

I don’t mean to be doomy-and-gloomy about all the potential curveballs of life, but I’ve noticed that my most age-fluid (and joyful!) friends truly understand human frailty.

And when we consistently recognize our frailty, we don’t expect a linear path, nor do we put too much of our value into something that can disappear.

At a time when I felt chronically purpose-less and spent most of my time envying everyone in the world who wasn’t me, I had a note on my fridge that said: You can spend your whole life working for something just to have it taken away.

It’s a grim thought, sure, but it reminded me that nobody’s life held more value because they “were on the right track.”

I tried to make myself as soul-wealthy as possible during that time, working toward things that could never be taken away: love of beauty, appreciation of the mundane, work in my community.

These days, my ego easily attaches to anything that “sounds impressive” like a book project or an art show, but my soul reminds me that its true fulfillment lies in my weekly walk to the neighborhood food pantry to drop off some goodies while admiring the subtle change in flora throughout a season.

You embrace your own Eras Era

An interesting thing has happened ever since I started needle-felting, and subsequently put up an art show of my NYC-themed felted projects.

I hear a lot of feedback to the effect of, “This is a good new direction for you.” Or questions like, “Where do you see this felt thing going?”

These are such loving sentiments to say and ask; who doesn’t want to be asked for MORE of what they’re already doing?!

But all I have to say is, “That was IT! That WAS the direction! There’s nothing next!!!”

I really enjoy needle-felting and I have a lot of wool left so I’m sure I’ll start more projects for fun, but my needle-felting days could end now and I’d feel great about it!

The activity got me through a hard winter, I was able to express myself in a totally different way, and I learned something new. A success!

In November, I wrote:

As I began thinking about the theme for my upcoming art show, I realized how distinct it is from anything I’ve done before.

It’s been hard the past couple years, quitting a practice that once gave me so much life—a daily illustration on Instagram—when it started eroding my sense of aliveness.

I felt like a failure, and often still do. But when I think about that time of my creative life as a single “project,” or, dare I say, an “era,” it feels successful as something I started and closed with intentionality and love.

Now that I’m starting a new project—a couple, actually!—I can see my own series of “eras” rather than a series of failures, or things that didn’t work out. Thank you, Marketing Genius Taylor Swift, for giving me this vocabulary!

Same could be said for relationships or jobs, anything that had an end date. A vacation also has an end date; that doesn’t mean it failed. Things end, and that’s normal and okay. On to a new era.

I love how

Emily McDowell

wrote about this: quitting vs. completion.

Sometimes it’s time to quit. And sometimes, a pastime or situation-ship or dream or experiment with a bob haircut is simply complete!

The end of an era means the beginning of a new one, even if you feel “too old!”

I recently got an email from a marvelous soul who, at 51 years old, wants to some day move to NYC.

I was happy to tell her that my mom moved to NYC at age 72 and is living her best life!!

That’s not old—or young!—to move to New York, it’s just a new era. And my mom notes that at this point in her life she really appreciates it!

You create a ‘discography life’

I’ve always always always wished I were a singer-songwriter. It is my greatest dream!

Alas, my singing voice is akin to an off-key Kermit the Frog, and my attempts at songwriting make me physically gag.

But! I can live my life like a songwriter.

By that I mean, I can create a discography life. So to say: Each of my life’s seasons—however long or short—will be in service of a particular vibe, mood, method, or lesson.

At a certain point during my multi-year illustration stint, I realized that I envied a songwriter’s career because no one expected it to be linear. I internalized a message that, in order to be a success, I had to keep getting more followers, more deals, more exposure—all while becoming a better artist—and I knew in my heart that wasn’t right for me.

Bob Dylan could be a political folk-singer one minute, a rockstar the next, dip into that weird religious period, then emerge with intimate personal revelations into his eighties. Who knows what comes next?

I never wanted more followers; I wanted more growth. And, for me, that meant growing away from illustration into something more aligned for this season of life.

I love that musical artists can create their art in albums—some more intimate, some more blockbuster, some experimental. I envy that format of work. But in lieu of being Beyonce, I can live my years like albums.

Release pressure, remain in awe

A couple years ago, I wrote an essay about the pressure to be grateful as we age.

I wrote (allow me to quote myself):

Recently, I heard a voicemail on a podcast where the caller was about to enter a new decade and she was feeling a bit trepidatious about the approaching milestone and a bit melancholy to be floating further from youth.

The podcast hosts responded that aging is a privilege, and life gets better every year, and youth is an overrated value we get straight from the patriarchy.

The response bugged me. It is indeed a gift to get older, but gratitude isn't an antidote to the overlapping feelings around age and time and beginning your own "years old" with a brand new number that once felt impossibly far away, an abstract concept belonging to mothers and teachers and dentists and presidents. Not you. Not now. It all went so fast.

It's not realistic that we wouldn’t feel some anxiety around the years passing. And not only because our society really hammers home the idea that getting older is full of negatives (the messaging is slightly different across the gender spectrum but equally strong).

If you’re a remotely reflective person, you will most likely feel a sense of wistful loss as time passes, or even painful loss. And for those of us who were "born a little mournful," as Durga Chew-Bose put it, any marker of time is going to resurrect some ghosts.

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I wrote that feeling grateful for aging is a lot to ask in a society where even the mere mention of death is totally taboo, but feeling in awe is doable.

As for me, I’m in awe that my quiet dull life as of late can still hold so much. Sheesh! A full-time job just feeling my feelings over here! And this is during the low season!

Being grateful for all of it seems like external pressure from some future objective version of yourself, but being in awe seems like a better approach to ground us in the present.

I don’t connect with the phrase “Age is just a number.” I mean, it’s definitely more than a number! But it means nothing when it comes to your energy, interests, friend group, food preferences, bank account, job, past jobs—whatever anyone might use to measure whether “they’re on the right track.”

Right track of what? Being alive? You’re doing great at that!!!

Maybe you love being your age and you feel like your life has completely made sense up until this point. Woohoo! But my wish/hope/prayer for the rest of us is that we can feel really young some days and really old other days, in the richest ways.

I hope we can ditch the absurd milestone markers that were probably made up by a really insecure person, and choke in awe that we’re here in the first place.

Last chance to join me for a writing retreat next week!

Do people book last-minute retreats? I’m guessing no??? But in case you’re that rare (and thrilling) genre of human, you can still come to my SACRED STORY RETREAT next week in North Carolina! You best believe I am taking a bus called the “Hickory Hop” (can’t wait) from the airport straight to the retreat center, AND YOU CAN TOO! All info HERE!