is life passing you by?

By alice | December 20, 2009

Still officially closed, but this really struck me and I had to write about it- from Mariella Frostrup’s agony aunt column, a response to a woman in her twenties in a commitment-ambiguous relationship:

I get so many letters from people my own age who feel that life is somehow passing them by, that excitement is eluding them, and that their gilded youth is crumbling around their feet as they stack the dishes and struggle to pay the bills. Make sure you make the most of every minute of your youth and that the people you spend time with, friends and lovers, are worthy of the investment you make in them.

I wonder a lot about what people my own age are doing, supposed to be doing, think they are doing and generally what the norm is, these days, for a woman in her forties.

The expectation has definitely changed since my parents were my age. I doubt most adults from their generation would even have considered such a thing as “excitement”, either in their youth or in their middle years, but if so, accepting its passing would absolutely have been expected with the birth of children, although perhaps as they grew older one might enjoy a little more time to oneself as they became more self-sufficient and spent more time out of the house. Youth has always been something to mourn, of course- if not the years themselves (if you feel like me on this, here’s Gogol Bordello’s I would never wanna be young again), then the feeling of immortality that goes with being young and not yet having faced the alternative.

But these days, people over forty can and do dress like twenty year olds, or, more appropriately, we enjoy and appreciate our own kind of beautiful, and the things in our lives that took us two decades to establish- emotional stability and the freedom that brings; truly adult relationships based on real love not what-ifs or exploitation; managing your family in a way that suits you rather than feeling pulled from pillar to post all the time; knowing what your career is and how it’s going; knowing what you want in general, having real priorities and goals.

We even have our own burgeoning style-culture, I think: it may have started with plastic surgery, the quest for age-free bodies and a desperate denial of maturity but now there are plenty of beautiful, alluring, successful women my age who dress appropriately and beside whom the next generation of twentysomething film stars now look relatively less deep, interesting, wise, experienced and womanly, in a way that is just as it should be. Girls can now be girls, and women can be women. The glories of youth now are about looking good in fun, often silly, experimental clothing, and the attractiveness of fully-grown womanhood is all about sexual self-possession and exuding inner strength of a specifically female kind. Madonna is the most famous one, but Nigella Lawson really has it in spades. But there is a whole new generation of successful middle-years women, who embody this new image of middle-years womanhood

But I’m writing somewhat aspirationally. To what extent does the New Successful Womanly Woman over forty represent ordinary people? For me, this idea has seemed out-of-reach, realistically translatable and a concept worth living, at different periods in the last few years. (NB I define success as meeting your own goals- these don’t have to be career-oriented if your pursuits are family or philanthropy instead). Any genuine, inspiring model is going to be about values not past-achievement, so you can always start doing those right now: being yourself, possessing your power, knowing your goals/dreams, living well are the main things. But some of us are still apparently chained to the kitchen sink, and various other things (the mortgage being the most complained-about trapping of feminist liberation), while doing our best with the above. What to do?

Well, I don’t know. More “date-nights”? Relocation and/or downsizing (perhaps near the grandparents/ free babysitters)? A change of attitude? A dishwasher? For excitement, my husband is building us a new breakfast bar this morning; you would not believe how excited it is possible to become about a breakfast bar when you’re 42. I am beside myself with bliss, convinced it is a miracle from the very Hand of God. Also we went to a Cuban (well, “Cuban”, really,) restaurant last night… and talked work. A mojito and a brainstorm about business is my idea of serious fun.

So here’s what I think: there is a sort of hurdle to get over, when you realise the numbers 2 and 3 are only going to be appearing in your age at decadely intervals from now on, in terms of reaching a point in your life where you feel OK about everything. When you’re young, it’s OK not to feel OK about everything because there’s still so much time for it to change. (Maybe some of it will even change on its own! Young people- I don’t recommend that approach.)

When you’re older, your standards go up, and you want to feel at least OK about everything, and pretty good about some of it, at least. So you have to take a good hard look at the stuff you feel bad- yes, BAD- about, and deal with it. Change it, adjust it to fit, come to terms with it as-is, whatever. But you do need to deal with it, whichever way is best for you, or it will be hanging there like an albatros ruining the next bunch of years and only getting increasingly rotten, until you do deal with it, and by then you will be regretting all that extra time it went unsorted.

This can mean upheaval. Maybe your marriage is horrific, your children are growing into hopeless uncontrollable nightmares, you loathe your career and you’re $50k in debt, with a serious drug problem. Those things happen. Maybe you always wanted to be an actor/ poet/ parent, or live in Japan, or maybe you really hate your hair. I think we all get these mid-life hurdles, and graduating beyond them is the key to feeling good and successful in your middle years and beyond. The key is dealing with them. Then, I think, you end up feeling grateful and happy right now, and not bothered about whether you made sure every last minute of your youth was wonderful, or not. The snag is, it isn’t easy, in fact may be the toughest thing you ever do, other than dealing with mortality. Much tougher than any amount of washing up. But being acquainted with this sort of reality is the stuff that makes you who you are. Which is what we’re looking for here- it’s where all the rewards come from.

May as well be positive and get on with it, I say…

1 Comment »

One Response to “is life passing you by?”

Theocritus Says:
January 13th, 2010 at 2:34 am

I define success as meeting your own goals- these don’t have to be career-oriented if your pursuits are family or philanthropy instead.

I quite concur but they have to be reasonable goals. Some goals just aren’t reasonable and therefore are unattainable.

You are reflective and neither jealous nor bossy; your prescription seems entirely fitting to me. But there are lots of people whose lives are running arguments with reality. There are some on the religious right but then there are very many on the religious left, who take it as a personal affront that the world does not take notice of them and their morality du jour.

There is no way for these people to be happy in a free world because it doesn’t care about them.

I learned not to search for happiness, but rather contentment, and after that I was surprised by joy from time to time. I came to terms with myself; quit lying; acknowledged my failures, and my strengths (which was harder by the way). It’s an ongoing process.

Owing to using myself hard there are some health problems. But none is insurmountable. And for me too much is not enough. But that’s surmountable too although it’s a running battle.

People who only have to work on themselves and do not feel it necessary to reform the world to their latest design have a much better chance of being happy.