As I age—and this is not going to be a self-pitying missive about drooping skin and my middle-age dotage but the effects of aging are in fact more pronounced now and I fear I’m joining an unsavory cadre of nostalgia whores so bear in mind this will come up again and with more frequency but today is about comparative age and not a publishing trend piece—as I age I become more experienced at things, and therefore I have the right and a standard permission to leverage wisdom that feels universally acceptable.
I am, simultaneously, and precisely because of the experiences that come with my age and gender and everything else (but principally those two aspects of selfness), extremely self-conscious, aware, sensitive, to the notion of lording my wisdom at all. So I give guidance in between two stone-hard truths. The first truth: I know a lot. I know more than most. That is, statistically speaking, I am now of so much experience in lived memory that I can recite stories and histories from the vantage point of the cumulative majority of humans in living realities. There are more of us 45+ year olds, and we contain the aggregate memory of eras of past age groups and human experiences.
The second truth is that every single occurrence, feeling and human experience is subjective and relative; narrative is fallible and prone to manipulation. These two facts are in an isometric hold.
With details I would rather have the reader presume than for me to have to write explicitly, I am finding myself fixated on something that was said to me weeks ago by a woman who dumped me. And in fact it wasn’t what she said it was how she said it, as the saying goes. I sheepishly offered some perspective on life as someone twelve years older than her and sarcastically, she responded:
Oh it’s all different when I get older huh?
I interpret the comment now in the spirit of conflict that I have described in my acquired wisdoms—that I of course know a lot from having had a big life, but that living has taught me that nothing I’ve learned is fixed information. I was sad that she said it like this nonetheless. I’m surprised this is the one exchange I can’t let go of. I think it’s nagging me because age was the one advantage I had while being let go, and it was rendered meaningless by the volition of desire. I cannot tell Jesus to serve me water if she wants to make wine.
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My son is terrified of getting bigger. As his parents, we have wholly transformed the syntax of conversation around growing up. When we look at old pictures and videos of him, for example, we are strictly forbidden from saying “when you were little.” Same goes for the “when you get older” comments. He reacts violently every time. He scolds us and sobs:
Don’t say WHEN!!!!!!
He understands that “when” in these consolations, is a threat. He cannot abide by the change either in reflection or in projection. We’ve learned to say things like, “look at baby Dario” and “one day, big Dario will do all of this differently.” When the existentialism gets too much for him he regresses into a fantasy and a pretend world in which the fact that he is not a person comes into full spectrum dread. “I want to see the fairy in the blue castle.” And this is not a poetic gesture. He thinks it’s real. And he sobs because he knows it is not real. Somewhere deep inside about to get older; able to name imagination or unable to name the castle. He insists that this fantasy locale is the only place where someone who was never smaller and will never be bigger gets to just be himself. Comparisons to Peter Pan are not lost on me. Neither is Tinkerbell.
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I’ve been drawing natural comparisons between the brief lover and my son. This would surely horrify her and terrify him, but it feels important to claim my age now. It can mean I know how you feel. It can mean I want to know how you feel. It means that moving forward will never mean moving backward; time=linear, et cetera. It can mean you roll your eyes or scream about the blue castle and I will try as hard as I can not to be mad because I am older. It’s my job not to be mad. But if negation is important to you, then position is imperative to me. When I grow up…
When I grow up
I hope finally.
I love where your mind is at in this unfolding 💕