Category: What’s Been on My Mind

According to the internet, I have reached the age where I would no longer be killed in a horror movie.

This sounds like good news.

Unfortunately, I have not been promoted to Final Girl.

I am now apparently the eccentric local woman standing beside a rural gas station warning a car full of attractive twenty-somethings not to continue down the road toward Murder Lake.

They will ignore me, obviously.

I am old.

Therefore, I know things but am no longer part of the story.

And this stupid meme has been living in my head for much longer than a stupid meme has any right to.

Because lately I’ve been thinking about getting older.

Not dying.

Not even really aging.

I’ve been thinking about the strange cultural suggestion that at some point, without anyone officially notifying you, the interesting part of your life is supposed to be over.

When Did I Stop Being Someone With Potential?

There are words we use for young people that we rarely use for people my age.

Promising.

Emerging.

Up-and-coming.

Full of potential.

We talk about young adulthood as though a person is standing in front of an enormous field of possibilities.

Who will you become?

What will you do?

Where will you go?

And then, somewhere along the way, the language changes.

You aren’t becoming anymore.

You became.

Past tense.

Apparently the assignment now is to maintain whatever you’ve built, try not to injure yourself getting out of bed, and begin developing strong opinions about lawn care.

Nobody asks what a forty-something-year-old might become when she grows up.

Which is unfortunate, because I still don’t entirely know.

And Can We Talk About “Middle-Aged”?

I hate this term.

I understand what the words mean.

I simply reject them.

Middle-aged sounds less like a stage of life and more like someone has divided my existence into three sections and cheerfully informed me that I’m now in the part where we begin wrapping things up.

Welcome to the middle!

Please enjoy your progressive lenses.

The exits are located here, here, and eventually six feet below you.

No thank you.

What bothers me isn’t actually the reminder that I’m getting older. I know I’m getting older. My knees have submitted extensive documentation.

It’s the implication that aging is primarily a process of decline.

That there was a peak somewhere behind me and now I’m on the downward slope.

That I have passed my prime.

I particularly hate that phrase.

My prime for what?

Women Get a Particularly Weird Version of This

There is an especially strange relationship between women and aging.

We’re encouraged to spend an enormous portion of our younger lives worrying about whether we’re desirable.

Then we’re supposed to age while appearing not to age.

There are creams, injections, supplements, procedures, hair colors, diets, exercises, and entire industries built around helping us “fight” the visible evidence that we have continued to remain alive.

Which seems like an odd thing to treat as a failure.

At the same time, we’re periodically reminded to “dress our age,” which is a phrase I have never understood.

What does my age wear?

Is there a committee?

At what birthday am I expected to surrender my Dr. Martens?

Because they will need to pry them from my cold, dead, fashionably shod feet.

And yes, perhaps someday my feet will request orthopedic footwear.

They are welcome to submit that request in writing.

It will be denied.

But I don’t think this is only about physical attractiveness or what we’re allowed to wear.

When I think about desirability now, I’m thinking about something much bigger.

Do people still want my ideas?

My perspective?

My work?

My creativity?

My presence?

Am I still someone the world is curious about?

Am I still allowed to walk into a room and think, There might be something for me here?

Or am I supposed to slowly transition into the background, where I can provide wisdom when requested and perhaps warn teenagers about cursed lakes?

I Don’t Want to Be Twenty-Five Again

This is the important part.

I don’t.

Twenty-five-year-old me was lovely.

I wish her well.

I would also like to gently take her by the shoulders and explain approximately seven hundred things to her.

I know more now.

I know what matters to me.

I know what I will tolerate and, perhaps more importantly, what I absolutely will not.

I have survived things she doesn’t know are coming.

I have loved people she hasn’t met yet.

I have lost people she still believes will always be there.

I have changed careers, changed opinions, changed relationships, changed my body, changed my mind, and changed the way I understand myself.

I am not interested in trading all of that knowledge for smoother skin.

What I object to is the idea that accumulating experience somehow moves me farther away from possibility.

Because I’m Still Starting Things

This may be why Murder Lake has been bothering me so much.

My life does not currently feel like it’s winding down.

I’m building something new.

I’m writing things I’ve never written before.

I’m putting ideas into the world that used to exist only in my head.

In a couple of weeks, I’m getting on a plane and traveling across the country to present at an international professional conference.

And, for reasons that remain unclear even to me, I’ve apparently started a website where I publicly discuss the things I think about instead of keeping them safely contained inside academic papers and PowerPoint speaker notes.

None of that feels like decline.

It feels suspiciously like becoming.

Maybe that’s why I resent the idea of having a “prime.”

A prime suggests there is one point in a human life when everything important converges.

Maximum attractiveness.

Maximum usefulness.

Maximum relevance.

Maximum possibility.

And then what?

We spend the next several decades remembering it?

That seems like a terrible system.

Maybe There Isn’t One Peak

Maybe a life isn’t a hill.

Maybe there isn’t a single climb, a brief moment at the top, and then one long descent toward death in increasingly sensible shoes.

Although, for the record, I will apparently be making that descent in Dr. Martens.

Maybe there are dozens of peaks.

Maybe there are valleys.

Maybe there are long stretches where nothing particularly dramatic happens.

Maybe there are periods when we’re building things and periods when we’re losing them.

Times when we know exactly who we are and times when we have absolutely no idea.

Times when we’re really good at something.

Times when we’re beginners again.

And maybe becoming a beginner again isn’t something reserved for the young.

I like that possibility much better.

Because there are still things I haven’t done.

There are still places I haven’t been.

There are still people I haven’t met.

There are things I don’t know yet.

Ideas I haven’t had.

Things I haven’t written.

Versions of myself I haven’t encountered.

There are still things I haven’t become yet.

So Fine. I’ll Be the Woman at Murder Lake.

Maybe the meme has one thing right.

I probably am the woman who knows something now.

I’ve been around long enough to recognize a few patterns.

I’ve made enough mistakes to occasionally recognize one before making it again.

Occasionally.

Let’s not get carried away.

So if a station wagon full of twenty-year-olds pulls up and asks whether they should spend the weekend at the abandoned summer camp where twelve people mysteriously disappeared, I will tell them absolutely not.

I have earned that wisdom.

But I’m not staying at the gas station after they leave.

I have my own places to go.

My own things to make.

My own mistakes left to make.

My own story still happening.

I am not the wise older woman standing at the edge of someone else’s adventure.

I’m still in mine.

And if this is the middle, fine.

There is an awful lot of story left after the middle.

There are moments when something you already know suddenly becomes real.

Today, I filled out a presenter profile for a conference.

This should not have been a particularly significant event. I submitted the proposal months ago. It was accepted. I built the presentation. I created the handout. I’ve practiced it. Other people have seen it. My name has presumably been sitting in a conference program somewhere for quite some time.

None of this is new information.

And yet, today they asked me for my biography.

Then my headshot.

Then my handouts.

And somewhere around uploading a photo of myself, my brain apparently went:

Wait. They really think you’re a presenter?

Ah.

There you are.

The Evidence Is Not the Problem

I’ve been thinking about imposter syndrome lately, although I’m not particularly fond of the term.

“Imposter” suggests deception. As though I somehow slipped past security and am now wandering around a professional conference hoping nobody asks to see my credentials.

I did not sneak into this conference.

I submitted a proposal. Someone reviewed it. They accepted it.

I have graduate degrees. I have years of experience in education and adult learning. I develop and deliver psychoeducation for a living. I have presented to hundreds of people at a time. I know this material because I built it from work I actually do.

The evidence is embarrassingly abundant.

And that’s the strange thing about feeling like an imposter.

Sometimes it has very little interest in evidence.

You can know that you are qualified and still not feel qualified.

You can know that you earned an opportunity and still wonder whether someone has overestimated you.

You can be invited into the room and still feel vaguely as though you’re trespassing.

Apparently, you can even create an entire presentation about helping people understand their experiences and then be mildly surprised when you have an experience of your own that needs understanding.

Rude, honestly.

Maybe I’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question

When this feeling shows up, my instinct is usually to argue with it.

Of course I belong there.

Here are my credentials.

Here is my experience.

Here are the things I’ve accomplished.

Here is the evidence.

Surely if I can assemble a sufficiently persuasive case, some internal jury will finally return a verdict:

Congratulations. You officially belong. You may now proceed without self-doubt.

That has yet to happen.

So I’m beginning to wonder whether Do I belong here? is even a useful question.

Maybe I don’t need to feel completely certain that I belong before I do something that matters to me.

Maybe confidence isn’t the admission price.

The Doubt Can Come Too

In a couple of weeks, I’m going to walk into a room in Norfolk, Virginia, and give a presentation at an international professional conference.

Even writing that sentence feels a little ridiculous.

There may be people in that room who have worked in this field longer than I have. People with different credentials. Different expertise. People whose names I recognize.

And I suspect there will still be a small voice somewhere in my head asking:

Are we absolutely sure you’re supposed to be up here?

Maybe.

But I don’t think I need to get rid of that voice before I walk to the front of the room.

It can come with me.

It can be nervous.

It can question whether we’re ready.

It can wonder whether everyone else knows something we don’t.

It just doesn’t get to make the decisions.

Because alongside the doubt, there is something else I know.

I care deeply about this work.

I have something worth contributing to the conversation.

And I don’t have to be the person who knows the most in the room to share what I know.

So the doubt can sit in the audience.

I have work to do.