Back in June, to entertain myself during my media cleanse, I established a new morning ritual. First I turn on some reggae music to set the mood. Then I pluck my “personal massager” from its special place near my bed. Next I grab a yoga mat and unfurl it on the floor. I place the beloved cordless tool next to the mat, lie down on my back, bend my knees, and tilt my hips heavenward. Now I reach for the pulsating wand of wonder and prepare myself.
And, like clockwork, here they come, the two of them, bounding across the room toward me, unable to resist the temptation of climbing onto my body. I turn on the vibrator and hold it out to them. “NO!” I say, waving it through the air in their general direction.
Milo and Louise don’t always remember that no means no, but during this routine they understand my meaning clearly. They tuck their tails and cower and retreat like the Scarecrow from fire. They are terrified of The Vibrator.
Sometimes, I conclude my evenings also clutching Buzzy, moving it beneath the blanket to my lower torso, pressing it against my right hip, hoping for some sweet blissful relief.
From my sciatica.
Repurposing this tool I once turned to for another sort of pleasure is just one of many signs I can no longer not see, proof positive that when I wasn’t paying attention, I done got old. My bodometer seems to suddenly have 300,000 miles on it. Parts are wearing out. I get up to pee three times (at least) during the night. If I manage these trips without tripping or running into a wall I feel such triumph, such joy.
There was a time when cultivating such big happy feelings required strenuous hikes, impulsive love affairs, twenty-hour flights halfway around the world. No more. The dopamine hit I feel anytime I manage to locate my missing glasses in less than an hour is on par with that I felt when I climbed the hills to the HOLLYWOOD sign in my twenties, blatantly ignoring all the warnings posted along the way that I was definitely breaking the law.
On the bright side, how wonderful that all it takes now is a successful journey to the loo at 3 am to feel deep gratitude. On the less bright side, it has also dawned on me that my days of bigger adventures are mostly behind me.
I reflect on how things used to be and how very different they are now. I wonder how much these differences hinge on the fact I am whipping fast toward turning 60 and how much they relate to the changes brought by lockdown. I know the answer doesn’t really matter—I’m here now and this is the me I am dealing with. Still, if I hadn’t stayed home for 2.5 years, I’m curious if I’d still be going out to shows and restaurants and taking trips like I used to with abandon.
I don’t feel like I’m missing out. It turns out, to my surprise, I very much enjoy being a homebody. The key to my joy rests heavily on Proper Framing. Two sides to every coin and all that, I can get mired down in making long sad lists of things I will never do again or I can play memory movies in my head and see with jaw-dropping wonder that I certainly managed to pack a lot of living into six decades.
Let’s look at how that works. A few examples of things I will never do again: date, take 6,000 mile road trips, regularly attend parties, attempt to single-handedly save the world. I can be sad about never having found The One. I can lament losing the astonishing stamina I now see I once had (though at the time it just felt “normal” to me). I can worry that I’ve turned selfish in my refusal to take on every hard case that crosses my path.
Instead though, I tell myself this is Harvest Time. Long ago, I read an article that suggested that when you see an older woman doing something alone, do not mistake her for lonely. Consider instead, that she is relishing her respite from having cared for so many people for so long. She loves her peace. She frolics in her mind. It is Her Turn.
In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, a woman gets word her husband has died in a train accident. She runs to her room, locks the door, and begins weeping. Her sister, on the other side of the door, mistakes this for grief when, in fact, the widow is feeling relief from oppression. When she finds out the news was wrong, that her husband is actually still alive, she drops over dead from shock, her fleeting fantasy of freedom gone as quickly as it arrived.
A bit harsh, I know. Written back when women had far fewer choices than now. Still, I hang onto the lesson and relish my autonomy. I do not do this from some haughty stance of superiority. I know plenty of couples who have figured out the key to togetherness. But I can see now, in a way I could not see as I fumbled through decades of bad man choices, that was never going to be a way that worked for me.
When I consider how frequently I used to travel, and how I no longer travel, my wistfulness for those days is easily tempered by what I am calling Harvest Time. I write frequently about being in possession of a memory so intense it startles other people. It startles me. The downside is that my alarmingly good memory exacerbates my PTSD as cinematic scenes of childhood abuse surface unbidden and toss me right back into intense feelings of those traumatic events that happened long ago. But, I am happy to report, there is also an upside to my superpower of near total recall.
Just as I have repurposed Buzzy to improve my yoga practice, I have repurposed my acute memory to serve me as a means to experience happy recollections vs. haunted horrors. Though not yet an effortless practice, I can now better shove aside the trauma memories and replace them with happier ones.
For example, thirty-five years ago this summer I did take a 6,000 mile road trip from Florida to British Columbia and back. I was 24 years old. I had hardly traveled anywhere. I can still see the changing landscape as we headed west then north. I remember the people I met, the things I saw, the clothes I wore, the places I stayed. I can feel the weather and smell the food. Revisiting in my mind is not the same as visiting again in real life, but most often it feels like enough. Why make so very many memories and then not take time to savor and reflect?
I can replace the list of Things I Will Never Do Again with a list of all the Things I’ve Gotten to Do. I had my first sushi at a sushi bar in Tokyo where I happened to be seated near a pair of Sumo wrestlers who happily posed for pictures. I have had a panic attack on the steps of the Eiffel Tower. I have scored a cashmere sweater for a pittance in a charity shop in London. I have seen many oceans. I have met so many wonderful humans, often overcoming language barriers by pantomiming about the knitting I carried with me everywhere I went.
In the last decade of her life, my paternal grandmother mostly crocheted and watched soap operas, aka her “stories.” She did not like being wished a happy birthday. “Don’t say that,” she’d say. “I’m ready to go.” I think of her often as I sit and knit and listen to audiobooks or watch TV. I am so content doing these things. So content I spent the better part of last week, my vacation, happily engaged in a light mystery and a sweater I am cranking out.
Maybe my grandmother felt she was done in her sixties because she didn’t have any exciting memories to harvest in her final years. No memories of big events. Nothing happy to look back on as she toiled over yet another afghan or poncho crafted from itchy acrylic yarn. Perhaps she felt obsolete. Maybe she didn’t like that.
The older I get the more keenly I am aware of my irrelevance. Unlike my cranky grandmother, I take comfort in this knowledge. The pressure is so off. Whatever youthful aspirations I might have had to be rich and famous are long gone. I do not crave book contracts or (much) external validation anymore. I recognize that, in the words of Nick Cave, we’re all just microscopic cogs in a catastrophic plan.
Which, I realize, sounds very negative. But that’s not how it feels.
For a very long time I have half-jokingly wished to get to do over being sixteen, only this time sober. Because by sixteen I was quite the experienced drunk already, with another eighteen years of hard drinking in front of me. What would it be like to try it all over without the booze?
I can answer that now. It has taken me 59 years to finally cultivate the things I need to successfully navigate adolescence. I have very hard-won self-confidence. I no longer give a crap how people judge my appearance or my choices. I do not worry about fitting in. I know I will never fit in. Not into other people’s notions of the right way to be. Mostly I like the way I am, which is not the same as suggesting that the way I am is some “right” way to be, only that it is the right way for me to be.
These seem like such simple notions on the surface. But the best and worst part of getting old is finally seeing with tremendous clarity all the ways in which I was lied to—by my parents, by a stupid church, by society, by the patriarchy. Actually, the very worst part is seeing how effective brainwashing is, and how I bought into all of the lies, treating my own self at least as poorly as I allowed others to treat me.
No more. It might just be the greatest wonder of my life to finally feel comfortable in my own skin, now that that skin is sagging.
And because these feelings are so relatively new to me, my aging gifts me the kind of youth I missed out on the first time round. I have the wrinkled hands of my crocheting grumpy grandmother, yes. But at long last I am shaking free of the ridiculous expectations heaped on me as a girl child. And whatever grief I feel looking back on all the things I might have done differently to save myself so much pain is greatly soothed by having gotten old enough to finally start letting that old shit go.
NOTES:
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