You’re Never the Write Age

But it's always the right time

I have always felt older than my years, but strangely I have never felt grown up. I have never ‘felt my age’ because I don’t know what that means. What does a forty-four-year-old person feel like? What adjectives should I attach to this age?

And while it may be difficult to know what feelings to attach to our own age, our culture absolutely loves to tell us what age means. It also loves to use our age to tell us what we can and can’t do. Now, with the obvious protection of children aside, using age as a determiner for what we are allowed to do is absolutely ridiculous.

It’s easy to look around and see that society wants us to think age really, really matters. In fact, it gives us lists just to make sure we are checking off how we measure up against our own age, or how we barely don’t, or how we’re no where near keeping up at all. And it can get under our skin. It did mine.

I would walk past magazine aisles full of ‘Thirty Under Thirty’ lists and just know that if I didn’t make one of them I was guaranteed to never get anywhere. Because we need to succeed young. And, if we want to be successful and young, we need to be on the cutting edge, connect with the right people, look the right way, and hustle our asses off. And then, even then, we’re probably just lucky or nepo babies or riding on the coattails of an older more influential person. So, if we happen to succeed young, did we really succeed?

Let’s say we didn’t make those ‘Thirty Under Thirty’ lists. That’s okay, right? We still have time? Well, society doesn’t always agree with that because we might be beyond our prime, too late to catch up. Or we can also be too old to be deserving of our successes or too old to be worthy of being heard at all.

Now that I’m not young (at forty-four am I old-young or young-old, I’m not sure?) I worry about not being accomplished enough for my age. Or being seen as someone who doesn’t deserve the successes I have already acheived or the others I am currently working toward.

‘Blame boomers’ is a constant refrain on social media. Apparently senior people just have nothing to add to the conversation. They’re old fashioned, out of touch, and basically just in the way. Therefore, if an older person is successful, it’s because they didn’t value equality, or they were spoiled, or they were jacked up on cocaine during the eighties and didn’t need sleep. They can’t be successful, they just exploited the system.

Or, the dreaded ‘you had your chance, now let someone else have theirs’ attitude we as society use to weigh down people who are over the age we think success should have come by.

Waiting to be the right age to do what you want is a never-ending project.

Here’s a perfect example of what I mean:

In 2014, at the age of twenty-eight, Lena Dunham released a memoir. She had accomplished several things by that point. More than I had when I was twenty-eight. Aside from the many content critiques about the memoir, the biggest, loudest complaint from everyone seemed to be that she was much too young to be writing a memoir at all. She wasn’t old enough to have something to say. She hadn’t accomplished enough to have the right to talk about her own life and her own experiences. She had no value yet.

But we love stories from older people, right? Well…

Think of one famous person, author, politician, actor, musician who is too old to be doing their job. You probably thought of someone right away. Because we all have those ideas in our minds, too. Our culture firmly believes that people become too old to have something valuable to say.

If we’re first much too young to have the wisdom to say something meaningful and then almost immediately much too old to say something relevent, when is the right age to say something?

I don’t have the answer for this societal problem, but here’s what I do know: if we keep playing by society’s rules, it’s possible we will never allow ourselves to count. No matter what age we are.

I recently read a short interview with Bonnie Garmus. She was days away from turning sixty-five when her first novel Lessons in Chemistry was published. Of her age she said:

“Stop telling yourself that it’s too late, and instead say to yourself ‘It’s time.’ Sometimes you just need to let that experience grow in your brain.”

Telling myself ‘It’s time’ was a very recent step in my good writing days. In fact, it only happened a few months ago. Right before I started this Substack. I stopped telling myself I wasn’t young enough to impress people, I stopped telling myself I wasn’t old enough to be wise, and I started telling myself ‘It’s time’. It’s time to share what I’ve been intentionally learning for the majority of my forty-four years of life. It’s time to move ahead with confidence, knowing I’m capable, and that I will always be learning.

And now, dear creative, let me say to you, you are not too young to have something important and wise to say, you are not too old to have something relevent and entertaining to say. You are at the perfect age to do what you will do and learn what you will learn. There is no better time, no better age, no better moment than now. Dear creative, it’s your time.

Love you, Petra ❤️

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Inner Adventures

I know we’re all busy, so these inner adventures are only here as an offering (and may not be in every post). I’m including them as a little assist on the journey. Please feel free to ignore them if they don’t serve you. Or change them if you think there’s a better question for you — basically, ask the question you wish I had asked. And remember, no one is looking at your answers, so let loose.

~ Do you find yourself having preconceived ideas about age and creativity?

~ Do you have expectations of yourself for your age? What are they? Do they help you?

~ What would you allow yourself to do if you let go of any preconceived ideas about what someone your age should be doing?

~ How do you feel about the phrase “Now is your time”?

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