Part I: We're Too Old Not to Recognize These Feelings: Here's How to Deal With Them

Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

If you’re dealing with a flood of feels from big losses, this is your article

Dear Reader: this is the first of a two part series. I may get brave and do another, but let’s deal with what’s in front of most of us first. Because of the importance of the topic, the series is for everyone.

My friend Melissa just got summarily drop-kicked from her GSA job. With a resounding kick in the front teeth to all those idiots who honestly believe that ALL government employees are lazy do-nothings and fraudsters, she was one of the hardest workers I know.

It wasn’t the Reduction In Force per se. It was how it was done that did damage.

With public insult and cruelty. Wholly unnecessary, but that’s where we are. The whole country feels like a hostile workplace right now. Is a hostile workplace and getting worse. She’s in a lot of pain and in good company.

Been there. I’ve been laid off multiple times. Laid off from work when a big company bought mine and I was made….redundant.

I’ve been made redundant when an ex decided that someone younger and more handy was more appealing.

Love the one you’re with, dump the one you’re not with.

Bet you’ve been there.

This article is about the big life losses; death, disease, aging, loss of job, loss of income, divorce, disaster, all those things which cause us terrible pain and vulnerability.

If you’re at least forty you’ve already been through a few. Unless you were extremely unlucky. If you’ve gotten this far unscathed, what’s happening now and coming later are going to be very challenging indeed.

To be fair, I’m not addressing a teenager who is facing self-described LIFELONG TRAUMA because he couldn’t get the right color of corsage for his prom date. Yes, I’ve seen that. Forgive me, but GTFU, people.

This is an ALS diagnosis for your child, a horrible car accident, things that threaten to end you from the pain.

While “big things” are relative to where we are in life, they’re big enough to stop us dead in our tracks for a while, wondering what on earth….

What do I do?

Photo by Matt Paul Catalano on Unsplash

It’s like standing on the shoreline watching a bitch-ass big tsunami wave coming towards you and knowing that there’s no time….

That’s America right now. Individually, collectively, including as a species, as America forfeits her leadership in science, research, civil rights, climate change, the environment and just about everything else for the sake of greedy oligarchs.

Not just here. Everywhere, but especially in the US.

That’s my personal opinion. While I care a lot about people who disagree with me, every day that observation is further validated.

The fallout is profound, from my handyman who counts on Medicaid to Melissa who no longer has a job to watching the VA be eviscerated. And the very real possibility that the income millions of us count on will also disappear.

Whoever we are, however we’re affected, we’re facing endings, and with that, enormous feels.

Like a tsunami wave of them, one right after the other.

When the structures we count on collapse, we are left to wonder what to do.

Sometimes, there’s not a whole lot. Except there is.

You and I can tend to ourselves first. Let’s talk.

First, kindly, I’m not going to drag out that old saw about the oxygen mask on the airplane. Please. This is just so much more existential. Unless of course your airplane lands in the Potomac but that’s beside the point.

While many of us, especially as we age, are dealing with multiple endings and losses (think: dark hair, real teeth, smooth thighs), life ends a great many more aspects of our existence, like it or not. Kids go to school, some cut us off, parents die.

Skills waste away, our strength ebbs (often doesn’t have to), identities change over time.

For a brave, funny-not-funny look at approaching sixty here is a fabulous, unblinkingly honest piece by Substacker

Kim Foster

:

On Getting Old.

Life is full of such endings, and we as Americans in particular are crap at them. Aging well is my primary lane. It’s the one thing all of us better get better at or the inevitable is going to be awful.

That said, this is about big changes in general.

The ink isn’t dry on your divorce papers before your best friend has this new person for you to meet. Look…can we please just have a moment?

As many others have written better than I can, we cannot have the best things in life without their twin, the worst, which are loss and grief.

Bill Bridges, PhD developed a program based his little evergreen book from 1980, Transitions. I’m a trained facilitator in that work and have conducted programs for lots of individuals and companies.

Credentials?

Go spit.

Bridges himself, who had penned this great little primer on how to manage your way through life’s biggest changes, couldn’t deal with his wife’s passing.

We are, after all, mortal. When it’s our turn to deal with terrible grief, fuck philosophy.

This hurts.

So with me. As I deal with the potential loss of my home, my life in Oregon, a possible move overseas, starting a new business, staying, taking on a roommate, selling my house and buying something smaller, any one of a thousand offerings in front of me, I have no clue what to do.

I am hung between the trapezes.

Millions of us are clueless right now. A tsunami is coming and many of us are standing on the shoreline, feeling helpless.

It’s the best of times and the worst of times. Yes, I’m going to go Dickens on you.

This godawful period of not knowing could be the best possible thing.

Let’s find out why, and how to work with what we have: nothing.

And everything: we have how we choose to move through transitions.

The author has the rights to use this image.

Bridges explains that there are three stages to transitions. In this article I’ll deal with Endings, the second will address how to navigate The Neutral Zone.

First, the reality check. As with the five stages of death and dying, it’s way too tempting to believe that the grief process is linear. Get through Stage One, done. Stage Two, done, and so forth.

Anyone who has ever lost a loved one can tell you that life isn’t like that. Grief is circular, cyclical, unpredictable, formidable, and forever. Ask

Kristi Keller 🇨🇦

.

Ask

Amy Brown

.

Bridges’ three stages are the same, because we are dealing with grief.

Endings

Endings, like change, often happen to us. A hurricane, a cheating spouse, sexual assault, loss of a job. The event causes a cascade of emotional responses. The emotions are what can cripple us, so this is where the greatest work begins: managing our transition.

List what you are losing.

All change creates losses. Even a big job promotion creates a loss: you lose access to your team, you may have to move, all kinds of things change that may cause you discomfort or outright pain.

Worse, losses don’t come conveniently packaged one at a time, so that we can process them on our own timeline where, when and how it’s convenient.

As Melissa processes both the loss of income and the loss of access to her team, she is feeling considerable grief.

This just after she lost the love of her life.

This just after her beloved dog Karl died.

Losses often land in stacks, keeping us so off guard that we have no clue how to respond.

One day we wake up old, our husband leaves us for the secretary, our daughter suddenly hates us, and now we’ve traded our husband for hemorrhoids. WTF?

Laughter helps.

Make a list of what you are losing, what you may be losing.

In my case, I may lose my home, access to my beloved Central Oregon Coast, friends I’ve made here in Eugene, the Oregon way of life.

But wait, there’s more:

I just got a DEXA scan yesterday which indicated that I have osteopenia in my right hip, the result of not being able to run, hike and train since 2022, and nasty ongoing foot pain.

I can push osteopenia back with dedicated work, but not until after this year’s surgeries.

What have I lost with just the scan?

The ability to trust my bones if I take another fall, at least until I can return to training.

Of course I’m sad about it. I identify as an adventure athlete.

If I throw my body around believing that bit of fiction I am setting myself up for serious consequences. I’m still an athlete, but now I have bones to protect. While I’m likely to get those bones stronger again, my current reality demands that I let go of a fantasy version of myself and deal.

It’s time to let go what was, and make room for what is and can be.

Jim the Geek

and his wife hike three miles a day. Not long ago Diane began experiencing episodes with her heart. This despite careful, dedicated eating habits, sleep and regular exercise. Sometimes AFib just happens when you’re female and past seventy, no matter what you do.

They’ve dealt with it and Diane is back out walking the entire three miles every day, but not without surgeries, lots of doctors, a whole lot of pain and worry on Jim’s part (and concern from those of us who care).

It’s age, it’s life, and we must train for it.

The assumption that it can’t possibly happen to me is what we need to lose.

When we acknowledge what we’re losing, it’s putting a name to what causes us pain. We see it, recognize it.

Now we can move to the next step:

Take the time to mourn.

Whether it’s a job, your identity as a marathon runner cut short by a sports-ending ankle injury, a love affair, the house you loved burned to the ground, take the necessary time to grieve your losses.

If you’re like many of us with all that’s happening in America, we are grieving all kinds of losses. I can’t even address how I feel about the evisceration of EPA protections. That is a death knell for much of what I hold precious, and a further underscoring of how greed at all costs has burned our world to near extinction for all of us, regardless of country.

That’s another loss I feel deeply, along with the osteopenia, another year dedicated to surgical recovery, and everything else.

Every one of our losses needs a name, needs to be honored, needs to be grieved. If you and I are to live any kind of life, we recognize and embrace losses as rightful, and mourn them as they are due.

If we are wrapped in denial, we perpetuate our anger, our resistance. We cannot move forward, cannot move back.

We stand, embalmed in salt like Lot’s wife, in a world moving at warp speed past us.

It can seem insurmountable when the losses pile up.

Photo by Carl Tronders on Unsplash

To not do this essential work is to burden our lives with unspoken, unprocessed grief. It will grind us to a halt.

I’ll bet you can relate, even if some of what’s happening at the largest scale doesn’t directly affect you. Yet.

Many of us can no longer trust the foundations upon which our society was built. When an immigrant oligarch can rip away structures that billions in the world count on, things have ended. Big time.

However you feel about it, however you voted, you likely have losses to address. Including the loss of family members who are horrified with how you voted.

You/your company may be affected by the trade wars with the rest of the world. Your job, your career, your entire livelihood may well be over with, certainly for now, if you’re in certain industries that count on international sales. Some five million jobs are affected.

That’s in addition to the some 200k jobs already cut, with plenty more coming, from the Fed.

However you voted, you may be out of a job, out of luck, and out of a future. Your family, too, certainly for the short term and perhaps permanently, may be negatively affected, such as medical care, college hopes and more.

On top of everything else, you may be barred from friend and family contact, so some support systems you counted on may also be gone.

All these things are profound, life-changing losses.

Of course this is hard. It’s incredibly, painfully, heart-breakingly difficult.

If you’ve protected yourself from hard things, and you’ve dedicated your life to sheltering those you love from hard things, it’s going to be a whole lot more difficult.

We don’t get strong by avoiding hard things.

If I’ve wished hard things for you it’s because I want you to be able to handle much tougher things which I address in Too Old: aging, disease, loss of spouse, friends and family, decrepitude.

Aging is among the hardest of all changes, and it takes one hell of an emotional athlete to do it well. How we manage our transition into our final years takes a lifetime of training. Those of us who are well past seventy and facing the tsunami?

Many have seen worse.

They’ve got their surfboards out.

Nothing prepares us for life, but life can prepare us for aging.

All the rest of this? Of course it’s hard. Nothing was promised us, not really.

No matter where you are in your journey, I strongly recommend Steve Magness’ book:

Toughness is overrated, at least Western society’s Rambo version of it. To be better prepared for what we will all need to face- much of it being just life- I strongly recommend this book along with Transitions.

This much I can promise: do the work, you get stronger.

The more you deal with what life dealt you, the more likely you’ll be the one with the surfboard on the shoreline, waiting for the tsunami.

Please stay tuned for Part II: How to Navigate The Neutral Zone.

That’s coming shortly.

Let’s play, no matter how big the effing waves.

Get yours here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/625385970/big-girl-panties

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