You and I Are Too Old Not to Speak Our Truth and Live Our Own Life

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

Photo by Kiana Bosman on Unsplash

At what point do we own our own lives?

Dear Reader: I am not a therapist. If you are having difficulties please seek professional help. Nothing in this article is intended as medical advice.

Now that I’m 71, I’m living a very different kind of life than I had ever imagined up until I was 58. I’m redirecting in ways I never thought possible, so I have some thoughts. Doesn’t make me right, but for what it’s worth, let’s talk.

First, I see a lot of articles on Substack by midlife women, for midlife women, who are starting to shake the trees of their lives. They are asking intensely interesting questions about what they agreed to, signed up for (knowingly or not) and what those agreements cost them.

Those agreements include living a life proscribed by society as daughters, wives, mothers. Some write about wanting but never having had kids, others are questioning the arc of their lives and whether or not there’s something more.

Having been through midlife, I now see that as a potent time of asking deeply difficult questions. Not only are our bodies changing, so are our brains. Not only are our lives changing, so is our relationship to the lanes we’ve been swimming in, many of which were forced upon us young.

Finally, many of us are actively carving out new lives based on who we are becoming, not who we were, sculpted as we all are by societal expectations, family dynamics and demands. It’s equal parts terrifying and exhilarating.

Many of us, far too many of us, are asking about the cost of keeping our mouths shut about family sexual abuse, trauma and the like to protect our families at the cost of our quality of life.

At the cost of our lives, let’s call it what it is.

Good men are asking the same questions. They are equally hard but in different ways. I honor that, but not being male I am primarily addressing women here.

A woman I respect a great deal was sexually abused as a child and teenager. Her family abused her repeatedly. She went on to get her PhD in Psychology from an Ivy League college, and wrote six books. Most of them addressed the abuse.

As soon as she called it out, her family retaliated. Of course they did.

That’s what dysfunctional families do. The children are expected to be complicit in the abuse, and never reveal the family’s sins to the world. The cost is incomprehensible not only to the child but also contributes to a deeply sick society.

That woman has done extraordinary work to recover herself. A Black belt in Tai Kwon Do, a marathoner despite asthma, and a very successful speaker, rapper and business woman, she carved out her own life despite being rejected by the family that abused her.

I watched a segment of morning television featuring this incredible woman. She spoke about incest. As I listened, for the first time in my 69 years I realized that what my brother had done to me was incest. It’s remarkable that my brain, my psyche were incapable of applying that definition to the horrors I was subjected to as a pre-adolescent child.

The validation, being able to name it, and to begin the healing process as a result, was profound.

I never called out my family; all were dead by the time I called out the incest. I did, however, name the alcoholism.

By calling out my father’s drinking, I got the ultimate punishment. Dad wrote me out of the will and banned me from the family. I couldn’t see my mother until after he died.

Here’s where I’m going with this.

The other day on NPR I listened to a fellow writer discuss how her father threatened her with the same punishment if she dared bare the truth to the world. She did it anyway, as part of her sacred right to speak her truth, break out of the family prison and heal.

Her father did precisely what he threatened: wrote her out of the will and banned her from the family.

It would be impossible for me to state how validating that snippet of interview was. Of course I know that this has happened to other people. But hearing her say this on national radio was a profound acknowledgment of my experience.

If you as a Substack contributor ever doubt the importance of telling your truth, let me dissuade you of that lie right now. You cannot imagine the impact of reading or hearing someone else’s story, one which mirrors your own. Few things have greater impact if you and I want to be free of sick familial systems.

I’ll bet many of you can relate, if you’ve read a powerful article which speaks to something you experienced, but feared discussing openly.

Last night I read an article which addressed the cost of sexual abuse when the mother is complicit. Worse, this mother was very famous, won prizes, and if anything, contributed to the abuse by siding with her husband, the abuser.

It was difficult to read, but reminded me of the extraordinary power of fame, and the famous person’s commitment to maintaining a good public face at the cost of everything else.

The famous person is Alice Munro. Here’s the story.

From that story:

In a heart-wrenching essay by Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter who is now 58 years old—published on Sunday in the Toronto Star alongside a reported companion piece by the paper—Skinner reveals that she was sexually abused by her stepfather, Munro’s second husband Gerald Fremlin, since she was 9, and that when she informed Munro of the abuse years later, the celebrated writer turned a blind eye and stood by her daughter’s abuser.

This piece reminded me of so many articles I see on Substack which echo the same need to break out of familial prisons, patterns of abuse which control the children and forbid them to speak out. That traps them into a lifetime of lies, and prevents them from healing and living their own truth.

Of course there’s a terrible cost. We lose our families if we dare speak our truth.

I did, so I know how this feels.

Family systems based on abuse exist to protect the abuser(s). Those of us subjected to that abuse spend far too many years blaming ourselves, which is part of the pattern serving the abuser(s).

We bear the weight of the blame and the shame.

So many of us at midlife, when menopause and empty nests and a changing body all conspire to both force and invite us to think differently, finally address some of these issues. It takes enormous courage.

We often lose our family but we may well find ourselves.

When Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified about Brett Kavanaugh, that was the first time in some forty years I found the strength to speak about the four senior officers who raped me in the Army. All are now dead, some buried with great honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

That plot is planted with a lot of “heroic” rapists.

The number of strangers- all men- who wrote me on Medium claiming that I didn’t know what I was talking about (you will forgive me if I vomit here) was stunning.

Those attacks are a perfect example about how family systems of abuse are supported by patriarchal, societal systems of abuse which exist solely to protect the right of abusers to keep right on abusing.

Speaking out takes their candy jar away. That’s why it’s virtually impossible to force churches to reveal their systemic child abuse problems. State after state has tried, but church fathers like to keep what’s happening behind closed doors. It’s God’s work. Of course it is.

But only if God is a serial abuser.

When you and I reach middle age and begin to fight back, we aren’t just pushing back on our families. We are pushing back against a system which likes to keep things as they are. We are fighting against far more than just a bad dad or an evil mother or other twisted family member or friend.

This is why people like my friend the psychologist, my new friend

Rebecca C Mandeville LMFT CCTP

and many more are so important to all of us. For us to live a life that we define as our own, it begins with truth.

That truth so often involves terrible grief and loss, loss of innocence, childhood, and much more.

The cost of denying our truth is far worse. Then we become complicit in a living death: our own.

To write our own stories, we have to peel back the protective covers laid over the stories of our childhoods.

Photo by Inés Castellano on Unsplash

Shaking, terrified, but finally, honest, we stand emotionally naked, facing our future. To me, that’s what it really means to be born again.

The best therapists have paid their own prices to live more honestly. Most have experienced what we’ve experienced. That empathy allows us a way forward, to be heard.

You and I may lose our birth families. Until my father passed, I did. My brother, always troubled, took his life thirteen years ago. I built what relationship I could with my mother, who rewrote history and claimed that my father wasn’t an alcoholic.

I was never able to discuss anything else with my mother, for whom a “united front” story about the family was vastly more important than dealing with the gritty, ugly reality that we all lived. That was the only way she could cope.

Bet many of you can relate.

The story about Alice Munro inspired this piece today. I dedicate these thoughts to every single one of us, male, female and all pronouns, who struggle, as we must, to rewrite our lives at midlife and beyond. Who come to uneasy terms with our history, then use that same history to launch a brand-new life.

This is difficult work. It’s sacred work. It is the price we pay for being innocent and preyed upon by troubled people. It is the price we pay to be free of the feeling that it was always our fault.

I invite all of us to find a way to use those experiences as the building blocks for that new life as we perceive a different way forward.

Tomorrow morning I leave for another river rafting trip, part of the new life that I carved out beginning at sixty.

Every year since, I’ve taken remarkable trips in the world, doing what I love.

Every year since, I’ve also taken difficult, important journeys within.

The latter is a lot harder than throwing my body off a bridge in Croatia.

Neither would have been possible had brave people not spoken their truth. Had good therapists, so often healing the same wounds in their own lives, not committed to being of service to us.

Do the work. Speak your truth. Abusers don’t deserve your silence, your complicity. If you lose your birth family, you get to choose from eight billion other people, many of whom share a similar story.

Some of them might well be freed from their own prison because you were brave enough to write about it.

Of course it’s painful. Giving birth by definition is painful.

Speak your truth. It may cost, but nowhere near as much as living the rest of your life in a prison constructed of lies.

A heartfelt thanks here to the brave men and women who have spoken their truth. It has a way of bringing light to the soul’s darkest places.

It’s time to play.

Photo by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash

These are difficult topics but nothing is more important. Every day we avoid doing the work is a day that belongs to someone else, not us. I encourage all of us to find ways to speak out, to find a community, and to enthusiastically choose life. If this article was valuable to you, please consider

If you know someone who could use perspective and encouragement, please also consider

Either way, please claim your life, step by step, brick by brick. We all carry something. But carrying it the rest of our lives is a choice. Let’s lighten the load and find ways to play more.