You and I Are Too Old to Want Shortcuts to "Freedom, Empowerment and Living an Unapologetic Life"

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

Photo by William Krause on Unsplash

How do we get there from here? We do the work

This morning in Notes I came across a challenge from fellow Substack writer

HumanKind with Kim Kimberlin

that I wanted to share with fellow older writers.

The request hit me at multiple levels. I’m 71, for reference. There are plenty of wise and wise-in-process (I’m not there yet, kindly) women who write about midlife, aging well and much more whose input I’m inviting for Kim’s sake.

Here is the request:

A question for women 50 and up from

HumanKind with Kim Kimberlin

:

I’ve noticed a theme amongst women approximately 50 years and older—one that embodies freedom, empowerment and living an unapologetic life. What advice would you give younger women who want to live with that same freedom and empowerment? Where does it come from? How do we get it? We don’t want to wait until our 50s.

The line that got me was the last:

We don’t want to wait until our 50s.

Yeah. You do.

For a thousand thousand THOUSAND reasons you do indeed want to wait.

Why?

Simple. Wisdom, the wisdom to know how to say no, the wisdom to set clear boundaries, to free yourself from so many conditions, does not happen with shortcuts. Wisdom happens though life.

Freedom, such as it’s even available to anyone, is earned. Being able to live without apology is earned.

Wisdom, such that we may attain it, is earned.

Not the answer people want.

We all wanted- and still want- those things that Kim listed. At 71 I am still grappling with all of those characteristics, but not the same way I did at thirty, even forty.

In fact, so much of the joy I now feel in life, and that which I expect to feel at ninety, has only come with age, experience, loss, pain, lousy choices, challenges and the inevitable side-swipes of life.

Those are the teachers. No older woman can give you experiences. No older woman can give you the path forward. Nobody can. The path forward is for each of us to carve out on our own, so that whatever freedom we may savor later is solidly inside us.

It’s part of us, not stapled on and easily lost.

Again, it’s earned.

You and I are WAY Too Old to believe there’s a shortcut to wisdom.

Life exacts a great deal of us along the way. As a survivor of multiple rapes, those experiences led me to severe body dysmorphia and eating disorders for forty years.

I finally beat that when I was fifty-eight.

I had horrible issues with abusive men. I finally beat that with one cyclical, ugly connection that I ended, finally, at 70.

Does that make me a late bloomer? Hell yeah, to some people. But I’m freer- freer, as none of us is truly “free.” I don’t care that some lessons took longer. That was my path.

I don’t mourn those lost years. Maybe that’s it’s own kind of wisdom. Because those years weren’t lost. They were part of the payment for where I get to be today.

I hardly began to live life on my own terms until I hit 58. Each of us has an arc that is unique to us. The challenges we are given are for us alone, and how we move through them, choose to embrace them, are our path.

Learning courage, learning our strength are part of becoming. I believe that true Goddesshood begins around sixty, and gets better every year.

Midlife is full of huge losses:

-We lose our kids to adulthood

-We often lose our marriages

-We lose our smooth thighs and faces to age

-We lose our liquid, quicksilver brain functions to crystallized intelligence, which is when we begin to more thoughtfully dip into our years and years of experience (that is a major gain but most don’t experience it that way)

I could go on. Each of those profound losses teaches us to value something different as we mark the inevitable passage into an aging body.

There are no shortcuts to any of this. These things take years, they often take therapy, they demand that we turn to our communities of women who are experiencing the same things, they require mourning.

Mourning takes years. It’s the process that teaches us to walk through life with pain, loss, bouts of depression, and failed hopes and dreams so that we can make new ones.

You and I cannot hurry sacred work.

We forfeit youth in order to learn how to be eternally youthful.

Photo by Diana Simumpande on Unsplash

If you read the writings of

Annie Scott

,

Louisa Wah

Jody Day

and others who are right at midlife or older, you realize that they, as must we all, struggle with cultural burdens, parental missteps, societal and cultural demands. They battle insecurities and internal demons, as must we all. They read and study damned good books (No Bad Parts, for example) and do their level best to apply what they read to their lives.

We try. Fail. Try again. Fail. Try something different. Fail again. This is how wisdom is earned.

The path to some kind of insight, to seeing differently, takes a lifetime.

Part of what Kim references among women over fifty is the relief that many of us feel when we release ourselves from the societal demands for beauty, for child-bearing and rearing.

The empowerment comes in part from having learned how to take care of ourselves instead of everyone else first.

Not all of us get there either. Some who write about it are still working their ways towards greater freedom. Writing is part of that path.

It takes courage, real courage, to walk this path. To achieve any kind of confidence, we avoid shortcuts. Take the long, high road. Fall off it and learn to get back on. Over and over again.

Shortcuts rob us of the very experiences which train us for Goddesshood.

Instead, I would invite Kim and everyone else who might feel the same way to find extraordinary women whose lives inspire you. Read about them. Find a muse. Ask what it is about them that moves you, and what it is in you that needs to be challenged.

The first muse I found was Robyn Davidson, who wrote the book Tracks, which was later made into a movie. In her early thirties, she took a bunch of camels across Australia’s Outback. I found her book while researching for a trip to Australia. I was 31. Davidson’s adventure motivated the hell out of me, and I leapt into my adventure with gusto.

I learned to fly ultralights, scuba-dived the Barrier Reef and explored that marvelous country for four years. Alone.

By Tekniska museet - Beryl Markham, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42128109

My second muse is Beryl Markham. Her life inspired the hell out of me, and my life has evolved into something very much akin to her accomplishments, although I am no kind of pilot like she was.

Yet I have flown airplanes, ultralights, skydived 131 times, climbed huge mountains in Africa and Asia, rafted the Nile in Uganda, ridden spicy horses all over the world, paragilded, kayaked the Artic ocean, written two prize-winning books and much, much more. MUCH more.

Almost all of that, except the skydiving, after sixty.

Find a muse.

There are thousands of women who came before us, paid a higher price than we did, had to work harder, wear ridiculous clothing, suffer workarounds and abuses that we did not and THEY DID IT ANYWAY.

While there are some who bloom early, and good for them, I am a great fan of blooming late and ending on the highest possible note.

That’s earned. No shortcuts.

I understand the desire to hurry up and get wherever you honestly and passionately believe is a place where it’s not as hard as where you are right now. First, that’s a terrible fallacy.

Life doesn’t get easier. We get better at handling the shitshows. They never stop, but having weathered them long enough, we are far better equipped to navigate them.

That’s earned. No shortcuts.

Second, learn to love your problems. I did a story on this the other day, and truly believe that if there is a gateway to wisdom, it begins here. Run from them, you learn nothing. Walk into them and learn to love them, life changes overnight.

That’s earned. No shortcuts.

Third, do the work.

What confidence that women past fifty feel is born of the price we have all paid for life. There is no Easy Button from Staples, no back door. You really don’t want to be Rosie Ruiz, who faked winning the Boston Marathon. What laurels you have, you want to know they came because you did the work.

Nelson Mandela became Madiba because he went to jail for nearly three decades.

Toni Morrison became her unbelievable monumental self because she did the work.

You become who you are meant to be when you do the work.

There are plenty of us cheering you on.

I’m one of them.

Find your path. Pick your machete. Start cutting your way through. See you on the other side, tired, sweaty, bruised, bloody, grinning and bloody well

TRIUMPHANT.

Let’s play.

Photo by Vusala Abdullayeva on Unsplash

Thank you for hanging out with me today for a few moments. Whoever you are, I hope you find a muse, are inspired to be something grand, and find your own inimitable way to that grandness. Then it is yours, and yours alone. If this piece was fun for you, please consider

If you know someone who could use a little inspiration, please also consider

Either way, take the leap and live life your way. Thank you.