You Are Too Old Not to Have Serious Grit in Your Gut By Now

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

Jan 18, 2024

The more time we spend faceplanted, the more grit we grow

Fellow Substack writer

is the inspiration for this article, so credit where credit is due. Jen wrote something a few weeks ago which invited me to consider the concept of resilience, of grit, of personal power.

My thoughts then skewed to the question of why, it seems, so many women, especially young women, seem so bound and determined to display learned helplessness.

I watched my mother play that card. I learned it from her, then I had to unlearn it. Nothing that I write here (or anywhere else, kindly) doesn’t first and foremost apply to me.

This past week I spent three days without power during a brutal ice storm on the Oregon Coast, a situation which hasn’t much changed, but at least the power came back on.

Then last night we lost water, so there’s that. It was really cold, there was no place to go for warmth. Yet I had four walls, food, and blankets, which many do not have around here, and I was given the choice to deal or squeal about it.

When my breath formed a long, lovely plume in thirty-ish temps inside the condo, I had a wonderful laugh.

I live such a great life.

Having had more than my fair share of pretty crappy events, many of them just in the last year, the hilarity muscle which allows me to find the absurd in the appalling is one of my strongest. That does not come without spending plenty of time face down in the dirt.

In fact, I have rather often felt at the bottom of a scrum. That said, given the option to be at the bottom of a pile of sweaty, handsome, athletic young men sounds pretty fucking good compared to last year. But I digress.

men playing rugby on mud — Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

If you’re old enough, not just that but scarred enough, such things are blips.

This past July I broke my hip when I took a header off my porch onto the concrete patio. I was just recovering from six major surgeries. This bit of tom-foolery would cost me a seventh.

That broken hip also turned out to be a blip. For far too many my age or thereabouts, a broken hip is a death sentence. I was out training on sand dunes in six weeks. That’s not granted. That’s earned.

Age alone doesn’t deliver grit, which in this particular context means perseverance in the face of odds.

Let’s talk about grit.

The word derives from the Anglo-Saxon greót, meaning grit, sand, dust, or earth. As with many words it has morphed over time and with use, moving through slang and becoming popular these days as a way to verbally lash Millennials and younger for their lack thereof.

Well, that’s helpful for inter-generational relations, isn’t it?

There is a significant amount of research which addresses how social media has adversely affected women, most particularly young women, and in particular young White women, to reinforce and reward victimhood and trauma.

One of the side effects, quite unintended but nevertheless powerful, is that this trend has turned too many of my White sisters against our Black sisters in a sick race for who is more traumatized.

This isn’t that article but you can find plenty of research and discussion online. In our wholesale lemming-like rush to get attention and eyeballs, the plight for pity seems to overwhelm the much more powerful, positive story of pulling ourselves up by the proverbial bootstraps.

We lose agency, we fail to develop resilience and strength, and we further victimize ourselves by playing the victim violin, louder and louder, in competition for attention.

Here is one example, and another, if you are so inclined. I am not calling this out as criticism. These are observations, and since I’ve done some of this myself long before the seductive power of social media, this is of course personal.

As for being victimized, kindly. I experienced incest and four different rapists in the military. There was no way to fight back, so it’s fair to say I understand the experience. However I am not going to engage in a useless pissing contest about who carries more trauma. Not only is that a monumental failure to live life well, it also invites us to go lower, not higher.

Not a contest I care to participate in.

If that’s what it takes to build a following, I have no interest in leading.

Before I move on from this particular aspect of the topic, I recommend a re-read of

Gurwinder

‘s piece on The Perils of Audience Capture. We can become the snake eating its own tail, with the need for attention feeding our victim story with no end in sight.

We turn on ourselves, and then we turn on each other.

Before anyone barks at me about this, the Far Right, driven by the master of manipulative victimhood, Donald Trump, trots out all its grievances in an embarrassing display of gross incompetence in a country so bloody proud of its independence and freedom.

I fail to see said independence and freedom in any of this.

Not to cop an Eighties ad campaign or anything, but…

WHERE’S THE GRIT?

You and I don’t do very well if we’re not willing to get dirty. Getting down and dirty, means failures, flops, fallouts, fuckups, faceplants and every imaginable embarrassment. The more, the merrier.

We will fail at jobs, relationships, school, tests, parenting, sex. If it’s in life, we have the potential to fuck it up royally. If we refuse to fail, we don’t grow.

The more we’re tested, the more we’re bested, the better we get.

Failure is the only absolute guarantee. Admittedly I tire sometimes at how often I see this, a motivational meme so often proffered by someone who is sitting comfortably at home with every creature convenience imaginable offered by the Western world.

Give it time. Siri will wipe our asses for us.

While I cringe at his affection for being on Joe Rogan’s podcast, I do like

Michael Easter

‘s book The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. As someone who has thrown herself into extremely uncomfortable situations on the road, in the wild and in life in general, the book and the ideas behind them were right up my alley.

Discomfort is the handmaiden of growth, and too much comfort is the killer of our creativity.

I stand in support of your wicked discomfort, for therein lies the opportunity for you to grow grit.

A backbone.

You will need it as you age. Guaranteed.

I let my awful military experiences turn into self-hatred and body dysphoria. Forty years I struggled with eating disorders from incest and the rapes in my twenties put them on steroids.

Finally I chose to see those situations through a different lens: humor.

There is absolutely no skill so potent to find humor in the worst of life’s offenses. Where there is humor, there is perspective. Where there is perspective, there is personal power. Where there is personal power, we grow grit, as we understand the word today.

It’s not handed to us. It’s earned. We pay for that power with pain, loss, suffering, agony, doubt, failure.

Mark Twain wrote that humor is tragedy + time. The real superpower is to accordion the time so that you can see the humor closer and closer to the point of pain.

Humor grows its taproot in the courage to look life’s shit sandwiches in the face and say, super-size me.

You will still be scared. Angry. Bitter. Resentful. Horrified. AND. You can still laugh.

grayscale photo of 3 women standing and smiling — Photo by Siviwe Kapteyn on Unsplash

You and I are Way Too Old not to find humor in the worst life has to offer.

Not to laugh at others’ distress, but as a way to harness the winds. Not torn apart by them.

Of course we experience trauma. Of course life hurts. Of course we lose people to dementia and accidents. Of course our bodies age and youth leaves the building like Elvis. Of course horrible things happen and people are displaced and the world is full of racism and ageism and ableism.

Grit, which is otherwise known as backbone, is formed when we choose to feel the pain and stay standing anyway. In fact, that skill, to laugh in the face of the worst of it, is precisely what allows us to expand.

In my research this morning I found a story by Robin Turner, who writes on Medium, wherein he mentions the Battle of Maldon. It’s worth a look if only for two reasons. First, the mention of a king with one of the most unfortunately hilarious titles I have ever seen: Æthelred the Unready.

Imagine being immortalized with such a title. It sounds like a Shakespearean insult but it really is how he’s remembered.

The other: depending on the translation you read, this term:

god on greót (“good [man fallen] on the ground”)

Presumably, given how heavy the armor was back then, with a mouthful of grit. If you stay down, you die. Get back up, you may live. That takes grit.

You and I must fall down in order to learn to get back up. If we are far too invested in our trauma story, we will only ever learn to be down, stay down and never live.

That’s a choice. It’s one you and I get to make all day, every day. What story tells the one we are proud of? How we’re so helpless and need saving? My trauma is worse than your trauma?

Or that we got knocked down over and over, and got up and kept going anyway?

Each of those stories feeds a hungry part of you.

As you make your way into a brand new year, I sincerely hope you choose to feed the story that builds your backbone. For as you age, you will need it.

Let’s play.