You're Too Old NOT to Quit Your Life and Start All Over Again

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

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

To be female is to begin again, over and over

Anne Boyd Rioux

recently posted about quitting her life, and starting over. This piece caught my eye for a variety of reasons, and I wanted to share it here with further comments.

First, her article, which clearly touched a live wire in a great many people:

Am I Too Old to Change My Life?

I wanted to acknowledge not only the power of how we can start over at any point, but also underscore this:

Starting over always and forever begins with changing our minds about whether or not we can start over.

If we have decided we’re Too Old, then we might as well call the funeral home right bloody now.

Unless you are on your deathbed, and time is very short, my unsolicited feelings about this are simple:

What on earth is holding you back?

Nearly every single time it’s our belief that we can’t, we don’t deserve it, some story that someone told us that past a certain age we can’t do whatever it is we want to do. It’s us, more often than not. Something very small in us argues all kinds of ways that we shouldn’t risk it, what if what if what if.

Case in point: last year, while recovering from a busted hip, I got permission to hike the 18 floors in the tallest building in town which happens to be a 62+ housing facility. A resident and I would meet twice a week and we’d walk the stairs for an hour.

Every single time a resident spoke to us, no matter what age, and many were much younger, they said precisely the same thing:

“OOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I could never do that.”

Yep. You’re right. Until you decide you want to. Then you do one set of three stairs until you can do eight. Then you do eight until you can do sixteen. And so on.

A year later maybe you’re a member of a local hiking group. A year later maybe you’re hiking the Dolomites.

Everything begins with a “yes.”

You and I change our lives when we change our minds. When we decide that we are worth doing/being something different in the time we have left to us, the gates tend to open.

Truth, it may not look anything like what you planned, but invariably the movement made something happen. The movement forward is the gift, but we first have to move the CAN’Ts out of the damn way.

People rewrite their life stories over and over and over again. History is full of amazing folks who decided that life wasn’t over yet. We women do it all the time.

Our roles change repeatedly from schoolgirl to college (maybe) to profession (maybe) to love and marriage to mother/partner to maybe divorce to caretaker (sometimes all at once).

Each time we take that new role on, often without giving much consideration to the fact that we just morphed again, we are rising out of the ashes of an old life into a new one. All too often we don’t honor the fact that we are remaking ourselves into those new roles. Such roles are in the service of others, they are placed upon us, we accept them.

When do we get to live our life?

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons this is so hard. If we want a do-over, this time it’s for us. For many of us Boomers, that’s a hard one. We grew up with the same role limitations as our mothers, despite all the noise to the contrary.

Now, faced with time and the potential for living differently, we all too often seek permission.

Again, my unsolicited feelings about seeking permission:

WHO THE HELL FROM, ANYWAY? WHOSE LIFE IS THIS?

I sincerely hope you can hear the laughter behind this. I so relate to the feeling that we are still playing Mother May I? in our fifties and beyond, as though the decision to move to Italy or cruise for three years or whatever tugs at our heartstrings needs approval.

My nasty little voice kept saying that nobody would like me if I did what I really wanted to do. No man would like me (okay, that’s largely true), Daddy wouldn’t approve (he’s dead silly) I’d fail (god knows hundreds of times, my best comedy material). On and on. I had to put that idiot voice in the dunce corner and tell it to SHUT THE HELL UP.

Wasn’t easy. Often isn’t.

Photo by Valentina Conde on Unsplash

What does a seriously badass do-over look like?

Among my absolute favorites, since I love adventure travel (which I leapt into screaming and on fire at sixty) is Barbara Hillary. A nurse by profession, she decided at the grand age of 75 to hike to the North Pole.

Then she did the South Pole at 79.

From the NYT article:

Ms. Hillary had retired from a 55-year career as a nurse when, seeking adventure, she went dog-sledding in Quebec and photographed polar bears in Manitoba. She then learned that no African-American woman had ever made it to the North Pole and challenged herself to become the first, though she had no funding and no organization behind her and had lost 25 percent of her breathing capacity from surgery for her lung cancer.

The expedition would require her to ski, which she had also never done before. “It wasn’t a popular sport in Harlem,” where she had grown up, she told The Seattle Times in 2007.

She had already survived breast cancer in her twenties. Lung cancer in her sixties.

She did it anyway.

That’s a Phoenix. She’s one of my great sheroes of all time.

I am not in any way, shape or form saying that you should adventure like I do, like Barbara did. That’s not the point.

Find your thing, that thing that keeps calling to you in the last moments of consciousness before you drift off to sleep. That thing that entices you in the moments just before you wake. That thing that insistently whispers your name.

Anne writes:

Yes, this crazy, outlandish, audacious thing I’ve fantasized about is actually possible!

That’s the permission we need. It only comes from within. Once you’ve decided that you are worth the investment, you blow the dust off your dream and start making serious inquiries about making it happen. Boyd goes into lovely detail about how she did that in her fifties.

Sometimes, as with Boyd, it takes a death to break us out of the glacial slowness of our willingness to risk. Boyd lost a brother. So did I, when he was 62 and I was 61. I had just started my adventure career. That launched me even more determinedly into doing what I love best.

Huge emotional events, losses, illness and the like are often the calling cards of the Phoenix. Faced with the inevitability of time, we get to consider the invitation and determine if we are worthy of it.

Yes. You are.

The other day I got a marvelous comment from a reader that I had to share, and I think it fits here:

The Long Goodbye

writes this (quoted with permission)

I have (a) tattoo in Chinese which basically says: the end of chaos is the beginning of opportunity. I’m not grateful for the terrible things, not in the moment, but if I can remember that—that there is something good that can be made from anything—it’s easier.

When I was evicted from my rent stabilized apartment, and living on disability, it felt like the end of the world. It was, in a sense. I was pushed out of the familiar and had to find a job (there was no good reason I wasn’t working). I moved out of Manhattan and left behind a home where awful things occurred and no amount of paint was going to change that or hide those memories.

When I was raped, I held on to that anger for decades, until it almost killed me. When I finally let go, I let go of blaming myself, or looking for revenge and made space for compassion and the ability to help other women (and men) who had been there.

As long as I don’t lose the lesson, I’m okay. It’s when life makes you repeat and repeat and repeat because you’re just not getting it - ach, that’s fucking painful.

I’ve always felt ready to die. What I was not ready for was living. As I close in on 70, caring for my Mom who at 94 cannot make decisions for herself or feed herself, I’ve done a 180, getting myself in the best shape of my life so I can meet the next twenty-five years head on. (author bolded)

That’s a powerful statement, a Phoenix getting ready to rise. Who knows where she is headed?

Does it matter? Does to her.

This hit me like a gut punch:

I was raped repeatedly in the service. I too hung onto that anger for decades until I realized what it was costing me. Years of eating disorders and suicidal ideation.

I launched an adventure travel career at sixty and never looked back. My appetizer was summitting Mount Kilimanjaro. I was on fire for years until I needed serious repairs, which were just completed.

I lived in a house in Denver for 14 years, most of which was witness to great emotional pain, loss and loneliness. I hung onto that house and that relationship way too long. I sold the house in 2020 at 67 and moved to Oregon after fifty years in Colorado.

I was ready for a different kind of living. Like Long Goodbye, nothing I did to my house could erase the memories.

After forty years of eating disorders, I chose life.

After fifteen years with a destructive relationship, I chose life.

The author at 63, realizing a dream: I rode a black Arabian stallion in Hurgadah, Egypt, at a dead run at sunset. This was just before we took off.

At some point we get to change our minds and choose ourselves.

Change your mind, change your life.

This happens in my world about every seven to ten years. I am currently in the middle of a big remake at 71. It’s terribly exciting. I get to ask all kinds of questions and seek all kinds of answers. What dreams need to be dusted off? What new dreams are possible?

Not all dreams need oodles of money. Many simply need a change of mind, where we put our attention, our efforts and our love.

The best first step? Simply saying Yes. I deserve this.

Then see what happens.

Let’s play. Please. Because yes, you deserve this.

Photo by Jessica Felicio on Unsplash

Thank you as always for hanging with me. I hope you find the other writers tagged in this article worth checking out as their pieces certainly made me think, which is what I hope to do for you. If so please consider

If someone you know is a bit stuck and concerned about making a big change, please also consider

Either way, fear is a terrible time thief. Find small steps, take them until you can leap. Then….LEAP. That faint clapping you hear is mine.