You're Too Old to Believe Someone is Going to Rescue You (Especially From Yourself)

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

Photo by Janosch Diggelmann on Unsplash

If you’re still waiting to be saved, might be time to start swimming

Dear Reader: This is NOT a post about religion, although religion most certainly has a powerful piece in this. For those who ascribe to Christian beliefs, I offer this phrase from Luke 17:20-21: …behold, the kingdom of God is within you. Some version of that is quite consistent across the major religions. In other words, it’s up to us to find the sacred within, a way to save ourselves, and when we do that, we are available to be of service to others. But I’m ahead of myself.

Sharon burst into delighted laughter.

“I do that, too,” she exclaimed, grinning.

We were sitting at breakfast, which we do regularly. Sharon’s in her mid-fifties, I’m seventy. We’d struck up a friendship a few years ago when I met her during a bodybuilding show posing practice. We’re both gym rats. As it turned out, we have a lot in common.

Both of us experienced incest as children. Those experiences colored, or more frankly, tainted our lives, from early adolescence onwards.

I had just told Sharon, guiltily, that some wee part of me still, after all these years, expects that some hero is going to come along and save me.

That’s why she cracked up. We both did. It was rueful laughter.

“I always believed that someone was going to swoop in and save me,” she said. “I’ve believed that my whole life. Nobody ever did.”

The belief in a savior is one of the most pervasive and damaging of all the fantasies we hold. Worse, it keeps us from the real work of learning to save ourselves.

You and I are way Too Old to keep believing in some magical savior who is going to fix everything, kiss the boo boo and make it all better.

There is saving to be done, however. Let’s talk.

Far too many of us have suffered as children at the hands of very bad people, and nobody intervened. As an adolescent, I remember imagining myself as Supergirl, trying to go to sleep, while smelling the gardenias just outside my bedroom window.

Then I would hear my big brother remove the screen off the other bedroom window and climb in.

I couldn’t fly away, couldn’t fight him off and I couldn’t save myself from him, either.

Anyone who has had a similar experience can relate. Where’s Mighty Mouse or Batman or even a loving parent when we really need a hero? Big bro was supposed to be a protector, not the predator, right?

Not at my house, and far too many others.

Fairy tales, Disney movies, superheroes, the Marvel Universe, religion in particular- every culture has some story about The One, whether it’s The Matrix, Dune, or Mina’s line from Dracula,

Take me away from all this death!

Somebody, some thing, some magical something is going to save us from the bad man, the monster, the bad mommy (sometimes the same thing), the train barreling down the track, the disease, the rapist, the invading barbarian hordes, the evil (whatever), the zombies, the pandemic, those people who don’t look like us, that bad country….

It’s exceedingly seductive to believe that some great and powerful savior is going to come save the day. Punish our enemies. Make life cushy so that we don’t feel any more pain.

Sometimes the very people we expect to save us turn out to be the worst offenders: priests, preachers, politicians, parents, police. Worse, they take advantage of that very trust and under the guise of protection, commit atrocities.

Bad things do happen, all the time, everywhere. Read the headlines. (Better, don’t read the headlines.) Who will save us from the saviors, then?

There is still that distant, tiny hope that, as per The Princess Bride,

“My Westley will always come for me.”

Savanna Briscoe neatly skewers that notion in this article. While she primarily discusses this idea relating to romantic love, it has larger implications about our agency as humans.

You and I are Way TOO OLD to believe that someday a savior is going to magically appear to make life easy and wonderful forevermore.

Again, all due respect to those who have strong religious beliefs. To that, this, which originated in Greece: the gods help those who help themselves.

It’s in that phrase that real power, real agency are found, especially if you believe that the sacred, and all its power, lies within each of us.

First and foremost, life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s also not fair, which is offensive to those who hold fast to the idea of fairness.

Yet we often blame the victims of rape, blame the homeless for going bankrupt taking care of a child’s cancer.

So eager are we for fairness that when faced with the truth of the wholesale lack thereof, we blame the victim.

Life is horribly, terribly unfair. What’s fair about blaming people who most likely didn’t sign up for testicular cancer, for gang rape, for genocide, for the lifelong sentence of being born into a marginalized community?

Out of that, though, we learn to swim.

If we don’t want to drown, learn to swim. When we gain faith in our ability to swim, we are less likely to drown. From this, we learn resilience.

We learn to be our own advocates. We become the warrior who stands up for ourselves. It takes a village for us to do that, and that is precisely the point.

Stay with me here, I’m going somewhere with this.

The other day I was digging through a big box of five-dollar DVDs that you often see at Rite Aid and the like. I found a copy of Trust, a 2010 movie starring Clive Owen and Viola Davis. I like these actors and I like thrillers.

I had no idea that movie would rip my soul apart.

Spoiler alert: our hero has a pretty fourteen-year-old daughter who falls prey to an online child predator. She is raped, then struggles to understand what happened to her while her father, in a rage of grief, goes off the deep end to avenge his daughter.

I kept waiting for him to cave the pedophile’s head in. Find him and end him. I wanted a revenge fantasy to help me feel better about the bastards who had done much the same to me.

I suspect I share that revenge urge with anyone else who’s ever been raped or hurt like this, held down helplessly while someone has his way.

Towards end of the movie, the traumatized daughter finds her deeply distraught father sitting outside in the cold in a kind of stupor. He weeps uncontrollably, holding his daughter tightly. He is in an agony that he didn’t protect her.

Then we switch to the predator, glibly engaging family friends, surrounded by his own white-bread all-American family, most likely already going after some twelve-year old. He’s a high school physics teacher.

Of course he is.

Such predators are everywhere masquerading as people we’re supposed to trust.

Nobody saved me from my predatory big brother. Nobody saved me from four predatory senior officers at different times during my Army career. Nobody usually does. That, sadly, is life.

Despite plenty of movies and TV shows to the contrary, the handsome hero never swooped in to save the day.

Instead, all too often, we get this:

In 1976 when I was 23 and a newly-minted second lieutenant in this man’s Army, I was assigned to an Army psychiatrist at Walter Reed to help me deal with three different sexual assaults. One was a gang rape. I needed help coping.

The psychiatrist was also a rapist. And because he was a lieutenant colonel, I could do nothing about it. Worse, he could have ended my future by penning a few choice lines in my file and getting me summarily booted out with a dishonorable discharge.

The classic Catch-22.

An officer and a gentleman MY ASS. He’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery, a beloved hero. Yah.

That, sadly, is life.

Who is to save us from such so-called saviors? You see my point.

Those events led to serious body dysmorphia and four decades of eating disorders. I assumed that because nobody came to save me, that I wasn’t worth saving. Not worthy of love. So I nearly starved myself to death.

I was punishing the victim.

If you live long enough, you realize how terrible a lie this truly is, that we are not worth saving. Not worthy of love.

You and I were worthy of profound love the moment we first drew breath.

Sadly, religion and power are behind most of the worst of our bad behavior, as history and current events are witness. For a deity who purportedly teaches “Thou shalt not kill,” we sure interpret that liberally if the other guy doesn’t happen to pray to the same invisible guy in the sky that we do.

Nothing about that is fair.

So what is fair? I’ll take a stab at it.

The ultimate battle is always and forever inside us, the choices we make for good or evil every day, moment to moment. More importantly, once we’ve been through enough and realize that the idea of a savior is a false pretense, we learn the greater truth.

To that, a quote from one of my all-time favorite actors.

Viola Davis, who plays a social worker in the movie Trust, says,

“When people get hurt, the only thing we can do for each other when we do fall down is to pick each other up.”

We cannot save our ourselves or our kids from pain, despair, and their fair share of heartache. Nor should we. They too must learn to cope with the horrific, for no matter what we do, it will likely strike their lives as well.

The only thing my parents could have done, had they found out about my brother, was be there to help me cope.

What my sexual assault history gave me was immense compassion for assault and rape victims. The ability to speak to large groups of fellow female veterans about how to face down the pain and use it to get stronger by standing with our sisters. I see them.

And in many cases, that has made all the difference. It most assuredly has for me as well.

Ultimately, helping is what we all do for each other when life rips holes in our hearts. We hold each other, we help each other cope. That is the grace we most desperately need. This is what “saving” really looks like.

This is how we tap into the innate, immense sacred.

Part of the price we pay for being human is to experience pain, loss, sadness, failure. Avoidance of suffering only teaches us more avoidance and no skills to deal with its inevitability. Learning to embrace what life hands us can teach us great empathy, which in turn saves us, if you will.

Then we can use that same empathy to be present when others fall. This brings us even greater grace because now we are giving it.

I passionately believe that what animates us is a spark of the Divine. What truly animates the Divine are compassion and empathy. Those are borne of bearing life’s pain, forging on anyway, and being present for others.

Those endless, boundless gifts are what save us: Compassion and empathy.

First and foremost for our precious and beloved self, then offered to others, who deserve no less.

You and I can be “saved” all right, by finding the kingdom of heaven within.

That kingdom, if you will, is comprised of compassion and empathy. Grace. Those are what rescue us all.

Let’s play.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

I hope, especially in such turbulent times, that this message offered perspective and hope. If so, please consider

If someone you know is struggling with “why me,” please also consider

Either way my heartfelt thanks for hanging with me for a few minutes today.