I have finally come to terms with Life
We’ve come to a compromise
Instead of me wanting a different one or mine to end
I’m giving myself fully to this one, no holding back
In return, Life agrees to continue to be fully what She is
(And to let me think it’s a compromise when really, She has won me over)
I take a deep breath
Connect to all who’ve been before
Feel my mother’s mother’s heartbeat in mine
What I yearn for
I don’t always understand
Whose dreams am I living
Are they of the present or the past
Well, it happened.
I thought I published yesterday’s post, but I just saw that I did not.
There is a part of me devastated by this error.
I call this part of me “Perfectionista.”
If I am not vigilant, she drives me. She wants to get things right. She wants to be the best at whatever she does, all the time. To be seen as the best. Perfect.
She hates making mistakes.
So breaking my daily posting streak of many months? Not going over well with her.
I try to reason with her. Technically, I did write it yesterday, and though clearly I messed up and only thought I published it, I created it yesterday. And after all, the point of me doing it daily is so that I do at least one creative act daily to stay connected to my creativity. That’s it.
So cool. I did that. Yay me!
But that part of me, Perfectionista, she wants more. And what she wants has to do with what she thinks others think of her.
And she is loud.
She creates suffering for me. She is going to incessantly remind me of this flaw, trying to create a very unsettled feeling that will saturate my system.
“You blew it,” she says.
Hers is a world of extremes, of black and white thinking, of a self-generated pressure to meet somewhat randomly selected standards and performance deadlines and levels or else…
She lives in world with an almost life and death internal pressure to seem perfect to others.
I cannot live from her world view. It’s too exhausting, too exacting. And empty.
I. Just. Can’t.
My world? I try to simplify these days. What a waste of precious time, worrying what others will think about me missing a randomly-decided goal.
More and more, it’s about doing my best on any given day and letting that be more than enough.
Don’t get me wrong: I still strive to be “the best.”
The best I can be on any given day.
As for what others think of that? No longer my business, thank you very much.
It began innocuously enough:
A fissure in the surface of her consciousness
Something slowly began its escape
From the depths of long-since sealed off passages
And traveled the complex distances within her soul
Until one day it broke free at last
The bloody, naked truth shot forth
Filled her awareness with itself
A seismic riff that turned her world on its axis
A silent scream shook every cell of her psyche
And with that, she came to know her Real self
The legend of me
Changes daily
Sometimes hourly
Sometimes rooted in the past
Sometimes projected into the future
Sometimes whispered, often shouted
I have allowed ghostwriters
Free reign for far too long
Time to write my own story
I know it best, after all
Gonna get quiet and listen
For the voice that is my own
“Don’t varnish the truth, darling,” she said to no one in particular as she resolutely declined to add more lipstick color to her lips. She could plainly see the little telltale lines above her upper lip and the way the bright red color she had favored in her youth now bled off into the tiny trenches, and with that, she was done with reds. It would be pinks and faint corals from now on, until the day when even those colors would need to be retired.
* I was inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: age to re-visit a blog post from last year after an incident this morning further pointed out to me my continued sensitivity around this issue.
On this fine morning, I went to the grocery store after a run. I was wearing a NYC Marathon shirt, and the man ahead of me in line had one on as well and sparked up a conversation. He nicely offered me participation in a neighborhood running group. I asked if it had a variety of levels of runners (I am not a fast runner,) to which he said, “Oh, yeah, there’s a woman who everyone loves who is your age. Yeah, there’s lots of people your age.”
Now the thing is, I was thinking we were pretty near in age. I certainly wasn’t thinking I was in some whole other generation than him! Yikes!
Clearly, I have more work to do.
You see, I discovered two years ago that I am severely prejudiced.
It was a shock. I didn’t know that lurking within me were truly vile and discriminatory feelings and thoughts about a huge portion of the human race.
I didn’t know I was an ageist.
According to Wikipedia: Ageism (also spelled “agism”) is stereotyping and discriminating against individuals or groups on the basis of their age. This may be casual or systematic. The term was coined in 1969 by Robert Neil Butler to describe discrimination against seniors, and patterned on sexism and racism.
Lemme back up. I was having an especially terrific day.
There are days when, as an actor, you are just filled with joy because you feel so in the flow. This was one of those days.
I was on my way from a great voice lesson. I had a while to do an errand and then later was going to rehearse and then do a staged reading of a very special play that held deep personal value for me, with amazing fellow actors. What could be better than that?
I stopped at a grocery store to pick up some kale (what is it about me and the grocery store and this issue?!) I was at the register when it happened. The woman checking me out said the following words:
“Do you qualify for the 55+ discount?”
I was shocked. Then outraged. Then mortified. And ashamed. In that order. Appalled and dripping with disgust, I looked at her.
“What?! Do I look like I’m 55?!! Oh. My. God. Kill me now.”
(Yes, I actually said “Kill me now.”)
Poor thing tried to backpedal it.
“Oh, I just thought…you eat so healthy…so maybe…”
Which made it worse, because she was inadvertently inferring that I’m actually older looking than 55 but eating so well that it doesn’t show?!
I left the store, kale in hand, attempting not to spin out on this.
I wanted to enjoy the rest of my day, but knowing myself and how my brain works around such things, I knew I had a triage situation in regard to my frail ego.
First, I tried different paths of logic. Oh, she didn’t really take me in before she said that. She probably says that to every one, right? I don’t look my age. Everyone says so. And my real age is not 55, so she obviously didn’t even take me in.
I’d slip into anger occasionally.
How irresponsible of her. They really shouldn’t let those cashiers offer that discount willy-nilly. They are just asking for it!
By the time I got home, there was a new voice inside making itself known. A voice that said, “Hey, you. What’s so bad about being associated with being 55?”
I mean, truthfully, the level of disgust I felt at the mere suggestion that I could ever be 55!
I began to examine this, go deeply into it. I discovered that being over 65 felt OK. I mean, I know I’m going to be a rocking 65-year-old.
And 70? Look out! I want to be one of those cool Septuagenarians who astounds people with their vitality and continued accomplishments.
But 51-64? I want no part of THAT club. No way.
Where did this come from? This abhorrence of people those ages? I wasn’t born rejecting a whole segment of the population. How did this hidden inner belief system come to be so strong in me?
And better yet, what can I do about it now that I know about it?
I don’t want to feel such a distaste for any of the years I am lucky enough to have ahead. I thought I had embraced ageing when it first started appearing in my mid 40’s…I looked at how I felt about it then and really thought I had decided I was gonna forge a new pathway for generations of women to come by embracing my later ages. By celebrating the changes as they came. By being a vibrant, sexy woman at EVERY age.
I thought I had decided that I was gonna be a one-woman revolution and reject societal, cultural pressure to look young no matter what the cost for as long as possible. To be on TV and in films at my age and not be ashamed or embarrassed because I am not young anymore. To blaze trails. To be a part of a change that embraces beauty at every age instead of the age-shaming we are bombarded with from infancy through all forms of media.
I thought I had chosen this path.
Little did I know that sure, I was great with aging as long as I still looked 38-48. That was cool.
Little did I know that when I looked in the mirror, reviewing the changes I could see, there was this part of my brain that must have decided “Sure, this is acceptable. I can live with THIS.” But that all the while that seeming acceptance actually held a hidden silent caveat: “As long as it doesn’t get worse than THIS.”
How insane it seems now. But that must have been the invisible internal logic.
Oy.
I can’t stay frozen in time. I cannot choose the face I will keep for the remainder of my life in this body.
My face and body WILL continue to change as time progresses. I am like every other human who has ever lived and aged.
But. I can choose all of the things I thought I chose before. I CAN embrace. I CAN blaze a trail. I can be a one-woman revolution.
I can choose to reject what advertisers and media cram into my psyche on a practically moment-by-moment basis. Anti-aging, this, anti-aging that. (“Anti-” opposed to, against!)
I do not have to believe/embrace or live from the beliefs that:
After 40 it is all downhill. Middle age is something to dread and fear. Women become invalid and invisible once they hit menopause. Life is meant for the young. Old people have no relevance. Old people cannot remember things. Old people are “out of it” when it comes to modern technologies or cultural references. Blah, blah, blah.
Bullshit. It is all designed to make me fear getting old and to buy skin creams and such as if my life depends on it.
When I shared my grocery store story with a friend, she said she could relate to my outrage. She said she wasn’t going to age “without a fight.”
But I don’t want feel like there’s anything TO fight, you know?
Or rather, I am gonna fight. But not aging.
I’m gonna fight Ageism.
Look out, world. Here I come! Who is with me?!
To find out more about ageism: www.legacyproject.org
#beautifulateveryage
And then came the day
I pulled the stuts out one by one
Pulled off the boards, and
The mighty fortress fell at last
Naked to the world, I stood still
Trembling in awe of my freedom
I kissed the ground goodbye
And greeted the sky hello
He rubbed his knee quite gingerly, as if to say, “Come on, old Boy. We’ve come this far. Just a bit more to go,” before rising to head out for his daily constitutional.
Once up, he paused a moment, giving his body’s sundry parts time to adjust to the height, though in his mind, he was already half way down the street.
And once his body was ready, he started out, one step at a time.
For as long as I recall, I’ve carried within me the following line:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
I can’t usually remember what poem it is from. I probably read it in high school English.
But it has stayed with me all of these years intact, the way wonderful writing can. It visits me at times, like an echoed wisdom from an ancestor since passed.
I think it stuck with me because even in high school, I sensed the existence of walls inside me.
I didn’t know it consciously. But often the Frost quote would float through my mind paraphrased as “There is something in me that doesn’t love a wall.”
Looking back, the Freudian slip was prophetic.
Those walls were walls that I’d built to protect me, but they’d also held me prisoner, because I did not know then that they were of my own making, and therefore my own to remove.
Years later, through much personal healing and growth, I’ve come to terms with my inner walls, and I find I am both of the people in Frost’s poem.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
Like the narrator, I, too, find that my walls want to come down.
Though I’ve come to accept them as a part of me to love and find compassion for, they also feel like something that wants to be dislodged, or that needs to disintegrate, feeling like foreign matter in the organic soul forest I inhabit within.
And like the neighbor, some ancient part of me feels them to be necessary. It’s as if there’s an ancestral heritage in place that pulls me to them, at odds with the part within that wants them down.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
I thank those parts within for their concern, and the peoples from which I came who needed walls to survive.
I thank them for their love and care.
I respectfully let them know that today, I choose a different way.
I feel their support at my back as I step out into the Great Adventure.
I lovingly dismantle each wall, and face the leafy, lush green of the world within and without, with my face towards the sun, unafraid of the shadows.
I wonder if Robert Frost was speaking of the walls within, too.
I like to think so. It makes me feel we are connected, like good neighbors can be.
Mending Wall
BY ROBERT FROST
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”
I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Beyond the Skinny Branches 