This is My Life
6 minute read
I just had a birthday. I turned 47. I’ve never been one of those people who dreads their birthdays, who doesn’t want other people to know. Any excuse to indulge in cake is fine by me. And I’m a sucker for a good card.
But this birthday - this 47th birthday - has felt a little different. It might have been that it was straddled with some invasive tests for some scary health stuff. Or that the health stuff in question was what had taken the life of my favourite aunt decades ago when she was 47. Or maybe it’s just the sound of 47, its proximity to the next decade, that I can’t really say I’m in my mid-40s anymore. Whatever way you look at it, even with advances in medical science, chances are that I am already more than halfway through this life of mine. Which brings up bigger questions than what kind of cake I want this year.
Indulge me, for a moment, while we take a trip back to 1980s Ireland, a land of one television households where the viewing was mostly the choice of the parents, or at least it was in my house. There were three broad categories of programmes: the ones we would all watch (Glenroe, Murphy’s Micro Quiz-m); those that prompted me being nudged out of the room and up to bed (Dallas, certain episodes of The Late Late) and outliers like Songs of Praise where I fled from the room voluntarily. Amidst this league table, This is Your Life, was one that fell somewhere in the middle, half an hour of television that could be sat through while waiting for Coronation Street to come on. Some of you will, no doubt, remember it: Eamonn Andrews, the big red book, the trail of school friends and old bosses and neighbours coming from stage left to greet the smiling or squirming celebrity on stage right.
Now, I’m not saying that I consciously watched that television show thinking about what my red book might hold, but I do think that somewhere along the way there was a clear message that it should contain certain things: academic achievement, a good job, success in your chosen field, among others. A husband was most certainly supposed to feature in the book - he would get his own chapter, at least - and that would bring the plot along further to children, pets, grandkids, setting us up for a sequel.
I was in my 30s before I realised that I could choose the story to write in my very own big red book, that it was okay to choose a wife instead of a husband, to leave a “successful” career for something I liked better, something I loved. When I turned 40, I wrote a piece called Things I Learned in my 30s which was a short-list of big and small things that had only become clear to me in that decade. I liked that piece, I enjoyed writing it. It reminded me that life was fun, that the possibilities were endless, that I could choose my own adventure. So seven years on, on my 47th birthday, why didn’t things feel quite as sparkly? As simple?
The answer, it turns out, is a four-letter word starting with F. No, not that one, the other one: fear. The timing of my health concerns, the long-ago loss of my aunt all played into the story that we are surrounded by every day, a story that’s so ubiquitous it’s almost invisible - that as we get older, there’s more to be afraid of, that our choices are, in fact diminishing in front of our fading eyes. Advertising, social media, the news reminds us constantly of our vulnerabilities. We should be spending our money on health insurance, retirement planning, a vast array of medications, or perhaps a home colonoscopy kit we can send away in the post.
And speaking of money, as women, we should worry about that too because unlike men whose income grows until their mid-50s at least, our earnings peak at 44 and it’s all downhill after that. It’s enough to give you wrinkles just worrying about it all, wrinkles we are ever more conscious of after a year plus of seeing ourselves reflected in our computer screens. It would be wise to invest whatever dwindling income we have left in the right moisturiser or hair dye or maybe an exercise machine that will fight what gravity is doing to our arms. The language that is rolled out to us - anti-aging, age-defying - shows us the battle we are up against, a battle we can win with the right choice of cosmetics until of course, we can’t.
Thankfully, for my sake, the tapestry of my life here brings me into contact with many people who are older than me - mostly women - who reinforce to me every day that this story is Bull Shit with a capital BS. Most of the students I teach, the volunteers from my day job who sparkle from the love of their lives, the neighbour who had a socially distanced birthday party in our hallway in the midst of the pandemic, are all older than me. These women talk about life getting better with each passing decade and many say this started for them in their 40s.
When I ask why, the answers are pretty universal - that getting older allowed them to be more fully themselves, to embrace their own wants and needs, to let go of the opinions of others. That in fact, they had more choices with each passing year, not less.
Last night, in my Zoom creative writing class, an argument broke out among my students as to whether their 60s or 70s were the most fun decade. We had to move on before it could be fully resolved but the general consensus was that by their late 50s most “didn’t give a hoot.”
So, at 47, I am going to offset the fear-based story that I am told with real stories from the front lines, these women in the trenches. I am going to take a leaf out of their books and remember that I have more choices available to me than arguably at any other point in my life. Not because I have more money, or more years ahead of me, but because I know myself better, because I can see the choices I do have and - crucially - because I don’t care as much as I used to about what others think. My hunch is that with each passing birthday, I will, in fact, care less.
And when the fear creeps in and whispers to me that this piece is too long and no-one is still reading, or that my best days, or my best work is behind me, or that next time my health results may not be so positive, I have a choice too. I can remember what one of my wise older friends told me about what fear stands for - False Evidence Appearing Real - and I can say hi to it and keep going. I can keep writing the next lines in my very own big red book.
Yvonne Cassidy, June 2021
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