With another new year now underway, I thought I might talk about the experience of being, as a friend says, “old af.” It was not with the turning of this past year, but at some random moment several years ago, when I realized – with startling and unforgiving clarity – that I have many, many more years behind me than I do ahead of me. If life has a three-act structure, then I am in Act 3, heading for the denouement. Given my robust good health, maybe I have another three decades left, but two is far more realistic.
My days now have a distinctly different tenor than at any previous age. If we can switch metaphors to the visual arts, imagine a base tone of freedom, lightly washed with sadness, and with highlights of fatigue. With each year, my confidence in myself has grown, and my concern over what others think of me has diminished. Every day, another fuck I used to give flies out the window. I expect the degree of that feeling differs with privilege and circumstance, but I would bet a dollar that everybody, as they age, feels it to some extent.
The sadness isn’t about facing death. It’s about all the death I’ve experienced over the course of my life. I was born extraordinarily lucky, to an amazing mother, who, while single, dwelled within the encompassing arms of a large extended family. Having loved, and been loved, by so many people is a wondrous, transcendent feeling and one that I am deeply grateful for. Losing each of them in turn becomes an accumulation of grief and loneliness, settling into the bones like a gentle ache that no amount of rest or exercise can relieve.
Over the past couple of years, the sadness has evolved from a wash to a full secondary color, disrupting the balance. I think this is largely due to the loss of a very close friend who was younger than I am. Deaths like that, of the relatively young, don’t have the sense of the Natural that can soften the sharpest edges of an elder’s loss. I miss him terribly. I am also increasingly uncomfortable with my nation’s, and my state’s, politics and culture. And frankly, I just don’t want to fight on those fronts. I feel too tired to fight.
Which brings us to those highlights of fatigue. In some ways, I am actually in better shape now than during younger years, when I suffered from chronic pain. But even as a dedicated exerciser, I do not have the energy I once did. I can feel how much greater the effect of losing a few hours sleep has on me. I am not as physically strong as I used to be, and I find myself mentally drained after a day of work in a way I don’t think I used to. I think this makes a space for the sadness to slip into and makes it harder to fight off.
And yet, here I am, intent on embarking upon a new career even as I look forward to, someday, retiring from the old one. Writing? Trying to be published? At my age? What am I thinking? The simplest answer to that is that I have to do something. If there is one thing I know about myself, it’s that I must be creating something all the time. A close second to that drive is learning something new, but learning does not take the place of creating. It doesn’t necessarily have to be writing. It could be visual art, music, sewing. But language is my first love. It’s my love of language that drives me to learn at least one other besides my native. And it’s my love of words that makes me such a voracious reader. And everything I said in my Artist’s Statement last year still holds true.
But there’s a difference between writing and “being a writer” in a career sense. I could just keep writing stories for the sheer joy of it until that upcoming final day. But, I have found – and this is actually something I only discovered recently – that part of the joy of writing for me comes when others read my work. When I read a piece at an open mic and somebody reacts with “Wow,” that’s a kick. When somebody reads a story I wrote and tells me they liked it, that feels good. So, to some extent, I suppose I do care what people think. I hope they’ll get something from my writing, and if I didn’t get those reactions, I might not continue putting my work out there. But I have gotten those reactions. And yes, there are always, and always will be, rejections, but those are to be expected. There are a lot of people doing the same thing I am, and many of them doing it better.
I need to remind myself of these things periodically. That I enjoy writing. That other people enjoy my writing. Because the mermaid’s song grows sweeter every day, and if I do not remind myself often, I will sink into the soft depths of nihilism and drown.
And really, there is no reason not to pursue a dream. I’m old, not dead. But there may be days, or even weeks or months, when I do not have it in me. I think I need to learn to be okay with that. No, I can no longer stay up all night working on a story and expect to be functional the next day, like I could in college. And no, I may not achieve all my goals. I may run out of time. Still, the fact that we may fail is never a reason not to try. I remind myself often of something I learned many years ago from the life-changing book, Stumbling on Happiness. In the final days of their lives, people almost universally feel more regret over the things they didn’t try, than they do over having tried and failed. There is no reason not to at least try to make my third act the boldest, the most delight-filled, the most sating.
Happy New Year.