Dear Eva,
I feel old. I know I’m not really – I’m 35 – but I feel very tired and like I’ve missed out on lots of things. For instance, I am single (when all my friends have partners), and I don’t have kids (not that I particularly want a baby, but my friends are starting to have them). I can’t stop thinking about all the things I haven’t done. The lease on my flat is coming up (oh, did I mention I don’t own a house!), and it’s making me feel like I want to cut myself off from everything and just age alone in peace. I can’t imagine how I’ll feel when I turn 40.
From Hannah
Oh Hannah, age is relentless. It just keeps coming, doesn’t it, like a tennis ball launcher shooting hard round weeks at you, then months, and years, and every now and then one of them winds you quite badly, or leaves a bruise. I have just had a birthday, and the sheer quantity of years I am now carrying, on increasingly sloped shoulders, is actually breathtaking. But I think maybe the feeling you’re describing, the feeling of “being old”, is not actually to do with age so much as it is to do with feeling unstable, or dissatisfied, or simply sad.
It is a particularly difficult time to enter your thirties. The traditional indicators of adulthood like houses or babies have been denied to many millions due to either systemic failures of governance or excessive avocado usage, depending on which websites you read. People have always mourned their youth, but your generation is getting older without the security or benefits that sweetened the deal, which adds a certain terror to the journey. But that’s not all of it. The process of moving forward through a life inevitably requires you to acknowledge opportunities missed or things undone.
I’m reading a book by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, Missing Out, in which he asks: Why do we think we know more about the experiences we don’t have than about those we do? I’m thinking about this all the time now. And I think it’s completely normal to wonder what might have happened if you’d leaned into that kiss in 2007, or moved to Paris when you were 18, or said that thing to your dad, or worked harder on your maths GCSE. The trick is not to dwell there, not to set up a little camp in what might have been, or in the perceived successes of others, but instead to look around at the choices you’ve made, and try and enjoy them. You’re mourning an unlived life, rather than appreciating the life you have, and I think it’s things like this that can make a person feel stuck, or tired, or old.
Admittedly, turning 40 is weird. It is, it just is. I remember when my mum turned 40, and I remember it because I was old enough already to write her a birthday “rap”. Well, more a sort of spoken word poem, illustrated, but I was yet to discover those pretensions, and my point is, 40 remains the age of mothers and branch managers – it is not an age when you can still, for instance, have a tantrum over getting dressed, or get moody about lunch (as I have learned the hard way). When you get there, write in again, we’ll chat. But now, you can’t imagine how you’ll feel in five years time? Good! That’s a good thing! You will have grown by then in imperceptible yet crucial ways you cannot and should not try and know today, and this is something time does, with its bruises: it reshapes us, and makes us want, grieve and delight in completely new things.
You could, of course, take yourself away to hibernate in your old age – a little flat by the sea, some herbal tea, one of those leather flip-back phone cases that also contains your credit cards. Sounds quite nice. But truly, you have an entire three or four lives ahead of you, which you might enjoy more if you instead attempted to reconnect with your friends and brush off your mounting bitterness. Age can work as a spotlight on our regrets; try and refocus its beam on the future.
