When I am Old…
Oh no. It’s come out again. The ‘O’ word. I thought living with new housemates I could start again, develop a new reputation. But we’re only a few months in and the old insult has been levelled against me. All it took was one aquafit class, a lot of knitting and my love for the BBC 2 quiz show Only Connect. And so here I am today, looking at myself in the (metaphorical) mirror, and asking you lovely reader: ‘Am I an old lady?’
I’ll address the elephant in the room. Physically I am a 21-year-old. I was born in 2003. Whenever I say that my older work colleagues visibly wince. But, according to my friends and family, I am spiritually seventy-four. I couldn’t tell you the last time I went clubbing, or even to a bar. I am my happiest when I have an early bedtime and am up early in the morning. I like crosswords and reading and going for long walks. I prefer tea to coffee so I don’t get too jittery when I’m going to bed, which I will do with Radio Four and a cup of chamomile.
I’m definitely not the only one – ‘#grandmacore’ has more than 28,000 posts on tiktok. A quick scroll through these videos and you see people, mostly young women, extolling the virtues of doing what you actually love, not what you think you should do. The old women have stopped caring what other people think, so why should we? Why waste your time on ‘fun’ you don’t like, when your precious time could be spent intentionally on things that bring you actual joy, even if those things aren’t ‘cool’? Which brings me roundly to my secondary question for you dear reader (I’m working you hard today): ‘Is being an old lady such a bad thing?’
This second question led me back to the poem Warning by Jenny Joseph, which I hadn’t read since I was at school – which, contrary to popular belief, was only about five years ago, not in the 1950s. Joseph’s poem opens
‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.’
before going on to list the various wild things she will do when she is old, but cannot do now because now
‘We must have friends to dinner and read the paper’.
Re-reading this poem struck to the heart of the matter for me. As a young woman there are plenty of cultural expectations on how I should look, how I should present myself, how I should behave. Older women are (although limited in other ways) socially much freer. My paternal grandmother who has never done a single drug in her life once told a taxi driver she could ‘do with a line as a livener’ because she’d seen a character in a TV drama say it. You can get away with these things when you’re older.
In her book, ‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying’, end of life carer Bonnie Ware states that the most common regret she saw from all her patients was “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” I don’t think my paternal grandmother was thinking about the taxi driver’s expectations when she joked to him about doing drugs. I don’t think my maternal grandmother was thinking about society’s expectations when she took off her top in front of next door’s builders. Part of the privilege of aging is getting to shake off the shackles of expectation and live a life that you’ve actually chosen, for you and no one else.
So, my third (and final, I promise) question to you diligent reader is: why wait? As Ware says nothing is guaranteed in this life, so why not spend your time living how you actually want to? For me, that includes aquafit and knitting and cups of tea and fruit cake. If you want to be a rave granny that’s your prerogative. Start today: live the life you want, embrace your inner old person.