Yielding to age stereotypes, expressing indulgence, contempt, disgust for a person because of age, we first lock our neighbors into a prison of prejudice, and in the long run ourselves, journalist Ksenia Tatarnik notes. But why is it so hard to let go of the ageism in your head?
At 43, I split in two. That other me smiles at me from advertising posters for anti-aging creams and plastic surgery clinics, flips through catalogs of clothes for ladies of elegant age, and watches TV shows that make my cheekbones cramp. Secretly, every time I rejoice that our tastes do not coincide with her.
Internet robots can construct a stereotypical 5-something woman based on search queries and demographics, but the living me remains unrepeatable and unpredictable for them. In Russian, we talk about years, that they come true like wishes: “30 … 60 … 80 … XNUMX … years have passed.”
I like time-tested friends – I love their faces. Age has never scared me, rather fascinated me. Why are so many people ashamed of their age? Why am I not ashamed? I am a child, I am a girl and I am an adult woman – is it still the same me or three completely different people?
Why do I feel either younger or older than my reflection in the mirror, but I never internally match the number in my passport? Appearance embodies my grown-up essence or is it a mask that obscures an eternally young soul?
The prospect of carrying around the image of a girl like a donkey skin until the end of my days and clinging to youth does not please me at all, but I also don’t want to turn into an “aunt”. I feel cramped, bored in these two boxes: either you are young, beautiful, successful and everyone is drawn to you, or second-hand, no one needs you.
My colleague, brilliantly educated, smart, bright speaker, said at a workshop: “No, no, I’m too old to be on TV, I’m disgusting to look at.” She just turned 50 years old. Do you think this is a wise way to embrace aging?
Sociologist Dmitry Rogozin has been studying people over 70 in Russia for many years and has noticed a sad trend. The illusion that you can consider yourself old and scary, but at the same time remain smart and interesting, is extremely dangerous. For our old people, giving up their body is a very common temptation.
For our old people, giving up their body is a very common temptation. In practice, it looks something like this: the old woman believes that she was beautiful in her youth, but now she has become ugly, and therefore is ashamed of her body. If she is ashamed of him, she will not go to the shower again. What for? As a result, the body begins to cause even greater disgust – both in herself and in those around her. I want to put some kind of mantle on him and not look.
There is such a well-known thing as an senile smell. Believe it or not, but at first the old people themselves really don’t like it, they just get used to it – they say, what can you do, I’m such a ruin. But this is not the smell of old age, this is the smell of desolation.
There is a real link between adherence to hygiene and the rate of development of dementia1. After these words, I promised myself that I would be friends with my body and treat it carefully and with love – no matter how old I am.
Nevertheless, it takes considerable courage to crush far-fetched taboos. Actress Kim Cattrall calls it “ageism in your own head.” At the age of forty, she was offered the role of a dream, and she almost refused – she was afraid that she was already too old to play such a seductive siren as Samantha in Sex and the City. Today, revisiting the series, she is amazed, as she could have doubted, but in 1998 it was a truly courageous step.
Judging by youth or wrinkles, a good person in front of you or a bad one, is the same as by skin color, gender or nationality.
Ageism, or age discrimination, is not at all as harmless as it seems.
“What we think of a person affects how we see him; as we see him, so we behave towards him; our behavior towards him ultimately shapes his attitude towards himself, and perhaps who he is, wrote 88-year-old Lillian Rubin, a sociologist and psychotherapist who studies the phenomenon of aging. “In this interaction between self and society, one can clearly see how the perception of old age in society sets the direction and determines how we feel about ourselves. For what we see on other people’s faces, sooner or later will appear on our face.2».
Rubin is the author of several bestselling books, including Women of a Certain Age: The Midlife Search for Self about women in their forties. In it, she found out at what stage women, because of the shame imposed by society, begin to hide their years; in the 80s we did it on the threshold of the 40th anniversary, in the 50s the “shameful figure” shifted to 55-XNUMX years. I want to believe that one day we will be able to abandon stigma forever.
The poetess Vera Polozkova once wrote that by the appearance of older people one can easily judge their moral character. From her point of view, youth serves as a mask, it hides the personality, and the old people can’t “hide” behind it: “You can’t see how many days you don’t sleep, why you are sick and whether you are a good person: while you are young, you are anonymous , you are invulnerable, you spend what you will not soon know the price of …
… By sixty-five, a person’s body – his folds, posture, muscle tone, skin texture – will tell you in detail … Old people are absolutely permeable, it is much more difficult for them to lie: everything can be told from them even before they say the first word.
There are great old men, and from them shine; the body seems to become thinner on them, and a hot happy light flies through it; there are dark and bad old men, such as if every beat, striving, good intention was suffocated in their body; there are old people tired and empty, as if the spirit had been in them, left them and sent them on, like empty containers; and this is always the quickest and most eloquent answer to the question of what they lived about.
I imagined myself in my sixties, on the subway, under the gaze of such an insightful young man, and I laughed. The young are unaware – the elders also read them like an open book. Over the years, our “I” is gaining experience, and with it sympathy and understanding that everyone lives as they can.
Judging by youth or wrinkles and posture, whether a person is good or bad in front of you, is the same as by skin color, gender or nationality. This desire to place all of us in pre-cast forms and also to dissociate ourselves from what frightens, disgusts in oneself, to transfer all this to another.
In fact, young people, like old people, are full, caring, soulful and – bad, tired and devastated. Only by entering into communication can we figure out whether our interlocutor is kind or cruel, stingy or generous, lying or truthful, reliable or a traitor.
This text is a fragment from the debut book by Ksenia Tatarnik about relationships with yourself and your body, “Who needs me: 7 steps from self-abuse to rebirth”, which is published in August by the AST publishing house.
1 “Instead of the cult of youth, there is a fashion for old age.”
2 «The hard truth about getting old».
About the Developer
Ksenia Tatarnik – journalist, editor, author .