Tag: aging

My Online Real Estate Obsession

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I have many pathologies, one of them is compulsive use of a website, Redfin.com.

There are many cities in which I look at homes. I look at homes for hours. I will never live in these homes. I will never live in these cities. Many of these cities I don’t even want to live in.

Nor am I looking to move at this time.

I hate moving, actually. I hate boxes and packing them and especially, unpacking them. It is why I still have unpacked boxes from moves several years ago.

But here is what I love: fantasy.

The fantasy of having a slide that shoots from the upstairs to the playroom in the basement (what lucky children live there)!

The fantasy of an old-school elevator, the kind with a collapsible metal screen painted black instead of a proper door, or an outdoor shower by the sea.

The fantasy of any number of architectural styles having nothing to do with one another: mid-century modern, Victorian vampire, camelback fixer-upper, exposed brick artist loft, ugly nouveau riche McMansion (often contains provocative innovations in toileting equipment).

I have realized what this is about. I want to have multiple lives, as many lives as possible.

I want more.

The older I get, the more I have seen the irrevocable finitude of others. And I see my finitude. This one life of mine is moving fast, seemingly accelerating because that is what happens when you gain perspective by way of time.

By fantasizing about a succession of alternate lives, I am able to pretend I have more runway than I probably do. (Though I consider myself to be quite healthy and put effort into that—it would be awesome to live as long as possible.)

I rawdog this website, Redfin.com, no account, no app, gawking homes in my pretend cloak of anonymity.

Of course every site I’ve ever visited is tracking me with “cookies.”

Of course Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the supposedly depersonalized algorithm know everything.

Redfin.com and the whole internet control apparatus knows damn well I’m a middle-age woman with a long list of additional monetizable insecurities and obsessions (to flatter the ego, we’ll relabel them ‘aspirations’) not specified here. This is escapism with no escape hatch.

Me, Graduate School, Middle Age, The Big Box Store

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary3 Comments

Doing graduate school in middle age is strange behavior. No one is waiting for the graying to burst into our respective fields screaming, “I have arrived.” I am in the process of pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Mississippi University for Women. It is a strange choice to wallop homework into my life, and I stand by it, even though more appropriate behavior for my demographic (working mother, aging parents) entails flossing away what little time remains at the big box store.

But graduate school has not changed this fact. I continue to spend time in the big box store. I do a number of big box stores on a regular basis: the discount store, the book store, the sporting goods store that under the leadership of a woman CEO has made it harder for school shooters to buy their guns and ammo there. My daughter, who is ten, begs to go to any varietal of big box store with me because then she can beg that I buy her everything inside the store. Earlier tonight we went to the supermarket in the big box store complex and I caved. I let her get the Gingerbread House Cinnamon Toast Crunch on clearance. I am a sucker for a deal at the big box store. My daughter knows this. It is why she has a discontinued Harry Potter pen projection light from Marshalls, where I went last weekend to pick up a cheap blanket for the dogs.

The big box store in late-stage capitalism America bears similarity to middle age. Time accelerates and slows in perplexing ways, and I buy things that wouldn’t sell a few seasons ago at a lower price even though I struggle to close my chest of drawers. I am old enough to remember a time when it seemed flashy for big box stores to have soaring facades above their entrance not backed by actual levels/floors of the building structure itself. At 43 I am old enough, and moneyed enough, to have tried Botox on my forehead once. It was fine but it dissipated after a few months, and I doubt I’ll do anything like that again. Earlier tonight, in the parking lot by the shopping cart carrels, my daughter asked me why I said aging is a feminist issue. My voice shifted to its ‘spirited steed’ gear and I told her we could talk about that on the drive home. She then commanded I explain the concept in 10 words or less. I said, no.

Aging is a feminist issue because women and girls are subject to pressures on their appearance that are unrealistic, make us feel bad, and consume our time, I said. Aging is part of this, and especially for women, I said. My daughter told me that’s too many words. Fine, I said. I’ll explain it in two words: total crap. She squirreled in the backseat and we kept bickering about aging, feminism, and how many words I am allotted to express my ideas to her about politics. God I love her.

I find that to age out loud is a political statement. It is a statement I am making. I am not afraid of my age. I am proud and lucky to be here.

But it is a special type of lunacy to be in graduate school when time is as comparatively limited as mine. The reality of doing graduate school part-time in middle age while working full-time and doing sandwich generation as a fucking prickled verb looks like:

+ Me completing homework in the car in the parking lot outside of gymnastics practice

+ Me responding to emails from the school at the speed of crawling, from a baby who hasn’t learned to sit up yet

+ Me dashing off portfolio of work for the semester in the lobby of a hospital skilled enough to keep old parents old, rather than dead

I would like to revise my statement that it’s not lunacy, but rather optimism or maybe self-love that keeps me in graduate school. To believe that I can improve for the sake of improving, and to commit to doing it, is a gift. I love becoming a better writer. I’ve got a big box store of a brain full of stories and poems and essays I want to improve. I know time is precious, that it runs out. To acknowledge that and keep going in earnest as myself, this spirit attached to a woman with caregiving and professional responsibilities, is the sacrilege that interests me.

An Open Letter In Advance Of My 20-Year High School Reunion

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary1 Comment

Hi, guys,

Erin here. I’m  self-conscious and nervous excited to see you in a few weeks for our high school reunion. During the past twenty years I have been a human diorama of someone who did not ‘peak too soon.’

Over the years I have grown wrinklier and larger. I take less shit. Given the choice of being tighter or taking less shit, I’d rather take less shit.

I’m grateful for each of us who are healthy and still here. Almost everything I cared about in high school didn’t really matter. It’s a privilege to age.

Cordially,
Erin

Dear Girls, Friendship Is The Best

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary2 Comments

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Dear Girls,

Someday you will get older than you imagined possible. You will begin to imagine the humanity and youth of your parents when they were your age and you thought they were way older. You will begin to look older. If you’re lucky, you won’t care.

Hold on to your friends. The ones you took bad pictures with. The ones you didn’t see for years. New friendships become harder and more rare as you get old. Old friendships, even just for a brief, reminding moment are the best.

But enough of this lofty shit. Have a Coke.

Fondly,

Erin and Christopher

 

Burying An Ex, Or Why I Hate Drugs

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary3 Comments

I nearly died for anorexia twenty years ago. It was stupid but maddeningly complex, and I couldn’t get out. I went to the hospital. I left the hospital. I went to college. I relapsed. I relapsed again. I spent a summer in hell, living with my parents, floating through rooms, speaking to no one. I let the phone ring. Message boards were pretty much my only contact with humanity, if you can call them that.

And then one night I went to a party. I spoke with this charming, funny guy I’d gone to school with earlier. I was sick as hell, but he treated me like I was human. We started flirting and fantasizing about getting married and having kids. We were basically kids. We became boyfriend and girlfriend. He stood by me when I was a pile of immobilized insecurity crying in the bed, terrified about my body and my future. He told me he loved me. I wanted to impress him so badly I ate a real dinner one night on a date, above the screaming voices that had kept me locked in deadly patterns for months.

He died in his twenties. He used drugs, kind of big time. Drugs were never my thing, but I looked away from his unhealthy behaviors and he looked away from mine. I got healthy. I married. I divorced. I found new love. We lost touch.

He died when I was 28 and felt like I was getting my shit figured out. He died when I was on a trip to D.C. and the mentor I idolized asked me to run on her ticket for the next NOW executive officer elections — basically the apotheosis of my dreams at that stage of my North Minneapolis, volunteer-feminist life. I came home with my suitcase on this incredible high and learned this man with the flowered sunglasses and spring in his step was dead. I sat outside and stared at a crack in the sidewalk.

I felt a sorrow I’d never known before. I saw him in dreams. I stayed in bed. I cried. I cried so hard it felt like someone had jammed a cantaloupe in my throat. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know how to grieve an ex-boyfriend in front of a boyfriend, so I shut the door and turned out the lights. Was I an enabler? What would saving him have looked like? I don’t believe you can save people; I learned quite directly that people who tried to “save” me from anorexia failed and our friendship ended. I thought and still think people who are struggling need love and not direction, but it was hard not to second-guess myself.

I attended his funeral by myself, sitting in the back. It’s been almost 10 years, but I still remember what I wore and that I thought I looked hot. It seemed like the least I could do for him. I walked by his casket and saw his embalmed body. I hated, I hated, I fucking hated drugs in that moment. I still hate drugs. I hate them with my whole being. I don’t know if drugs killed him and it’s not really my business. But I know he struggled, and I know I hate drugs.

It is possible to hate things that cause people to suffer, and to not judge people. I hate drugs and still want to decriminalize them; I think locking people up for drugs is a tool for oppressing people of color and preventing people from accessing the care they need. I’m writing about this because I don’t want stigma for anything.

I’m getting old. Thank God I’m getting old. It’s a privilege to get old.

Getting Old And Loving It

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary4 Comments

I turn 36 in a few weeks, and I’m excited.

Aging is cool. It’s the ultimate affirmation of having “made it.”

I have written about loving my first gray hair as a political act, because the whole you’re-old-you’re-done message sucks. It is a privilege to age. I’ve long thought women get prettier as we age; there is something sculptural about the way lines cut a face.

36 feels significant to me because this is literally twice the age at which I thought I might never have another birthday. Today, half my life ago, would have been about the first morning I would ever wake up in the middle of the night to flashlights making sure I wasn’t killing myself, going to the bathroom in front of someone so I couldn’t vomit, and taking a shower observed after my razor was retrieved from the locked cabinet in the back.

You see, both my 18th and 19th birthdays were spent in the hospital because I had been starving myself to death. I think about all the destructive things I did, and all the ways I tormented myself with what I thought was my fatness and unacceptability.

I’m not ashamed that this happened. I’m appalled that society does this to people every day, that gender roles suck as much as they do, that it’s hip to brag about how “good” or “bad” you were with your food or your exercise, that size 00 is a now a thing — like literally, now the size for women to strive for is less than nothing.

I’m significantly larger now than I was before that eating disorder started. And you know what? I am fucking alive and fighting.

As I get ready to go into my later thirties, I’m proud to be alive. I think about loving all of my “imperfections” — including my wrinkles, crows feet, gray hair, C-section scar, cellulite, varicose veins, shoulder scars, and especially the laugh lines.

I remember what it felt like to laugh and cry this hard, to get these lines on my face. The condition of my forehead is intimately related to the number of occasions I’ve had to raise an eyebrow at total bullshit. My stomach and thighs! After so many battles, I am soft, triumphant, and strong enough to run a steep hill.

Loving yourself and your body as it is is truly revolutionary. I’ve spent half of my life on the other side of rock bottom; long enough to learn that the kind of lady I want to be SCREAMS HER AGE, has a belly roll and acknowledges it, and encourages others to do the same.

Loving My First Gray Hair Is Political

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary5 Comments

Yesterday I got my first gray hair. It’s beautiful and light, hugging the soft space to the side of my forehead. I love it.

I have been waiting for this day. I am 35. Gray hair was going to happen. Years ago I made a conscious decision to continue loving myself as I grow older. This is an act of self-preservation, and defiance.

This is about my feminism — hatred of women is intimately tied in with dangerous, racist, and unrealistic expectations of beauty that we are expected to internalize. We must reject that as much as we can (real talk: this can be a day-by-day thing, and feeling like crap about your looks doesn’t mean you don’t get to be a feminist).

This is personal — I almost died of anorexia. Gray hair is a victory! I am fortunate I made it to my 18th, 19th, and 20th birthdays. I am both grateful and proud I did, because damn that was a lot of work. My personal interest extends beyond having overcome nearly lethal negative self-talk related to my appearance; I’ve reached an age where too many peers have died for no good reason. I’m lucky to get old.

This is about parenting, too — my daughter deserves the example of a woman who dares to look like herself and love herself.

As a social justice activist and organizer, I struggle with the decision to write posts like this sometimes. Today yet another video has surfaced of a Black person losing their life to police violence; his name was Sam DuBose. Racism is one of the most pressing issues of our time.

And so, I ask myself:

Is it indulgent to be introspective about the first freaking gray hair on my head at a time when people are dying, when politicians fail to acknowledge that Black lives matter, when terrorists are targeting abortion providers because they dare to help women?

I struggle with this question, and yet this post speaks for itself: Here I am, writing. My firm belief is that self-love is radical. You cannot fight effectively for equality, dignity, or justice when you are unable to treat yourself with respect. You cannot find the courage to accept difference in others if you’re unwilling to accommodate difference for yourself. Loving yourself is not ego or dominance (those are rooted in insecurity, after all); loving yourself is about compassion. Best part? Inner compassion is compassion, and both are contagious.

So, when I embrace my gray hair, what I am also saying is that we should embrace ourselves and one another as we are. We must treat our fragile lives with respect and love, and break every convention necessary.

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Aging In Place

On By erintothemaxIn Commentary1 Comment

The truth is that older women are more beautiful than conventional wisdom would have you admit. Time makes the contours of a face more pronounced. For many, it becomes easier to grow the gorgeous lumps defining the marble statues of idealized women in museums. Veins on hands begin to tell stories with or without a pen.

Most of all it’s the sheer fucking luckiness of having made it, of being alive, that makes older people, and especially older women, more beautiful.

This is convenient for me to say at age 34, when I have become an unmistakable target of the drug store creams to fix the nature. It is growing increasingly clear on Facebook — where pictures replace shared experiences as the currency of relationships — that some of my age peers have begun to use plastic surgery. Seeing this is a struggle.

Like everyone else, I have grown up in a culture where we devalue women who don’t live up to impossible ideals, and then dismiss the women who take extraordinary measures to do so as shallow. Aging presents one of these most classic damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenarios, and from a modern feminist point of view that honors the individual lived experiences of women rather than attempting however earnestly to provide a blueprint that everyone must follow to sidestep oppression, I think I’m not supposed to care about another woman’s plastic surgery. And really, as it pertains to that other woman, I don’t. Making value judgements about someone else’s beauty regimen is one bad jam.

The struggle comes in elsewhere. Like everyone else, I have grown up in a culture where women are encouraged to compare themselves to one another in superficial ways. So seeing all this plastic surgery makes me wonder: Yes, I’m comfortable aging in place today, but will I be tomorrow? I would like to think that when gray hair comes I’ll embrace it. But I say that a time when my appearance gives me no real reason to fear being written off as yesterday’s news. So I am sitting with this ambivalence and uncertainty and honoring it.

The longer we live, the more we know people who have died. If you have made it to a point when aging is considered a concern for your age group, it means that you are supremely fortunate. I wonder why that keeps getting lost, especially for women, and what we can do about it.