Getting old is a process that creeps up and takes you unawares. I’m now 48 and can say with certainty that 45 was the year I became old (i.e., switched adjectives from “young” to “old” in reference to myself). Since “old” is an adjective few prefer to describe themselves as, it’s often up to the environment to give you this label before you reluctantly accept it. And by “reluctant” I mean putting off this label for a long time and taking nearly a scientific approach corroborated by evidence in order to finally apply it. If you have a family with kids you may get called old and laugh it off, but then you wake up the next morning with this amazing pain in your upper back and remember the words a friend told you years ago: “the body wasn’t made to live past 40.”

The path to growing old is replete with denial and cognitive dissonance, the more so if you lived youth with any number of crutches relating to your own looks or on youth itself (as ego boosters for uncomfortable feelings). In other words, getting old can be painful in itself from a psychological standpoint, especially when you finally must let go of the crutches. In my teenage years I was told I was “good looking” at various times and while my condition precluded me from a vibrant social life and the partners/girlfriends that come with that, I always convinced myself that any social rejection encountered was not because I was conventionally ugly. Of course this was always a near-useless sop to my main issue of believing something is inherently wrong with me, something that is obvious in my appearance but cannot be quite pinned down and understood.

An example of this denial and cognitive dissonance is being simply unaware (or trying to be unaware) that you’re old – you cannot see what others see in you. If I see a pretty girl in the street I will still notice her and have some of the same feelings now as when I was 20. From my own point of view, I might as well be 20 and not the middle-aged man I am now. This is where life sometimes plays its tricks, and to make matters worse, I sometimes catch myself denying my own age in order to shore up my own sense of being attractive. Some might argue that this kind of denial is in fact healthy and the hallmark of “staying young” but it’s important to recognize the bullshit you feed yourself. In my mind, there’s nothing worse than being like this guy.

As a young person I never held anything against older people and even liked working with them, but at this stage I’m noticing there is a fair amount of young people out there who indeed hold something against older people, or at least like to mock them for it. I’ve never understood this hypocrisy – do they not realize that they will become old one day? How will they cope with their own aging bodies and minds? Applying for jobs is also harder for me now and in my rejections I’ve strongly suspected a case or two of ageism.

The gulf between my young and old selves

But there is another aspect of how old age affects my self-perception and condition. Now it’s obvious that when I was younger, other people were simply more interested in me. Today I’m no longer asked about my opinions on anything and I’m left alone in my corner of the party. As I was always a socially avoidant person and never had the skills or motivation to initiate contact with others, this lack of interest leaves me more isolated. As mentioned above, it seems I had no problem finding a job in a company whereas now this is practically unimaginable. The jobs I like (web design) are populated mostly by people in their 20s and 30s.

Today I understand better the phrase, “over the hill.” It means you’ve spent half your life marching up the hill, have reached the peak, and are now starting the descent. It must be admitted however that there is one shining advantage to being old. I can cope much better with the traditional issues that plague me and I can simply see them in a much clearer light. I can also write about them (somewhat coherently) in this blog. That’s something that was literally impossible in my younger years, and I marvel at how unable I used to be at seeing my own problems and at dealing with them.

Simply put, I recognize today that my main problem (which has contributed to early cases of depression, anxiety, and social isolation) is that I carry extremely distressing feelings inside of me, feelings in connection with others (i.e., associated with social interactions where I fear rejection), and that I’ve been suppressing or denying these feelings my entire life.

Therapy for me today would simply consist of being in the intolerable state of allowing these feelings to envelop me and endure the pain while somehow “digesting” them properly (I guess). These feelings originated in my early life while being among my parents and caregivers (who were all uniformly unaffectionate and even abusive), as well as from the culture I grew up in, which was mainly shame based and sought to humiliate children for misbehaving.

So, I am where I am today with “undigested” feelings mainly because whenever I approached these feelings in my mind, a giant cloud of confusion (more like a miasma) would spring up and prevent me from approaching further. In my old age, this cloud has started to clear and I’m left more and more with the pain that was there all along. This, to my mind, is the single greatest benefit of old age.