Ageing

Time is passing, and we are all getting older.

I’ve noticed this for years, but recently there is something more urgent, swifter and heavier in the awareness than there has perhaps been before. My friends and I are moving into middle age. Many of us have children. Many of us don’t. Either way, we are not the youngest ones anymore. There is a younger, newer generation behind us, contributing their time and effort to the great, impossibly intricate series of systems otherwise known as Planet Earth. We are somewhere in the middle, with our parents and even grandparents still alive on one side of us, but with our children and even their children on the other.

I have often felt like I was running out of time. I had an ambition as a child to become the youngest published author in England. I owned a series of books about various garden vegetables written by a child who was about ten years old, and I remember reading them and thinking, Wouldn’t it be amazing to have books by Elloa Barbour - and to do it aged 9? Two ambitions became conflated – the desire to write, and the desire to be the “best” by being a writer younger than anyone else.

When my first year of double digits came and went, it felt like a confirmation of a conclusion that I had been coming to for a few years already – that I wouldn’t win at this thing called life. I spent each season of my childhood comparing myself to people out there who were all doing much better than me, who were further along at my age than I was. Life, I realised, was a great competition, and I would never come first.

I spent a lot of time feeling like I was already too old. I thought I was too old to learn to dance at 11. I didn’t get into the school I wanted to at 12. I was too old to become fluent in another language at 16. I wasn’t featured in the magazines I loved, magazines full of other 13 and 14 and 15-year-olds. I nearly became a model, but was told to come back in a couple of years. By the time I was old enough to go back, I was too destroyed to even dare to dream of modelling again. Over and over again, life dealt a series of Top Trumps, constantly outbidding me. I became a twenty-year-old who hadn’t travelled South-East Asia, then a twenty-five-year-old who wasn’t on the career ladder (because I’d done this crazy thing called “Following my heart” and had quit my good job with good prospects to study Shamanism in California), then a thirty-year-old who, although I was married, had no real prospects financially or career wise. Every step of my life, someone somewhere has gotten there sooner, has achieved greater things than I could dare to dream of, has left me spluttering in the dust.

I have based a lot of my sense of self-worth on this competition, over the years. (Ha: ya think?!) I’ve been comforted by the knowledge that I’ve had another battle going on behind the scenes, one which broke me at 18 and required me to tread the simple path of recovery in order to put myself back together and then, once I felt relatively back together, to live according to a set of simple spiritual principles.

Maybe that’s part of the reason why I’m so fucking tired right now. Because many of those principles, I have set down by the side of the road as I quested, in the last couple of years, to find myself again, to figure out who I am without all of the frameworks and maps I had picked up along the way. Without my husband. Who is Elloa if she isn’t reading A Course in Miracles, if she doesn’t go to 12 step meetings, if she burns her old life to the ground and steps into a new one? I have discovered, with some dismay and some relief, that to some extent, for some of the time, what I have suspected about myself is indeed true – I do indeed need to find a way to live that runs counter to my factory settings, because if I let that programming run the show, I end up deeply depleted, despondent, angry, depressed and even in a place where I am in so much pain that I have noticed on two occasions the fantasy of ending my life creep into my consciousness.

In other words, the base set point for my mental health and my nervous system functioning is pretty low.

Or perhaps I’m going through some sort of transformation, one that I do not yet fully understand. There are many different ways to make sense of our lives. It’s all a matter of interpretation.

On Friday last week and Monday of this, I interviewed a group of young people for an internship position. Internships weren’t really much of a thing in my day. You didn’t aim to find unpaid work for three or six months; the job market was totally different then, so you didn’t need to. I understand that it’s much harder these days, and internships have very much become a ‘thing’ – something I’m not entirely sure how comfortable I am with.

The interviews with these amazing young graduates shifted my perspective in one fell swoop. I realised that am no longer simply trying to make a name for myself in my chosen career. Now, with eyes that cannot unsee, I get that I am also the generation that is holding hands with our elders on one side, and the young, up-and-coming rising stars on the other. I can see them as a threat to my own success, or I can choose to build them up, to stoop down and let them use my shoulders as a springboard for their own growth and progression in the Game of Life.

I still often feel like I’m running out of time. I feel taunted by my mortality, by the ticking of the clock and the rapid, even pace of the sand making its way from the top of the sand timer to the bottom. Days, weeks, months, years. Constant questions about whether I’m using my time well enough. Will I regret the things I didn’t dare to do? Will I regret the things I did? What should I do with my life?

Meanwhile all around me, everyone is getting older. Celebrities once in their prime are now playing people in their old age. Tom Hanks is no longer the kid in Big, or Forrest Gump; he is now Mister Rogers. Jane Fonda isn’t the uber-hot aerobics instructor my mum and I used to huff and puff along to in our living room; she is now the gorgeous older goddess in the Book Club, who meets her lover from forty years ago. Roald Dahl is gone; Sophie Dahl, his daughter, now has her own children.

I can feel myself grieving the many wasted hours that I’ve spent ruminating but not taking action, but I realise that I don’t need to prematurely regret how I’ve lived my life. There is so much life still to be lived. I am still in the summer of my life, but I can see autumn on the horizon. I want to use it well. So please, if there is some sort of Muse or God out there, show me how to use it well and help me get off my arse so I can make the things happen that I really, truly want to make happen while I’m here.

Things like writing a bloody book.