I'm Older. I'm Not Finished

With thanks to our member, Carole Crawford, for this article.

I'm going to admit something that, as a therapist, I perhaps feel I should have worked through by now.

Ageing bothers me.

I can be getting on with my day, catch sight of myself in a shop window or a mirror, and have this strange moment of recognition and non-recognition at the same time.

Is that me?

Who I see is not who I feel like.

And I can berate myself for that.

How can this be? You know how old you are.

Of course I know.

But knowing my age and feeling my age seem to be two entirely different things.

There is an incongruence between the woman I see and the woman I experience myself to be.

Sometimes, despite knowing perfectly well that I am older, I still imagine that when people look at me they see the young woman I feel myself to be.

Why does that matter?

Perhaps because being seen is not the same as simply being looked at.

The strange business of time

There is something else I have noticed about myself which makes me smile.

When I haven't seen someone for a long time, I can be genuinely surprised by how much they have aged.

The same thing happens when I see people in the media whom I haven't encountered for years. I see them and think, Oh! They look older.

They look fuller in the face or figure. Their hair has changed. Their face has changed.

And for a moment I am surprised.

As though, somewhere in my mind, I had imagined that time had stood still for them.

Of course it hasn't.

And then I realise that perhaps, in some strange way, I have imagined that it has stood still for me too.

Until the mirror tells me otherwise.

Will they see me?

Perhaps this is where my real fear about ageing lies.

Not simply in getting older.

But in being seen as older.

Will people look at my age before they look at me?

Will they see my experience, or will they see a number?

I have wondered:

Have I left it too late?

Am I still relevant?

Will I be bypassed?

Will someone look at my age and decide there is no point investing in me?

These questions can feel particularly uncomfortable when you are a therapist. We spend our professional lives talking about the value of experience, reflection, resilience and self-awareness.

And I believe those things have value.

But I know we live in a culture that can be much more comfortable with the idea of older men being experienced than older women being visible.

And I am a woman of colour too.

That matters to me, not because I want to make assumptions about how every woman of colour experiences ageing, but because none of us ages outside the identities we inhabit.

I have lived my life as a woman, a woman of colour, a professional, a mother and now an older woman.

Those identities don't take turns.

They arrive together.

So when I wonder whether I will still be seen, I am asking something bigger than whether someone notices my age.

What do they see when they look at me?

The therapist gets older too

I began my first specialist volunteering and training more than twenty years ago.

Twenty years.

Sometimes that fact surprises me almost as much as my reflection does.

I have accumulated experience, knowledge, mistakes, successes, losses and stories. My professional life has continued to evolve, and I am still training and developing my therapeutic practice.

There is something almost rebellious about that.

Not because I am trying to prove that I am still young enough to belong.

Quite the opposite.

I am learning because I am still interested.

That distinction matters.

I have never really been very good at accepting the idea that something is simply “not for me” because it is unfamiliar or because I have reached a particular stage of life.

I have noticed the same instinct in my therapeutic work.

A client may arrive wanting me to tell them what their relationship means, what their partner's behaviour means, what they should do.

But sometimes the most important thing is not giving them the answer.

I remember one client who repeatedly wanted me to tell her what her boyfriend meant by his behaviour. Whenever I reflected the question back to her and invited her to consider what she thought, she would close her eyes and say, “It's too much.”

I became less interested in answering her question and more interested in what happened when she had to sit with not knowing.

That is something I have learnt to value in therapy: the space between the question and the answer.

Perhaps ageing is asking me to occupy that same space myself.

I don't know exactly what this next stage means.

I don't know whether every opportunity I want will still be available to me.

I don't know how other people see me.

But I don't want to rush in and fill that uncertainty with a conclusion that says:

You're too old now.

Experience without becoming fixed

There is another danger that comes with experience.

We can begin to think we know.

We recognise patterns. We have seen certain situations before. We can anticipate where a story might go.

But the person sitting in front of us is never a previous client.

Their story belongs to them.

Younger clients have taught me this repeatedly. Their worlds can be very different from the one I entered as a young woman. Their language, relationships, technology, expectations and understanding of identity may be unfamiliar to me.

My experience doesn't entitle me to assume I understand their world.

It gives me a responsibility to remain curious about it.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of ageing professionally.

The longer I work, the more comfortable I become with saying:

I don't know. Tell me.

Wisdom isn't certainty.

Sometimes wisdom is knowing when not to assume.

The thread that has never changed

And then there is music.

And dance.

They are difficult to explain in terms of ageing because they aren't things I do to keep myself young.

They aren't strategies.

They aren't an attempt to hold on to youth.

They are simply me.

Music and dance have been part of me for as long as I can remember. They are one of the connecting threads running through my life, almost like a continuous piece of string that has remained there while everything else has changed.

Before I was a therapist, before I was a mother, before I understood anything about professional identity, there was music.

There was movement.

There was rhythm.

There was the body responding to something before the mind had found words for it.

And it is still there.

That matters because perhaps ageing isn't only about what changes.

It is also about recognising what doesn't.

There are parts of us that remain astonishingly continuous.

The things that make us laugh.

The music that moves us.

The way we dance when nobody is watching.

The questions we keep asking.

The things we have always been curious about.

These are threads of identity.

They remind us that although we are changing, we are not becoming strangers to ourselves.

The girl is still here

Sometimes I think about the girl I was.

I don't want to go back to being her.

She didn't know what I know now.

She hadn't experienced the losses, responsibilities and complexities that life would bring. She couldn't have imagined the woman she would become.

But I don't want to lose her either.

She still has something to teach me.

Her curiosity.

Her imagination.

Her capacity for joy.

Her belief that there might be something extraordinary just around the corner.

Her fire.

And alongside her is another woman now.

A woman who has lived.

A woman who knows that people are complicated and that life rarely follows the plan.

A woman who has discovered that vulnerability can coexist with strength.

A woman who knows that surviving something doesn't necessarily mean it didn't hurt.

A woman who has become more comfortable with complexity.

A woman who is still learning.

Perhaps ageing isn't about replacing the girl with the woman.

Perhaps it is about bringing them together.

The fear and the fire

So, have I made peace with ageing?

Not entirely.

I still catch my reflection and experience that strange moment when the face I see doesn't match the person I feel myself to be.

I still wonder whether I have left things too late.

I still wonder whether people will see my age before they see me.

But there is something else.

I still have a fire.

I have things I want to do.

I want to learn.

I want to create.

I want to contribute.

I want to keep developing professionally.

I want to make things happen.

And I think that is what makes ageing such an interesting psychological experience.

Sometimes the fear isn't really:

I am getting older.

It is:

What if I run out of time before I have finished becoming?

That question has changed how I think about my clients too.

Perhaps the person who comes to us saying they are struggling with retirement isn't only grieving a job.

Perhaps they are asking:

Who am I now?

The person whose children have left home may not simply be experiencing an empty nest.

They may be wondering:

Who am I when I am no longer needed in the same way?

The person distressed by their changing body may not simply dislike what they see in the mirror.

They may be asking:

Will anyone still see me?

And perhaps the older client sitting opposite us isn't asking us to help them accept ageing.

Perhaps they are asking us to help them discover what is still possible.

I'm older. I'm not finished.

I don't think I need to pretend that ageing doesn't frighten me.

Perhaps I need to become more curious about the fear.

What is it really telling me?

That I don't want to disappear.

That I still want to be seen.

That I still have a sense of possibility.

That there are things I haven't done.

That there are parts of myself I am still discovering.

Maybe that isn't a failure to accept ageing.

Maybe it is evidence that I am still alive to my own life.

I am older.

I am not the woman I was at twenty.

Thank goodness.

But I am also not prepared to become smaller simply because the number has grown.

The girl is still here.

The music is still here.

The movement is still here.

The fire is still here.

And alongside all of it is a woman who has lived enough to know that becoming doesn't have an expiry date.

We don't have to be young to be becoming.

I am older.

I am not finished.