Midlife is the age of mastery

Rage against the decline narrative

Clockwise from top L: Kim Gordon and her band, Jenn Romolini’s new book, interior designer Tess Bethune, composer, cellist and performer Zoë Keating

Let’s go ahead and assume that the topics we tend to worry about are actually social constructs. Let’s also go ahead and assume that much of what’s presented as fact actually originated long ago in someone else’s agenda or biases, in order to instill fear, control and/or to make money. And then let’s recognize that the things we go on to believe anyway are the worst things, because isn’t that just human nature to bow to our lesser angels?

It isn’t exactly news that American girls and women are trained to monitor and parse our deficits, to continuously narrate our decline, and to begin bemoaning how our best years are behind us, even when we are young. But if you look at the numbers and also pretend you’re a man, it doesn’t even make practical sense. A few years to be new, a few years to be a little kid, a few years to be a tween, a few years to be a teenager, ten years to be young, ten years to be under 40 and then … that’s it? I hate that math. That math sucks.

We don’t fall out of life 15 years after our brains have finished forming. But this is the construct we’re accepting when we piss and moan about getting older. This is the construct we accept when we refer to 40 as “old.” And this is also the construct we accept when we use “young” as shorthand for good, relevant, interesting and “old” as shorthand for bad, irrelevant, over.

I, like you possibly, get pretty tired of hollow rah-rah middle age you-go-girl stuff. This is not that, I hope. Recently I found myself practically surrounded by women fully in their age of mastery. Mastery isn’t a vibe or a catchy t-shirt, it’s a demonstration, an example. These women are all over 40, one who is 70. Maybe mastery is simply the gift we receive for never fully accepting the constructs we’re handed.

The mastery I’m talking about is not perfection, which is of course impossible, but rather the coming together of skills, experience, temperament, perspective, and curiosity. It’s the loss of a fear of failure (or success for that matter), and it’s the earned resiliency of being kicked around by life, fielding rejection and disappointment, and knowing you can pick yourself back up and learn from it and get better — just watch me, we say like the 9-year-olds we used to be, jumping our bikes over dirt hills or racing each other to made-up finish lines, just watch me go ahead and do it.

The mastery I’m talking about is hard-core, no-nonsense, feel-it-in-your-bones, I-don’t-need-your-praise know-how. But also I’m-not-afraid-to-be-vulnerable or yup-you-just-watched-me-mess-up-just-now ownership. Getting older is knowing that very few things are the end of the world. Regardless of gender, I think many of us tend to practice self-protective and self-deprecating middle age deflection, dad bods and rad dads, wine moms and “girls” trips, as a way to undercut our fears about age by seeming a-ok with it all too. Mastery recognizes the realities of age but pushes back against the negative assumptions that come packaged with it.

I saw Kim Gordon (admittedly north of middle-age) on the first stop of her tour. I need you to know that I was never cool enough to listen to Sonic Youth and I didn’t know Kim Gordon’s work really but I was like, she’s going to be in town at a small venue and I want to see a 70-year-old woman who is so fucking cool being that fucking cool in person. What I noticed first: Her band is very young and isn’t that also the template for not just long-term creativity but for life? To not assume you know better simply because you’re older? To not just teach but to learn? (Her band includes guitarist Sarah Register, bassist Camilla Charlesworth, and drummer Madi Vogt.)

At the show one of my friends grabbed her drink and said “I’m going up front” so matter of factly that I decided I would go too, a thing I felt like I had very much aged out of a while ago. I stood there, feet from the stage, thinking about the upward trajectory of life and art, if you choose it. To not be defined by the worst, shittiest things that have happened to you. And also: to witness the men in the crowd, probably around my age, waiting for the quiet moments to shout “KIM GORDON!” and “KIM!” and the cringe-inducing “YOU’RE HOT!” while she reacted not at all. And when I say “not at all” I mean I was close enough and couldn’t see even the slightest facial flinch that would indicate a sound of any sort had happened, which then became a full body feeling. Like, maybe that sound hadn’t happened? That, my friends, is mastery.

A couple of days before the eclipse I went to see my friend Zoë Keating perform at the Unitarian Universalist church in town. We became friends the old fashioned way, by following each other on Twitter back when the character limit was 140 and also back when it was called Twitter. As we were just coming out of lockdown she introduced herself at a local coffee place where we both had been sitting alone. I’m so grateful for our fledgling friendship, someone I can dig into conversations with about dating, navigating creative careers (she was the first and only person to congratulate me on being fired from a project last year and I’ll never forget it), and to understand what it’s like to live here given those first two things.

Seeing her play that night, while my friend Meg and I kept clutching each others’ arms over the beauty of the projections and the music paired together, is an experience I won’t forget. Burlington is a small place, the smallest, but a night like that night, when people from all over the country were descending on our little state for the eclipse and still took time to witness art, made me fall a little bit back in love with it again.

Have you ever been this cool? Me neither

I spent the next day decorating my bedroom, which doesn’t that sound very teenager of me? It was. I was collaging magazine pages and prints and postcards on the walls like I had when my dad covered an entire wall of my childhood bedroom with cork board. I’ve given up on my security deposit already, the privilege of adulthood, and I just want to like where I live. So I was lying on the floor, on my stomach sifting pages around and then on my back staring out the window at the clouds expanding and drifting and the birds gathering and swooping while I daydreamed and listened to Zoë’s music, a besotted new fan.

I was in Los Angeles just before those two shows. I had arrived with almost no plans and then filled my time up quickly and spontaneously. The women I spent time with were all over 40, our conversations a compressed timeline of how we come to mastery — surviving grief, failure and disappointment; being thrown for physical and parenting and professional loops; identifying happiness and rightness-of-place.

Those drinks and coffees and lunches included time with

Rebecca Woolf

who I met in person for the first time, and we talked rapid-fire about dating and sex and writing and raising kids. I went out to dinner and drinks with my great pal

jenn romolini

and we literally could not shut the hell up about writing and still wanting more from life. She also let me borrow a galley of her incredible new book AMBITION MONSTER while I was in town and I read it start to finish before I left. The leap from her first book to this one is a master class in what mastery actually looks like in black and white. The earned confidence of neither deflecting nor self-pitying, the muscular momentum of a tight and perfect edit, and the precise unlayering of a life that feels like it was performed by a clear-eyed and big-hearted surgeon. (but, hey, more to come on this book soon!)

FUZZY COAT DORK CLUB with Jenn Romolini

I had coffee and breakfast with my former co-worker and long ago fleeting business partner (I still find it adorable how we decided in our twenties to start a clothing line and even flew to LA to check out the garment district, feeling like we “really couldn’t fail” and then did exactly nothing more about it), Tess Bethune. She wisely left advertising a while ago and is now an in-demand interior designer. We talked about how she had moved away to Atlanta and realized while she was there that she had already found her right place — Los Angeles — and moved back. Isn’t this what getting older is? Experimenting, trial-and-error-ing, and not believing that once you do something that it can’t be undone? You can move back. You can quit a job. You can leave. And you can start.

Tess and I had seen each other briefly at occasional reunions of our old ad agency, but this was the first time in years, maybe decades, that we had had a real conversation about life and work and our trajectories. As I get older I’ve realized that I genuinely love hearing people’s stories, the details of how they navigate their lives, and how they change them, too.

My friend Tess XOXOXO

Custom channeled leather sofa designed by Tess Bethune

I don’t only want to give the impression that mastery is limited to creativity or to work or to women with a public profile. I can point in every direction at women I know who are in their mastery era. The task before us, I believe, is to remain curious above all else. I’ve written previously about how the lack of curiosity can kill a marriage dead. It’s just as effective as infidelity, it’ll only take longer and be a lot more boring. I still believe this to be true in any relationship, including friendships, but I believe it’s true most of all when it comes to the relationship we have with ourselves. If we are no longer curious, then we are already dying.

My aunt, who is somehow turning 70 this year, is one of the most curious people I know. I’ve realized just over the past year how it’s one of my most favorite qualities of hers. She’s recently returned to painting, regularly goes to art museums, and joined a Philosophy Club in her Rhode Island town that meets regularly. She isn’t a college graduate and none of us come from money, but she is one of the most educated people I know, because of how she lives her life.

My mother is still showing dogs and judging dog shows all over the world. In my opinion she’s been practicing professional mastery for most of my life. I learned from her that one’s professional name and reputation is everything, which I’m sure is why she never returned to her maiden name after my parents got divorced, although I suspect she probably wanted to. Your name is your name and when you work hard to build it you fight to keep it, too.

If you are not objectively noticing your own mastery, you’re selling yourself short. Take time to sit down with yourself and look back over the course of your life, the things you do every day, and write them down, as if you were creating a portfolio to show others. It’s time to own what you are proficient at, what you enjoy, and what you still want to do, what you want to get better at. As we get older the reality and the hope is that we’ve learned from our mistakes or our misplaced belief in inaccurate narratives. We’ve course-corrected many, many times. We’ve kept searching. We’ve kept doing. We’ve kept getting better. So here we are: We are not done. Don’t be done.

I know as a writer there is no such thing as true mastery. I do know I’m the best writer I’ve ever been. Does that mean I’m a great or even a good writer? No. I just know where I started and where I am now. I have complete faith that as long as my brain and hands continue to work, I will only get better. That’s its own sense of mastery, too. Coming into your own confidence but perhaps having a sense of your limits too.

I know it’s complicated, that it can sometimes feel impossible to even breathe amidst the suffocating realities of ageism and misogyny. And of course getting older comes with real challenges. I’m not intending to dismiss genuine struggles and unwanted or unasked-for-detours: layoffs or illness, divorce or disability, or any of a number of things that happen to us that knock us sideways.

But we know those are big things. We deal with them like the big things that they are. What I’m talking about is the small and slow chipping away of the self, the assumption of loss and the acceptance of not being wanted and of not being good anymore.

Speaking of big things, I’ve mentioned this previously and I continue to think about it often — I don’t know about you, but death feels like it’s absolutely everywhere. I initially chalked this up to age, this is simply what happens. But I’m losing count of the people I know either personally or one or two degrees removed who are my age or younger (in some cases much younger) who have died suddenly. Some of these deaths have been so tragic that I need another word for it, something bigger. They’ve been bizarre, sweeping, unfathomable. All of this feels extremely not normal. It’s as if the darkness of the world, of ceaseless and spreading wars, of the pervasive stress and hopelessness of the past many years are coming home to roost. I find it alarming, but I also find it to be a wake-up call.

I’ve made it a regular practice to ask myself, if I died tomorrow would I be happy with the life that I had led? Was it a good life? Did I do what I wanted to do? Which I guess are roundabout ways of asking: Did I live enough of a life while I was here?

By every measure I’ve surprised myself by being able to answer yes. It hasn’t been easy to get to this place, and I wasn’t there even just last year. And it doesn’t mean there isn’t more — a whole hell of a lot more — that I want to do. But it does mean I feel an odd sense of peace in the face of this pervasiveness darkness, even the mundane everyday darkness of ageism and occasional self-loathing. I can appreciate that the life I’ve lived hasn’t been exactly what I’d call planned, but it certainly has been a good life, a fun life mostly. And now I get to be extra curious about the rest of it. I hope I get a lot of it to be curious about.

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RELATED READING

• One of my recent favorites on

the braid

that I related to so hard: first love is a haunted house
• A fantastic piece that highlighted what I had taken for granted in watching these shows growing up: The Quiet Feminism of Norman Lear’s Middle-Aged Women by Rhonda Garelick in The New York Times [gifted link] and this related piece by Esther Zuckerman [also NYT, also gifted link]: Remembering Norman Lear’s Most Controversial Episode: A two-part November 1972 episode of “Maude,” in which the title character decides to get an abortion, still seems radical, particularly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
• I love this idea. A lot. I Wasn't Sure How To Celebrate Turning 70. Then I Sent An Email That Changed My Entire Year. by Megan Vered
• A Tess Bethune project that I’m currently dreaming about even though I thought I had sworn off home ownership forever: Magical 1920's Spanish Compound in Venice Walk Streets in Dwell.

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You can find my books here. You can find more of my writing here. You can find me over on Instagram.