how terrifying, to be aging and girl. at 18 i was told by men that i was “the perfect age,” and i still thought it was a compliment. is it because at 20 i figured out how sharp those words were. i felt old at 21, felt like if grey hairs came and my spine cracked i was done for. how scary. i am reminded constantly by “realistic” ideas in fantasy novels that i should have five kids.
my life feels short. like it is squeezed into my twenties. like at 30 i become ghost, just another mother or hard worker or both, just another background character. like if i am not settled and making a difference by 27 i should just give up already. is this something men feel? like a clock is painted on their back, one hand warning: your beauty is something you are valued for and it is something you cannot get back.
and why was i only beautiful, i wonder, at 18 on a riverbank. i’m told often my childish face is a blessing. that i shouldn’t want to look older. one told me i was a trap falling: “you look young but you’re not” he said to me, “it kind of led me on”. am i not young?
maybe i am wrong. maybe it’s just how we all feel, getting old, like time is slipping from us. maybe men do worry that they will be alone forever if they don’t settle by thirty, maybe it’s even because they think they’ll turn ugly. maybe we all squish our lives into that incredibly young decade. what do i know. i’m still learning.
I’m almost 25 and I’ve been feeling this a lot lately.
As a 48 year old lesbian, I offer my perspective on aging, and you all can take it or leave it.
Our understanding of our own aging is very much conditioned by the priorities of straight men, who in the aggregate understand beauty and femininity, indeed women in general, in literally superficial terms. Most of the ads you see for anti-aging products, for instance, focus on its *visible* symptoms: graying hair, wrinkling skin or discolored skin, sagging breasts, changes in body shape, etc. These are the symptoms of female aging that men perceive, and they are the ones that the cosmetics and the larger anti-aging industry therefore target. (Men do have their own anxieties about visibly aging, mostly related to hair loss and body shape; but they are not, for instance, generally terrified by the appearance of wrinkles, unless they work in the entertainment industry.)
But aging is not just something that happens to everyone else’s perception of you; it is something that happens in your own body, at levels deeper than anyone else (especially anyone male) is ever likely to perceive. From my POV the really important thing about aging is how you feel. Your body is where you live; it is for you. Aging is inevitable, but it can to some extent be intentional, in that you can (to some extent; all this is limited by the amount of time and money available to you and the healthfulness of the environments you have lived in and how you did in the DNA lottery) choose to do things that will help preserve the things about your body that make YOU happy to be living there–things like flexibility, strength, and the smooth functioning of your major organs. Generally, if you’re healthy, you don’t think about any of this stuff at 18 or 25; but when you are 40, you will start to take more of an interest as you come to understand how important all of this is to your own ability to enjoy life.
So that sucks, as does menopause, which is the unacknowledged referent of a lot of cultural anxieties about female aging. But the point I want to make is: one of the worst things that the phenomenon described so evocatively by the OP does to girls and young women is to make them so anxious about their own bodies that they are unable to enjoy and appreciate their youth while they have it. And that is theft. It really is. I miss youth, but even more do I regret the fact that when I was young I was so fucked up by cultural obsessions about female beauty that I was unable to fully enjoy the body that I had then. I did not appreciate its many excellent qualities, and it was a long time before I allowed myself to accept and act on its desires. At a time when I was beautiful, I thought I was fat and ugly, and that because no man would ever find me attractive, I was doomed to loneliness and isolation. After I met Mrs. Plaidder, her conviction of my beauty eventually passed into me. As a result, I enjoyed my life in general a lot more in my 30s than I did in my teens. I’ve enjoyed my 40s more too, apart from the cancer and the current catastrophe. Age does actually bring experience and knowledge and, to those able to profit from it, wisdom. You do gain, even as you lose.
Catullus, yelling in Latin verse at his lover Lesbia, asks her venomously, “cui videberis bella?” By whom will you be seen to be beautiful? It’s a question that still poisons our sense of self and our understanding of our own possibilities. By myself, asshole, she should have replied; and so may we all, at any age.
Long post, but – my three cents. At 67 I don’t feel old and/or ugly. In fact, I really enjoy myself. I’m happy with how I look – because I got over the brainwashed way we see ourselves. As plaidadder said: “even more do I regret the fact that when I was young I was so fucked up by cultural obsessions about female beauty that I was unable to fully enjoy the body that I had then.” BTW, plaidadder – you are STILL beautiful, trust me. The American cult of youth and they way of evaluating women’s beauty as inevitably liked to age is fucking TOXIC. I now live in South America; was complemented ( in a non-creepy way) by two guys less than half my age last week, grey hair & all. Love it here.
You will never feel as old as you do in your late 20s to late 30s. Seriously. Western culture makes the passing of youth into a tragic death and that’s – so fucking sad. Once it has passed and you can no longer reasonably think of yourself as young, no matter how desperately you try to hang on to it – you find yourself in a whole other country, you realize that you’ve lived on one side of a mountain all your life and told there’s nothing beyond it only to discover that there is, in fact, an entire world on the other side. Don’t believe the lie.
I enjoyed this post. I also lacked the clarity on culturally imposed bullshit to enjoy my youth and beauty, and at 47, I have good days and bad days. I’m looking forward to one day not giving a flying fuck what anyone thinks about my body. I’m embarrassed and a little ashamed to report that I’m not there yet.
What I like about getting older (I’m 46.) is that the less “attractive” I become, the more I get to fill that space with things I choose. The more invisible I become as a person with whom someone may wish to have sex, the more I can just wear clothes that I like and think are pretty, the more I feel free to let my hair have no real “style.” I wear flat shoes that I think are cute. I wear the same earrings I’ve worn for twenty years. I get to choose to present myself as eccentric or artsy or sloppy or outdated without much commentary from the peanut gallery, because nobody is concerned any more with my fuckablity. And without the constant input, I have more room for my own opinion.
Not that I’m there all the time, but I’m sure there a hell of a lot more often than when I was in my twenties.
One of the things I love best about tumblr (and there are many, many things) is that here I have found a circle of middle-aged and older women who are kind and wise and brave, and are willing to share their experiences and to mentor younger women through aspects of aging. I’m 40, and I feel like I am beginning a journey into a new phase of life with a tribe of women beside me. It is so hugely valuable. ❤️
Well, at 67, I can tell you that finally no one is looking at me like a tarted-up slab of meat with a vagina. Of course, I’m easy to mistake for a little old lady now, my hair having come in a disorderly charcoal grey after my chemo. But that’s a fun stereotype to work (some years ago the teens I was working with described my personal style as “granny goth”), and it also lets you comment and converse with other people with impunity: no one really worries if their kid shares a word in the store with “that granny” and when someone is unspeakably rude, you can just fire right back at them and they actually, sometimes, demonstrate at least momentary guilt. I dress for my own comfort—although I believe one can demonstrate respect by dressing nicely for things like meetings or travel, I tend to mean beyond what simply amuses me that I am clean, relatively ordered, and have all body parts covered that would cause arrest in my local jurisdiction.
The rest of it? Fuck that noise; I’m old and I haven’t got time for that shit.
Just to chirp in (45). One of the many gifts of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was the intergenerational community of dykes. So first, as a dyke, I wasn’t around men a lot who were telling me how unfuckable I was. So aside from the general socialization, inside stepped a ton of bullshit. But also, at 21 I was hanging with wyms who were 40, 50, 60. I was seeing all of these older women in their fullness and glory and sexiness and intelligence and BEAUTY and like everything that happened there, I realized the head trips about aging were a lie.
These women, who embraced being crones, were EVERYTHING. I wanted to be them. And as I age, I remember their power, their gorgeousness. I aim for it with all my might.
Unlearning lies is such hard work, but patriarchy spends a lot of energy reviling things that are powerful.
I can’t believe all the wisdom in these posts above. you GO. I am so in love with all y’all.
There is so much women are not only not taught, but flat-out LIED TO about aging. Even within fandom, a space that is very much women-driven, occasionally you come across someone trying to pressure older women to bow out because our mere presence makes some people uncomfy (and sometimes by “older” they mean over 30, never mind the 40+, 50+, 60+ women speaking up here).
Because we are not taught to respect older women as sexual beings, as beings with our own interests, our own passions, our own weaknesses, and our own right to take up space and be fully present even though we are no longer sexually desirable (to SOME) and might not be willing or interested in taking up a “mom/grandmom” role.
When I was in my 20s I was doing a lot of music writing and one of my biggest role models who I sort of knew personally was Deena Weinstein, who was doing exceptional work on metal culture – very little studied in academia at that time – and she was doing it as a (at the time) very rare visibly middle-aged woman at metal shows banging her head off to Cannibal Corpse. (She is not “detached.” She’s in the mosh pit. She loves the fuck out of it, and it shows.) Lots of people were lining up to tell her in one way or another she ought to be “acting her age,” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. I looked up to her as the giant badass she is.
A few things they don’t tell you about aging, that I know at 48 (and I know to some people here, I’m still a baby, and that’s OK)
1. Menopause is real and for some people perimenopause takes years. Holy shit. It’s as big an upheaval as puberty – but, like puberty, it’s not a disaster it’s just a shift. Respect it but don’t fear it. Most of all, don’t fear talking about it honestly.
2. Being sexually invisible to strange men is a fucking blessing, especially if you take public transit every day. What a gift to actually be able to read in peace most of the time. Don’t dread this!
3. Judgmental opinions of trivial people become a lot more obvious for what they are, over time.
4. Your interest in sex might decrease. OR IT MIGHT NOT. IT MIGHT EVEN INCREASE. In a culture that is horrified by the sexuality of older women, consider who is served by the assumption that loss of libido is a thing that always happens. (Or that it should.)
5. You ARE still the same person you were at 17, at 24, at 39, etc. You’re just a little bit MORE that same person.
6. You have the right to discuss and write about any age you’ve passed through. You own your experiences and you can do with them as you will, creatively. You have been a child, a teenager, a young adult, a middle-aged person – you have memories that you are always entitled to draw upon, for any reason at any time.
I’m so, so fucking glad I’ve had women friends older than me (and in some cases, older than my own parents) since my early 20′s. Seeing women older than me enjoying their lives and being interesting and doing fun things and even (gasp!) having active sex lives, meant I haven’t been nearly as freaked out about getting older.
Things I have enjoyed about getting older to this point (37):
Increased self confidence
Learned patience
Managing my anxiety and depression
Enjoying the body I have, right now as it is
Things I am not enjoying:
why is it so hard to get off the floor??
I get tired from physical activity faster
I can fuck up my back/neck in 0.5 seconds
Things I give zero fucks about:
grey hair
wrinkles
For all of you up thread fretting about menopause, feel free to ask (my inbox is open). I’ve actually been through it twice, one naturally and then because that didn’t work out as well as hoped, surgically. And I’ve done a lot of research on the topic. So fuck the conspiracy of silence and know that I’m available for questions or just blowing off steam.
But don’t worry, most writers are and I’m here to help because reading them is making me cRAzY.
I’m writing this because I’ve read three otherwise great romance novels back to back featuring characters dealing with PTSD (or PTSD symptoms) and each one of them made the same dream mistakes. I honestly can’t think of a fiction book I’ve read that didn’t make these mistakes, so I thought I’d compile a handy dandy list of mistakes and how to fix them.
Lucky for you, I have PTSD and a ton of fellow veteran friends who deal with these symptoms.
*This is based on my experience and things told to me by friends. This is not to say that the below doesn’t happen in real life, only that it’s not as common as you might think.
The issue with these dreams is twofold: on one side is the psychological accuracy of the dream and on the other side is how you’re using the dream within the narrative.
Oh an Black Sails spoilers-ish ahead.
1) Stop writing the dream as a shot-by-shot accurate retelling of Traumatic Event.
Listen, not only do dreams seldom follow reality, but our own memories are tricky at best. I don’t remember getting beaten up because a) it was horrifying and we block stuff like that out and b) I was going in and out of consciousness. It would be pretty strange for me to dream something I don’t even fully remember. Our brains are simply not wired to do these vivid factually-accurate cinematic retellings.
My friend dreams things that did happen, but in his own words those dreams are always wrong in some noticeable or bizarre way. For instance, he’s getting chased through the streets of Iraq by a werewolf.
2) Dreams are informed by reality, not direct reflections of it.
It’s entirely likely my friend dreamt of a werewolf in Iraq because I got him binge watching Supernatural and the two ideas merged in his dreamstate. But see, that’s how dreams work.
The trauma event exists as a constant in his subconscious, but he has all this other information right there in his conscious mind all day, every day. In dreams, there isn’t a clear delineation between that information.
My dreams are often dependent on whatever I’ve fallen asleep watching on television. The themes are consistent, but not the content.
In Black Sails, Captain Flint’s trauma dreams feature his dead partner and friend following him around his empty ship. You have an element of the trauma (the animated corpse of his friend) + his daily existence (his ship). The two things intersect to form these unsettling nightmares as expressions of his fears and grief. He never once relives the event itself in his dreams as shown on screen.
Speaking of…
3) Trauma dreams often revolve around feelings, not necessarily the events themselves.
The PTSD package generally includes heaps of shame, guilt, anger and fear. As someone who survived a beating when I should have had control of the situation, my dreams tend to revolve around fear that people will know I’m a fraud or being unable to act in a dangerous situation.
Again, it’s entirely common for trauma victims to not remember large chunks (or the whole thing) of the trauma event. So why should their dreams be stunningly accurate? What we remember are feelings. Real strong feelings.
You cannot go wrong if you write your trauma dream around feelings, not a specific event.
4) If you present trauma dreams as expressions of themes, you can let go of the trauma dream as an exposition dump/way overused suspense trope.
You know you’ve read this: MC has dreams that are a shot-by-shot retelling of Traumatic Event that always cut off right before Traumatic Event, so that the Big Reveal must happen by a discovery later in the novel.
If I were the MC in a book, the easy and common thing would be to use the “dream sequence” as an expository retelling of Traumatic Event as a way to give some backstory to why I might be surly, mistrustful, afraid to try something new, whatever, and to clumsily shoehorn in suspense where there doesn’t need to be.
The much more interesting thing might be if my dreams were inconsistent in content but consistent in theme. In one I’m on an alien planet (because I fell asleep watching the Science Channel again) and the ground opens up and I fall into a pit from which I can’t escape because I am helpless. In another a man is watching me while I sleep where I am again frozen and helpless. This would force the reader to think: what is the recurring issue in these dreams? Why is it important? What is this telling me about this character and what happened to her?
It could be a personal preference, but I’d rather see the Traumatic Event either told in narrative flashbacks (not dreams) or verbally retold by the character in question. Let the dreams tell me something deeper about the character. It’s not that I was beat up, it’s that I feel like a failure because of it. One of these things is a shallow factual detail, the other tells you something about me as a person that I’m sharing with you, gentle reader, because talking about this stuff is healthy.
5) The Traumatic Event doesn’t have to be a big secret.
In Black Sails, we know what happened to Captain Flint’s partner. It happened in real time in the show. That didn’t make his uber disturbing dreams less disturbing or mysterious. Fans still debate exactly what the symbolism was and what they were telling us about James Flint in those moments. We do know from the dreams that he was disturbed, obsessed, and also monumentally guilty and blaming himself for what happened.
The mystery was perhaps more heightened by the fact that the dreams weren’t direct reflections of reality. We know who this person was, what she believed, and why she died. That Flint is imagining her screaming silently in his ear is horrifying and discordant with what we know to be factual. This adds emotional complexity to his character and the decisions he’s making while suffering these dreams.
^^^this didn’t happen. It was a dream. A real unsettling dream.
Once you let go of the concept of the trauma dream as a literal retelling and exposition dump, you have the entire dreamscape to work in other narrative elements, like symbolism, metaphor, foreshadowing, etc.
I can never understand how Snape apologetics can stand up for him when he CANONICALLY does this shit.
I can maybe, maybe, understand those who haven’t read the books standing up for him, because honestly the movies don’t cover all the horrible stuff he does. But those who have read the books and still stick up for him baffle me.
I mean, you don’t see anyone sticking up for the Dursley’s or Umbridge, when they do the same stuff to Harry as Snape. How is Snape any different?
I- I just can’t get over Zuko and his arc. Everything he did – everything – was out of this insane drive to prove everyone wrong, to prove that he was worth something, and it amazes me that he never realized just how valuable he already was.
His sister tells him ‘You waste all your time playing with knives. You’re not even good!’ and he masters dual swords.
His sister is a prodigy and he’s told he’ll never catch up. He learns from dragons. He trains the Avatar. He takes her down (with the help of a very skilled waterbender)
He’s left behind by his mother, cast out by his father, hunted by his sister, and Zuko still learns unconditional love.
His father tells him he’s worthless and unloved, that he was ‘lucky to be born,’
and he becomes a man that the world is proud of.
Anything his family said to him, he managed to turn around and build on it. He thrived on it, exploded from it, turned all the negativity into a positive path and it’s just… it’s amazing.
There’s just no end to my love for this character. No fucking end.
Bonus: The weak, banished prince has fangirls for all the ages. Take that, Ozai.
My doggo, Ezri, who rarely barks and mostly borks.
When I got her, she’d been abused and would cower and pee at almost everything, and had been mistreated when she’d barked, so she never would. One day months after I had her she got excited on a walk and borked at a bird, and then immediately cower-peed. I had to re-teach her to bark by gathering her whole human pack and having everyone bark and howl and feed her treats and pet her till she got excited enough to join in, and then got more treats. Took a while but I was able to teach her to bork on command (and she’s gotta be excited or she just stares at me like “Sorry, the bork system needs charging”) and she’ll do it happily when she’s excited to go for a walk or upon seeing a friend, and at birds. I love her croaky borking, especially when she started off terrified of making a joyful noise.
What kind of dog is Ezri? I love her!!
I… did not expect this post to blow up this much but I am delighted at all the tags and replies and Ezri has been told the internet thinks she’s a Very Good Dog. 😀
She’s a German spitz – in the same family as keeshonds and pomeranians. She might be crossed with something else as her freckled coat, non-pointy nose, and personality are not standard for her breed (they’re usually a lot more high energy and excitable – she’s super laid back and chill). She’s a bit less fluffy than breed-standard too, mostly because she’s grown out from her spring/summer trim (not usually necessary/good for her type of coat but she gets terribly itchy otherwise). It also makes her look like a puppy of a large breed:
Ezri’s best friend is Murder Cat, who is a gentle friend to humans and Ezri, but does things to mice that would make Hannibal Lecter go “Isn’t that a bit much?”
I got Murder Cat as a kitten, and she used to try to nurse on everything when she was small. Eventually, she settled on her favourite thing to nurse on, Ezri, who has never had puppies and a little confused at first but eventually went with it. She grew out of it, but they have stayed snuggly buddies ever since.
New Years here is full of fireworks outside and Ezri gets Vry Scared. I usually set her up somewhere with a snuggly spot right by me, and Murder Cat comes and does this all night:
She goes everywhere with me in my bakfiets (cargo bike) and lets me warm my hands in her fur on cold days.
And her ears disappear if I say her name to get her attention.
ok so great thanks for coming to my TED talk about my dog, good night, drive safe
memeotional 