{"id":6241,"date":"2020-09-11T07:32:36","date_gmt":"2020-09-11T11:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silvercentury.org\/?p=6241"},"modified":"2020-09-16T07:29:24","modified_gmt":"2020-09-16T11:29:24","slug":"were-all-old-people-in-training-whether-we-know-it-yet-or-not-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/2020\/09\/were-all-old-people-in-training-whether-we-know-it-yet-or-not-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"We\u2019re All Old People in Training, Whether We Know It Yet or Not, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

This excerpt from my book ran on <\/span><\/i>TED\u2019s Ideas page<\/span><\/i><\/a> under the title \u201cRather than identifying as old, young or middle-aged, be an \u2018Old Person in Training\u2019 instead.\u201d I\u2019ve loved that idea since I encountered it over a decade ago (!), although I had no idea how central to my thinking it would become.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Becoming an Old Person in Training allows us to choose purpose and intent over dread and denial and connects us empathically with our future selves.<\/span><\/i> <\/b><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the best answer to \u201cHow old are you?\u201d<\/b> Tell your questioner the truth\u2014and then ask why it matters. Ask what shifted in their mind once they had a number and ask why they think they needed to know. The information feels foundational, but it isn\u2019t. We ask partly out of sheer habit, carried over from childhood, when a month was an eternity and each year marked developmental changes and new freedoms.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe kids drive me crazy asking how old I am,\u201d said 80-year-old Detroit schoolteacher Penny Kyle. \u201cI don\u2019t mind telling my age, but I know on the job it can cause you a problem, so I always say I\u2019m 104.\u201d Ha!<\/span><\/p>\n

We ask because age functions as a convenient shorthand, a way to contextualize accomplishments and calibrate expectations. <\/b>It\u2019s lazy, though, and utterly unreliable, and arguably impertinent. A woman who attended one of my talks says she answers the question by retorting, \u201cHow much do you weigh?\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Scientist Silvia Curado refuses to give her age\u2014not because she wants people to take her for younger but because she refuses to be pigeonholed in a way that she finds \u201creductive and usually faulty.\u201d Her consciousness makes it a political act. Social worker Natalia Granger offers a radical suggestion: follow the example of gender-nonconforming people. When asked for your age, identify as \u201cage-nonconforming.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Author and environmental activist Colin Beavan did something similar when he announced on Facebook that he was \u201ccoming out as age queer. I am not comfortable with the roles and stereotypes associated with the age of the body I was born into,\u201d he wrote. \u201cMy body\u2019s age is not my age. From now on, I will be identifying as 37.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I love the culture hack, but I want to modify it because identifying as 37 (still \u201cyoung\u201d) is a form of denial. <\/b>After a back-and-forth, [Beaven] decided to stop identifying with a specific age. <\/span><\/p>\n

I want to be age queer by rejecting not my age but the fixed meanings that people assign to it. I claim my age at the same time that I challenge its primacy and its value as a signifier.<\/span><\/p>\n

The habit of wanting to know a person\u2019s age is hard to break. Take the journalistic convention of including ages in newspaper stories. Two stories in the same week\u2014one about a 42-year-old nursing student running for homecoming queen and another about a 91-year-old mayor swindling River Falls, Alabama, out of $201,000\u2014got me thinking about it. Dolores Barclay, a veteran Associated Press reporter, fielded my question.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is just another essential fact to include about the subjects we cover. It\u2019s part of the \u2018who\u2019 in reporting,\u201d Barclay responded. \u201cAge is often relevant to certain stories as well. For example, if we write about a \u2018senior citizen\u2019 or \u2018older person\u2019 who takes her first skydive, does the story have more impact if the subject is 70 or if she\u2019s 99? Or, if we\u2019re profiling the accomplishments of a musician who has had an illustrious and amazing career, don\u2019t we want to know how old he is? What if he\u2019s only 24, but reading the story we might think he\u2019s 60?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously, the subject\u2019s age belongs in obituaries and profiles of child prodigies, but I believe its reflexive inclusion in other stories is nothing but a bad habit.<\/b> In terms of it being a necessary part of the \u201cwho\u201d of a story, race is no longer an obligatory part of the \u201cwho\u201d\u2014unless the story is about race relations. Why should age be any different? There are plenty of ways to clue readers in, [in] the rare event that it\u2019s relevant to the story. A little confusion could rattle assumptions about what people are capable of at a given stage of life or what they have in common across age divides, which would be all to the good.<\/span><\/p>\n

To avoid reducing people to labels or medical diagnoses, disability etiquette prescribes \u201cpeople first\u201d language: instead of \u201cmentally ill,\u201d saying \u201cpeople with mental illness\u201d; instead of \u201cautistic\u201d or \u201cepileptic,\u201d saying \u201cpeople who have autism\u201d or \u201cpeople who have epilepsy\u201d; instead of \u201cwheelchair-bound\u201d or \u201cconfined to a wheelchair,\u201d saying \u201cwheelchair users\u201d; and so on. The disability is a characteristic of the person; it does not define them.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, here\u2019s yet another thought experiment: How about learning from the disability rights movement and conceiving of ourselves as \u201cpeople with age\u201d instead of as X- or Y-year-olds? <\/b>Age becomes just another attribute, like being a good speller or a Filipino or a Cubs fan. People could \u201chave years\u201d\u2014just as people with dementia \u201chave trouble thinking.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Age needn\u2019t set apart, nor be set apart from other identifiers. Person first, as retired psychotherapist Bill Krakauer discovered when he started taking acting classes. \u201cSo here are these bunch of kids and they see an old guy, right? After a while it quiets down. It takes a few weeks, but everybody forgets. I stop looking at them like young people, and they stop looking at me like an old guy and we\u2019re all just people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

My final thought experiment: Think of yourself as an Old Person in Training.<\/b> In 2008, I heard geriatrician Joanne Lynn describe herself as an Old Person in Training, and I\u2019ve been one ever since. I know I\u2019m not young, I don\u2019t see myself as old, and I know a lot of people feel the same way. They\u2019re in the grips of a cruel paradox: they aspire to grow old, yet they dread the prospect. They spend a lot of energy sustaining the illusion that the old are somehow not us.<\/span><\/p>\n

Becoming an Old Person in Training bridges the us\/them divide and loosens the grip of that exhausting illusion. It acknowledges the inevitability of oldness while relegating it to the future\u2014albeit at an ever-smaller remove. It opts for purpose and intent over dread and denial. It connects us empathically with our future selves. As Simone de Beauvoir put it, \u201cIf we do not know who we are going to be, we cannot know who we are: Let us recognize ourselves in this old man or in that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the entirety of our human state.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

To be continued in \u201cWe\u2019re All Old People in Training, Part 2<\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/span><\/i>This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Agism<\/span> by Ashton Applewhite. Copyright \u00a9 2019 Ashton Applewhite. Reprinted with the permission of Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan Publishing, LLC.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s the best answer to \u201cHow old are you?\u201d<\/b> Tell your questioner the truth\u2014and then ask why it matters. <\/span><\/p>\n

Read more We\u2019re All Old People in Training, Whether We Know It Yet or Not, Part 1<\/span> ›<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n

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