No, age isn’t just a number – and the sooner we realise that, the happier we will be | Mental health
SITTING In a coffee recently, I saw a poster announcing a barista training course for young people interested in a career in hot drinks. Things in the NHS being what they are, I liked to get lost in the fantastic future spent behind an elegant and shiny machine, having full -minded exchanges with customers and colleagues while I skillfully pour smooth milk, foaming in a silky espresso, for the bottom and the turning of each cup to create my own work of unique art on the surface of coffee.
It was until I read the little impression, which included the rather brutal definition of “young people” as aged 18 to 24. I achieved, with an internal panting, that my limited capacity to pour liquid without overthrowing it was not the only obstacle to this career choice. There was a basic personal reality here from which I became completely without attachment: the passing time.
This relaxation is bad news for anyone interested in building a better life. Many nonsense are spoken and sung and written on plates and pencil cases on how we all have to stay young and never age. But I discovered as a therapist and as a patient in psychoanalysis that the ability to anchor you in the reality of the time to pass is fundamental for good mental health and the life potential to improve.
Whether it is early childhood, toddler, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, forty, early age or your last chapter, each new stage of life offers the opportunity to cry the loss of what happened before, grow and develop and develop the person you are at the moment. It’s a chance to work on something and change. So, the purchase of age is only a number of philosophy – consciously or unconsciously – deprives us of the precious experience of feeling rooted in our personal chronology. To feel rooted in something true.
The average age has the reputation of being Staid and Frumpy. But when I found myself stuck in the interviews on this stage of life for my book on growth throughout adulthood, I saw that this can be a particularly fertile period for people who can face the reality that there will soon be more time behind them than in advance. Recognizing this obvious but shocking fact meant that this chapter of their life was not dull, but more full of life than those who before, fed by a different type of energy. This moment was an opportunity to make significant changes and focus on what they really wanted to have their second half.
While I am now in my forties, I can clearly find it really believing that my “young” chapter ends. I think it’s because I don’t want to accept losses.
We expect feelings of loss that follow a death. As devastating as this sorrow can be, it can sometimes be more understandable than the losses that accompany life, development and growth. My young girl helped me see this very clearly, forcing me to face ordinary losses that leave me completely emptied. His “gooster”, which a week later became his scooter will never be a “gooster” again. I was not prepared for this loss of a word which seemed so entirely it, which was now so negligently fell by it – but with here crampon with me.
It is my most painful maternity work so far. Aside from sleep deprivation. And the mammite. Ok, maybe not the most painful, but it’s up there. How to let these parts go by, while understanding that they are still in her somewhere; How to let her become her own person, rather than getting so caught in my own feelings about who she was for me. How to hold and love him closely and freely at the same time, giving him space to become the child, then the adolescent, then the adult she will be. A few mornings, I recover it in her bed and I am momentarily amazed: who is this child who looks so older than the toddler I sang to sleep last night? Where’s my baby?
It is this moment of shock – like internal hayling when I read the small imprint of the coffee poster – which brings me out of my comfortable bubble, reintroducing me to the devastating reality of the passing time and the losses it brings. The good news is that when the bubble breaks out, growth becomes possible. If we can allow ourselves to enter and go out and come back again through the different stages of life – while my daughter moves through the girlfriend, and I head towards the forties – we can grow around our young me, not far from ourselves.
It’s like Gianna Williams told me, speaking of her work as a child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst: “We always find the infant, the young child, the adolescent in the patient. Like the circles in a tree, they are all there. ” This is what it means for me to grow, rather than just aging. And if we can continue to do it, we have a chance to build a better life until our end.
Moya Sarner is a psychotherapist of the NHS and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations with adults looking for adulthood
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