Featured image credit: Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash
In my life, I am the tortoise and everyone else is the hare. Except the hares aren’t napping. They’re either pairing up, moving in together, getting engaged, getting married, starting families, getting promoted, moving house, or all of them in very quick succession.
It’s human nature to compare yourselves to others and this is exacerbated even further with the prominence of social media and constant exposure to the lives of others. But what if your life isn’t following the order of the majority and you have passed a certain age you should have done, or be in the process of doing, a specific life event but haven’t?
It feels like I'm taking this journey through life at a glacial pace. While everyone else are full speed ahead. - Amanda Bishop -
I’ve become someone to despise age-related life milestones with every year that passes and the more milestones I miss hitting. And yet I find myself surrounded by people who, by no intention of their own, adhere to them. Everyone I am close to is paired up, starting families and have their career paths paved beautifully out in front them. While I am both alone and lonely, my career path is currently a stack of paving slabs piled high, waiting to be laid.
I am forever wondering what is wrong with me? Why do I have to be different from my family and friends? I feel like a leper within my close circle to be so far behind them all. And these feelings have only been exacerbated due to the current pandemic. Life is on pause but time is not a stopwatch and continues its path forward regardless what is happening in the world.
I hate comparing myself to others, but I still do it. I hate living my life by age milestones, but I still do it. It’s hard not to when most of the people in my life adhere to them. I hate that I am finding it increasingly hard to be happy for what is going on in everyone else’s life; there’s only so many false smiles one can do before you can no longer hide your despondency.
I resent myself for being resentful towards my current lot in life. I am very aware there are many people around the world with infinitely worse situations than mine. I just struggle shaking the feeling that I have not ‘achieved’ what so many others around me have managed to in terms of relationships, parenthood and careers by the age I am currently.
I know my close circle mean well when they say things like “your time is coming”, or “there’s someone out there for you”, but I can’t help feeling patronised and loathing them ever so slightly because it is easy from them to say those sorts of things when they haven’t got to worry about it.
When I think back to my younger years, I remember being full of excitement when imagining what and how I would be when I got older. I was the one among school friends to always be changing my mind about what I wanted do for a living. For a time it was historian/archaeologist and I imagined myself as Sydney Fox from Relic Hunter discovering treasures which have been lost for hundreds of years.
Other careers I have considered over the years have been, in no particular order: a makeup artist, an entrepreneur, a property developer, an interior designer, a fashion designer, a social care worker, a psychologist, a nutritional therapist which changed to a dietitian (they are different: the latter is regulated and requires a degree, the former is not and does not), and last of what I can recall, a building surveyor, like my Dad.
But, in wanting to be so many things, I have inadvertently become nothing.
I also remember having conversations with friends about the ages we hoped to be married by and start having children; 28 years old was always an arbituary figure thrown around. The age I am going to turn in less than a month. Being female, I am all too aware that my biological clock is ticking away even if the average age which women have their first child has risen over the years.
According to the Office for National Statistics, in the UK, many other significant life events are happening at later ages throughout adulthood. The average age people get married is on the rise although the rate of marriage is on the decline. Given the uncertainty of the economy and changes in technology and lifestyles, it’s increasingly rare that people enter a career or work for one employer until retirement age which also seems to always be increased everytime a new government announces their budget plans. And the chances of getting on the property ladder is becoming all the more obsolete that the probability of most people still renting by the time they do finally reach retirement is, rather worringly, highly likely.
Yet here I am, still tracking my life by milestones whose parameters are always changing. It’s so ingrained despite strong evidence suggesting significant life events are happening at all and any age.
It is a very homogenous way of viewing human life, that we grow up, enter a career, fall in love, get married, have children, retire, become grandparents; all in that order. What separates our species from others on this planet is the billions of ways we live our lives. The way we have survived and become so prolific is through the multiple ways of means to ends we have developed to overcome all the different challenges and circumstances we face.
And while there is something so satisfying about creating a list and ticking things off it, our lives are not lists. And it is not a competition to see who can tick stuff off the fastest as this competition has never, nor it will ever, be comparable. It’s like running the 100 metres against Usain Bolt, but he had an hour’s headstart, so he has been chiling for 59 minutes and 52 seconds while you are just taking up position at the starting line.
This pandemic has shown very clearly that life is unpredictable. And what we expect to happen and what actually happens in the near future doesn’t always align. Lives have been cut unfairly short, jobs have been lost and whole industries are struggling, weddings have been cancelled, and families are unable to touch one another under social distancing rules.
But we have also found ways to adapt. Many of us have connected with loved ones in different ways, and in some cases communicating with people more than we did before the pandemic. Some people have managed to create businesses during a time when many are going bust. Couples have realised that it is not how you get married it is who you are marrying that is most important. While new lives have been born into the world throughout the entire pandemic.
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.
Gilda Radner
We have gotten so used to treating life like a countdown; the idea that you have to do a particular thing within a ridiculous timeframe that life is not about living but achieving. And if you don’t achieve for whatever reason, whether a pandemic stands in your way or not, you are a failure.
But life can, and does, continue on, no matter how the strange the circumstances may be, just as it has for billions of years. It is a river; tumultous in parts, gentle in others and flows for as long as it needs.
It is time I embraced the delicious ambiguity that is life as opposed to staring it down as I have done for so long. It is time I finally say “to hell with plans and goals”, and revel in living my life out of order and out of sync. And maybe, most importantly, it is time for me, and for anyone else who feels the same way, to label myself as ageless. That way I’ll be sure to never fail at an age milestone ever again.
So, I’ve decided I’m not turning 28 next month, I’m taking a leaf out Virginia Woolf’s book and merely altering my aspect to the sun.
The Lilac 