I was walking past the mirror in the main bathroom of our new house that we’d just moved into after losing everything to the floodwaters of Hurricane Harvey. The months before had been a whirlwind of finding refuge with kind friends, mucking out our ruined home and razing it to the ground, finding a builder to rebuild, finding the money to pay the builder to rebuild, and finding a temporary place to live while the builder rebuilt. In short, it had been an emotional, exhausting year.
I stared at my face in the mirror, peering a little more closely. I searched for evidence that proved I looked much older than I did a year earlier. Weirdly, few identifiable signs of aging seemed new. Save for lines where I smiled, the skin around my eyes remained almost wrinkle-free. My hair was still dark, thanks to a recent dye job. My skin was sallow but didn’t appear particularly elderly. So what was it that I was seeing? When I was younger, there was a sparkle. Why was it slipping away?
It’s not age, I suddenly realized. It’s stress.
In that moment, I didn’t wonder at my conflation of stress and age, or my initial instinct that age could be the only rational reason for my tired face. But I felt relief – after all, stress I could fix. But eventually, I began to wonder: why did I immediately assume what I was seeing was age? Despite never having dreaded getting older in the past, was my assumption a sign of some internalized ageism that I didn’t know I harbored? And why was it that most people hated aging in the first place?
I decided to explore the answers to these questions and the result was my book, Radiant Rebellion: Reclaim Aging, Practice Joy & Raise a Little Hell. I quickly learned that as a society, we didn’t always hate aging: our cultural distaste for getting older began somewhere around the early twentieth century, when the US government mandated a retirement age so that younger men would get jobs made scarce by World Wars and the Great Depression.
The situation was exacerbated by what grew to be a trillion dollar, largely unregulated anti-aging industry. And nowadays, we’re steeped in ageist culture, from the villains in the cartoons and fairy tales we enjoy as kids, to the imagery that bombards us on social media as we approach our teenage years, to the cosmetics we’re sold as young adults, to the challenge of finding and keeping jobs when we get older, to the dismissiveness we can face from the medical field in our later years. It’s no wonder that we fear our advancing years!
But there’s hope: once we’ve seen the insidiousness of anti-aging culture, we’re like Neo taking the red pill in The Matrix: we can’t unsee it. And once we see it, we can fight it. By focusing on our wellbeing, from the way we approach and advocate for our health, to how we tap into our own purpose, to caring for our souls through self-care and community connection, we can redefine what aging looks like for ourselves, and help shift the cultural discourse on what it means to get older. Together, we can be the Radiant Rebellion.
And I say it’s time to raise a little hell.
-Karen
Author of “Radiant Rebellion: Reclaim Aging, Practice Joy and Raise a Little Hell” and “The Lightmaker’s Manifesto: How to Work for Change Without Losing Your Joy,” Karen Walrond is an author, coach, speaker, activist, and attorney, and her books, writing and coaching have helped thousands name their gifts, find meaning and purpose, and make light. She has appeared on national television and other news media, including PBS, Huffington Post, CNN.com, Harvard Business Review, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Chip will be co-leading a Santa Fe workshop with Karen August 27-September 1 on this topic. Learn more HERE.