Writing and Art at 40

ALL WRITTEN AND ARTWORK ARE THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OF PSG LOPES/THE MOONLIT GODDESS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, 2021.

I produced the following piece as part of an entry to a grant opportunity that I didn't receive. I hate wasting good writing pieces so I decided to include it here on my blog. It focuses on how I feel being 40 and how the young have overtaken our ever-aging world...

“What does it mean to be young in an aging world?”

By PSG Lopes

To be young in an aging world means being born in the midst of this wild jungle called life—this structure known as the world that existed millions of years before us and will exist quite a plethora longer well after we are gone. To be young in an aging world is the sweat upon one’s brow when they are on the verge of defusing a bomb with a mere five seconds left to figure out which color wire will save our very lives. It’s that inaugural cry a newborn shudders when she first makes her grand entrance into existence not realizing that her primordial tears are just some of many more to come in her long and difficult life.

We are ill-prepared in our youth for what’s to come. Not many are blessed with great parents who help provide those necessary tools to become successful adults. To be young in an aging world means being smarter, quicker, more cunning, and yes, maybe even more ruthless. Our lives are one never-ending “capture the flag” race with no definitive prize in sight. We just know that we must keep going in order to survive.

To be young in an aging world is knowing our time here is finite and we are only given a certain amount of time to decide how we wish to spend such a precious life. To be young in an aging world means having several “Groundhog Day” moments where we mess up repeatedly and take life for granted before learning that grand lesson that makes us all better individuals. To be young in an aging world means watching our loved ones get older right before our eyes. It’s knowing we are all on this conveyor belt, a sliver of paper in hand, with a hidden number not revealed to us until our time is ultimately up.

To be young in an aging world means sometimes having to make difficult decisions alone and finally learning what it means to grow up. It means learning that maybe, just maybe you become better parents than your own parents were to you as a child. Maybe we learn that is the takeaway of life—to not become our parents but to be better than them and our mark, our brand that we leave behind—essentially our legacy—is to find a way to make this cruel world a little less cold and dark.

In between the first and final tears of our lives, we must somehow muster up enough courage to be productive and to stop blaming others for our failures. We must somehow be strong enough and wise enough to get over it, let it go, and be perfect humans. To be young in an aging world means there are no rule books, that we forge our own rules and that we are all making it up as we go along. There’s no road map. No cheat sheet. No Sparks Notes or fast-forwarding to see how it all ends. That huge burden we bear, we realize, often much too late is that we choose our own adventure. We hold so much power and that is sometimes much too much for some to bear.

To be young in an aging world means growing up with heroes only to find out into adulthood that the people we believed to be godlike are mere humans themselves and make mistakes and sometimes those mistakes are too grandiose to forgive. That epiphany when you realize that books and movies are mere fiction and your dreams may never come true. It’s knowing there’s no Santa Claus, no tooth fairy, no Easter bunny, but a small part of you, this tiny part of you that still believes in childhood fantasies, waits each and every year for that wish you wished for while blowing out those birthday candles may somehow someday come true. To be young in an aging world is watching your face weathering with faint lines and definitions of wrinkles but still having childish desires of world peace and harmony among all men and women; being forced to grow up and leave Neverland long before you’re even done.

To be young in an aging world is growing up poor and whenever asking for some toy that your school friends have your mother always responds with “someday” and you wait around and wait around and someday never comes. It’s learning disappointment and growing up forced to be mature about losses and not understanding why you were never good enough for the same things your friends had as a child. To be young in an aging world is to learn that when you finally reach adulthood the world stops caring about you and you learn what it really feels like to struggle. You’ll learn unimaginable insurmountable pain that is sometimes invisible to others. You’ll learn to keep it to yourself and just soldier on because nobody wants to hear about your trials and tribulations because they already have too much baggage of their own to consider carrying yours as well.

To be young in an aging world is the devastation in hearing that your father was diagnosed with dementia and deep down knowing your own life is over too because you’ve just lost the unluckiest lottery of your life. To be young in an aging world is living the longest Monday of your life and not knowing when Tuesday will come. Sure, the sun rises and sets, the pages rip off the calendar each and every month, decorations come up and down for various holidays but it’s still Monday. I wake up, the routine starts the moment I recognize myself again and take that first voluntary breath in the morning. No variations, nothing to alter up the dreariness of the mundanity of it all. That moment where I finally can scurry off to myself could be something as simple as a bathroom break, I wash my hands and that moment I make eye contact with myself in the mirror and shockingly witness all my young years shedding away from my face to the point where I don’t recognize myself anymore.

To be young in an aging world is knowing that I am no longer young and watching newer generations be born. These newer generations grow up and learn more, have more privileges than I ever had as I watch them take jobs away from me. My struggles don’t matter, my experiences don’t matter, my education doesn’t matter. I become obsolete because the number of candles on my birthday cake shamefully increased. One episode of the Golden Girls showed two of the main characters Rose Nylund and Sophia Petrillo going into business together selling sandwiches to construction workers. They didn’t have tomatoes so instead of making BLT sandwiches using bacon, lettuce, and tomato, they used potatoes. An unpopular idea, they realized they needed to be sly in order to peddle all those sandwiches and still turn a profit. Rose told a story about how she was successful selling things when she was a kid and Sophia told her she was successful because she was young and cute. When Blanche Devereaux comes home from one of her lavish dates, she laments how hungry she is and asks what kind of sandwiches Rose and Sophia made. Rose quickly reveals bacon, lettuce, and potato hoping that she wouldn’t notice the potato aspect of the sandwich and Blanche quickly loses interest once she hears potatoes. Failing to convince Blanche, Sophia jokingly scolds Rose telling her how she must work on her sales pitch because she’s older now and isn’t considered cute anymore. That is exactly what being young in an aging world feels like. Being young means opportunities but unfortunately, someone’s path to those opportunities is so twisted and so long and has become such an odyssey that by the time they realize they have all of the tools and skills to be successful nobody wants them anymore. It’s like every action movie where you feel that the hero is finally going to complete their mission but it’s still way too early in the movie for any reasonable resolution and you hold your breath watching them fail time and time again until they finally save the day.

To be young in an aging world is recognizing the harsh realities of life. It’s the being bullied, it’s the lack of faith others have in you, it’s the fact that no matter how many platitudes from Dory’s “Just Keep Swimming” to Rob Schneider’s “You can do it” sometimes you just can’t keep swimming and no, sometimes you can’t do it. To be young in an aging world is being angry and bitter when you are tired of fighting harder than everyone does just for the bare essentials in life. In the movie, The Goonies, all the kids find themselves in a wishing well with tons of coins. Mouth starts pocketing all the coins and Stef begins shaming him for doing so. He quickly and angrily snaps back demonstrating how they all could have easily been his wishes that he threw into the well years earlier that never came true and declared bitterly that since they didn’t come true, he was taking them all back out of spite. To be young in an aging world means endless disappointments but it’s how you handle them that defines you.

All those movies, books, television shows we watched in our youth but couldn’t quite connect with carrying a much greater bearing as we get older. For instance, in The Twilight Zone’s episode, “Time Enough at Last,” Mr. Bemis, a lackadaisical banker with no other ambition but to read book after book, unwittingly was at the right place at the right time when a bomb hit, decimating the area. He was scared and confused and filled with sadness at first until he saw the books at the library and greedily counted out the books he would read for each month for the rest of his life. Cocky, he proudly exclaimed how he had time enough at last to read as he wished. He had no wife to nag him, no bills to pay, no boss who hated him. He had the freedom to just be the person he always wanted to be and that was a lazy bookworm. His plan shattered before his very eyes literally as his thick coke-bottled glasses broke rendering him legally blind and unable to enjoy the written word ever again since there were no eye doctors or eyeglasses to replace his broken ones. He’s left to cry out in horror and recapitulate his earlier speech declaring how unfair it was because there was finally time now to do what he loved to do the most. To be young in an aging world is accepting the fact that we may never have time enough, at last, to do what we love to do the most because of obligations and because we must work to make ends meet.

Another show that really captured the significance of how short our time is on this good Earth is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy’s one true love, Angel, had a tragic curse that never allowed him true happiness. Loving Buffy gave him the happiness he always wanted but tragedy kept them apart for good. They were given a gift of being together one last time but it was short-lived and they were given only a certain amount of time together and to make matters worse Buffy had to forget their reunion while Angel carried the memory of them together one last time for the rest of eternity. I remember this being one of the most gut-wrenching scenes when she cried and held him screaming and pleading to tell him it wasn’t enough time. That’s how I feel about life. Everything happens too fast and just when things are good for us, the rug is thrown out from underneath us and the suffering begins again. It’s the bitterness of never knowing when life changes because it happens so damned fast that gets to me. I always make that same mistake. Taking everything for granted. I’ve become much better as I’ve gotten older to appreciate every moment. Life is not guaranteed, and happiness is far rarer than sadness so it is up to us to bottle every moment and soak up the joy wherever we can find it.

Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town is another fine example of the realization of knowing how short life really is. Emily dies during childbirth and in the afterlife decides to revisit her twelfth birthday. The gravity of her decision proves too great for her as she realizes how she took her life for granted and frustrated, she beautifully pleaded with everyone in her memory to take a moment and really look at one another. “Let's really look at one another! It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So, all that was going on and we never noticed. Wait! One more look. Goodbye, goodbye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, Earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” To be young in an aging world means that we won’t know we are taking life for granted until it’s too late.

We have failed ourselves in society by shoving these ideals down each other’s throats. We must flee the nest by eighteen. We must go to college and get a good education. We need to be out of the house and married with three kids, a house of our own, a job, and a dog named Sparky by twenty-five. Heaven forbid being single, childless, jobless, friendless and still living in the attic of your parents’ home and that’s precisely my fate at forty. To be young in an aging world is lacking the foresight that this could happen to anyone and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with where our paths take us.

Being young in an aging world means you still have time before going through your high school yearbook and seeing how many of your classmates died over the years from cancer, senseless accidents, suicide, or something else equally catastrophic and devastating. It’s the pain of watching the news every day and hearing about people dying young especially around Christmas time wondering how many unopened presents are left under their tree with their name on them. It’s coming to the realization that it’s been nearly ten years since I’ve received any Christmas presents of my own. It’s knowing I’ve lived about half of my life and I still have to endure another thirty Christmases with no presents if cancer or pestilence doesn’t claim my body first.

To be young in an aging world means learning the ultimate lesson which is to never grow old. But grow old we must. And it’s the knowledge we gather along the way that makes us or breaks us. Knowing that the cheesy soap opera saying, “like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives,” isn’t so cheesy after all but probably one of the most philosophically poignant phrases of our lifetimes. Shake the naivety and ignorance of our youth and knowing that there’s always a chance to change and alter your life’s path and that it’s not always going to be this way. My mother’s go-to phrase that always helps me is “better days will come.” It’s this virtual token I keep in my pocket and carry with me wherever I go. I’ve fallen so many times and there were days when I did not see myself ever getting out of the horrific messes that I had gotten myself into. I’ve dealt with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, nervous breakdowns, death and sickness of loved ones, bullying, sexual, emotional, and physical abuse, I could go on and continue scribing every tragedy of my precious forty years but what’s the point? The point isn’t to keep beating to death the things in the past I got wrong and can’t fix, my regrets, my failures, how others did me wrong. The point is to use those as a compass for the present and eventually the future.

To be young in an aging world means there’s an older generation that’s out there and it’s our obligation to educate and prepare our youth realistically for a future that is attainable and within their grasp. Not every path is the same and there’s no one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter path for each person. We are all different and we need to start embracing those differences and stop chastising everyone who doesn’t reach certain milestones at certain ages. As I mentioned earlier, life has no rule book. We create our own rule book page by page as we live and experience life. Life really is like those choose your adventure books. I may really like page fifteen but my siblings may decide that page fifty-five is where they want to go and we lead different lives and it sucks that we can’t all be on this journey together. It breaks my heart and I find it to be one of life’s greatest cruelties to carry with me the memories of happier times knowing that when we sit together at the dinner table any day could be our last time laughing together. It breaks me in unimaginable ways. It crushes me to the point where I must give myself pep talks to keep going. I must stop myself and repeat “better days will come” over and over until the message is received. To be young in an aging world means that I can still be hopeful and optimistic while still carrying the memories of my pain and hurt. Robert Frost said it best in his poem “The Road Not Taken.” Mr. Frost said, and I quote, “I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” No two paths are similar and there is always more than one way to fry an egg.