A few years ago, I turned 50. I don’t know about the rest of you, but that number was a wakeup call for me. My mother was dead by the age of 51, so I started thinking more about what it means to get older, fears of death, and the privilege of getting older.
I’m not going to lie about it; aging scares me. I’m worried about what will happen to my body on a biological level, about how I’ll age. I’m worried, too, about how people will perceive me as I age. For centuries, women especially have been expected to become invisible as we aged. But, importantly, even though I’m terrified of the process, I want to accept the inevitable fact that I will age (and so will you) and learn to appreciate this stage of my life.
And that’s what this new book is about.
I’ll be reflecting on my own personal skirmishes with aging, both as a woman and as a medical anthropologist. As a woman, my experiences are not that different to my own mother’s decades ago. Both of us faced increasing ageism as we entered our fifth decades and worried about its effects on our ability to work and love as equals in a society that values youth above all else.
One of the things people say colloquially is that if you want to know how you’ll age, look at your parents. Since both of mine died well before the age of 60, I have no benchmarks. The anxiety I feel around aging, while unique in its causation, is certainly not singular. Every time I talk about my research for this book, people want to tell me about their own thoughts and fears around aging. Slowly, I began to realize that none of us want to feel alone on this challenging journey.
As an anthropologist, I know that aging has always been wrought with personal and cultural difficulties. We attach meaning to the process of aging and those meanings are steeped in the long history of how our species has approached the subject over the millennia. Aging has never been “easy,” but scientific advances are ironically making it a more fraught process than ever before. This new book will be grounded in the struggle – on both a personal and cultural level – to age in this era of anti-aging.