Conscious Choice Seattle: Age-old Question

June 2005 | The EM Column

Age-old Question

When a woman hits 35, why is she supposed to start lying about her birthday?

By Silja J.A. Talvi

There was a time in my life when I didn’t think I would even make it to 21. Several of my friends had already committed suicide, or had been killed or incarcerated. But I made it to 21, and kept going.

I took on jobs working with battered women, poor and immigrant women and, later, with high-risk and HIV-positive teens. Life was never easy but it seemed to be getting at least a little better, year by year. I had passion for the work I was doing, but I was fundamentally a terrible fit for office cubicles, fluorescent light and anything resembling the 9-to-5 grind. I turned to full-time freelance journalism in 1996, and never turned back.

When I turned 30 here in Seattle, I couldn’t believe that I had made it out of my twenties. The next year, I went through a divorce, and my life was thrown into a kind of transformative chaos that I was ill prepared to comprehend. I tried to start things anew in New Mexico for a year. When that fell apart, I left the Land of Enchantment for the Emerald City once again.

I’ve been here ever since. And it’s in this city that I recently had the fortune of turning 35. I announced my 35th birthday with aplomb to just about anyone even remotely connected with my life. I started celebrating several days before the fact.

Not only did I feel like I was reaching a personal milestone, but I was also at the point in my life where I finally felt like I was learning to truly embrace the woman I was capable of being. Perhaps most significantly, I actually started to realize I might really make it to 40, 50, or even 60 and beyond.

In fact, if I could be so blessed as to still be on this Earth to experience those decades, I’d be grateful for it.

And this brings me to another point: One of the reasons I seek out and surround myself with women and men of so many different ages (early 20s to 90s) is that I have something to learn from all of them. Their experiences, their insights, their wisdom, their sensibilities are things I need to be able to grasp in order to understand the world around me, and to get reality checks about where I’m going in my own life.

Over-the-hill terrain

I learn from them, and particularly (although not exclusively) from my “elders.” I have actually never looked at a 40-, 50-, or 60-year-old friend of mine and thought they were “old,” unless they themselves had resigned themselves to a life of complicity and boredom. (Then again, a 20-year-old can just as easily do that!) It’s for this reason that I found it downright bizarre that some people used the occasion of my 35th birthday to tell me that I was now officially “over the hill.”

Worse yet, some people mentioned that I might not want to be as truthful as I am about my actual age. “Just tell people you’re 25,” one person told me. “Oh, just don’t tell people how old you are,” said another acquaintance. “Otherwise, people will start thinking of you as an‘older’ woman.”

Personal wake-up call

All of that amounted to a personal wake-up call regarding something that I’ve read and heard about for many years, particularly given the fact that I was raised in Los Angeles, a city that worships youth and youthful beauty above all else. As a student of feminist studies, I have learned women in various professions have been dealing with this issue in many forms and guises for as long as they have been allowed into the male-dominated workforce (which still represents, sad to say, nearly all of the major professions save for a few, including prostitution, nursing, social work, teaching and daycare.) To take but one classic example, female actors in Hollywood know this is so true that they’ll go to incredible lengths to have every manner of plastic surgery done to hide their age.

All the musicians in my family are familiar with the same kind of thing; women have certainly had it worse all the way around, but even the men know what it is to see attention turn to the young “up-and-comers” whose appearance and glamour seems to weigh more heavily than their actual talent.

I’m intimately aware of my own mortality, and of the reality that things can change dramatically from day to day—or even moment to moment—without even the slightest amount of advance warning. My intention is to keep going so that I can keep supporting and loving the wonderfully good people I’ve met in my life, and so that I can keep writing about and drawing attention to all of the things that need healing and repairing in this world. I’m 35, and I’m proud. I honestly want to be so healthy as to live to see another year, another decade, another quarter of a century. As long as I’m able to be here, I’ll never lie about my age. And to the “elders” in my life, I’ve just got to say thanks. Thanks for showing me what it is to live life, fully, at any age.

Silja J.A. Talvi is an award-winning journalist and columnist for Evergreen Monthly.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: