Ageing and You Yourself

We are near to the end of this modest attempt to recognise that all of us get old, and we have explored some of the ways in which we can cope with its inevitability. We were saying at one point that we hardly recognise the person we have become as we look in the mirror and no longer see the face that once we had. O.K., we can’t do anything about that but we CAN tell ourselves that we are still the person we have always been. You are still you yourself.

We kid ourselves that’s it is not so. Forgetting a name? Well, perhaps that’s nothing new – you’ve always had that problem! Fingers slipping onto the wrong keys on the computer? Again – that may be nothing new, you may never have been digitally agile! Puffing a bit as you climb a hill? – since when have you been an antelope! Mispronouncing words? – malapropisms have long been your trademark! Have to use the spell-check a lot when you are using this amazing machine? Be honest, you were never that good at spelling. Parking the car takes longer than it used to? Yes, but three-point turns were never your speciality.

Ageing emphasises existing characteristics and they mark us out as the person we are and will always be, rather than replacing us with a new persona. The story may be different and the pace of our life has changed and you are not as mentally quick as you once were; it’s a new scenario, but the drama of your life remains. This old person is the same one that you have been living with all these years.

We have been reviewing a process not a transmogrification! You are not as beautiful as you once were perhaps: shrunken a little perhaps, and lined. It feels sometimes that you are a stranger to yourself and perhaps to others too. People who haven’t seen you for a while can’t hide their surprise. It happened to me recently. After some years of not seeing each other, we met with a very dear friend and she exclaimed, ‘you don’t look the same’. ‘Of course not I thought. But it’s still me’.

And so it is.

Bryan