I am thinking about life and dreams. In particular I am thinking about the general attitudes that make people give up on their dreams and pretty much stop living once they reach a certain age. By living I mean, doing things that fill them with joy. It’s not that I’ve ever had a life that was particularly fulfilling. I was always afraid to live for one reason or another. Now that I am older I feel like I am not allowed to live. It seems like once you turn forty the expectation is that you’re going to start thinking of yourself as having no worth or at the very least having less worth than people who are under forty. The general attitude seems to be to be that people over forty are no longer relevant. I’m under no illusions that this attitude will ever be changed; but it would be wonderful to see more people over 40 doing things they are not supposed to be doing because they’re too old. That’s really the only way you challenge ideas about what it means to be a certain age. Let people insist all they want that you’re too old to be doing something. While they’re busy insisting you’re too old to do whatever, you’re busy doing whatever.
Being afraid to live your life is really a tragedy. My fear hit me at a very young age. I was already hiding from life by the time I was eighteen. I never faced any of my fears, so I never did anything I dreamed of doing. Now here I am at a point in my life when society says it’s too late for me. My ship has sailed. I have no worth. I’m irrelevant. That may well be true, that I am irrelevant to you; but should I not live my life because no one is interested in me? Is that why we’re here–to charm and entertain people and be liked by them and be considered relevant by them? Is that the purpose of my life? I don’t think so. By all means it would have been better for me to have realized when I was 20 that I did not need other people’s permission to exist, their approval or their admiration, and that I did not need to live in fear of their criticism. Who knows what I might have accomplished with my life had I not given other people the power to completely destroy my sense of self and make me so afraid of their judgement and their ridicule that I would not even go out of my house.
You should not live your life based on other people’s opinions on what’s okay and not okay for you to do.
