Filed under: age, feminism, Healthcare | Tags: A Sense of Impending Doom, Healthcare, mammogram, menopause, perimenopause, speculum, Superman, The Change, What Would Virginia Woolf Do?, women's health
On my 40th birthday, I was struck with a sudden and horrifying sense of fatalism. I figured I’d over-absorbed the cultural preference for young women, that I’d over-attached my sense of self-worth to my youth, even though I thought I knew better. I figured that the reason I felt like I was turning 80 instead of 40 was because I’d skipped the mandated mother stage and just went straight from maiden to crone.
Then, recently, on a podcast, the guest mentioned that “a sense of impending doom” was a very common experience for women going through what used to be euphemistically called The Change.
Now – a lot of us have a sense of impending doom these days, what with the political landscape looking like it’s auditioning for a post-apocalyptic B movie, but my sense of impending doom hit even before the actual impending doom. So I suspect it’s partly the hormones shifting in a changing body.
About two years ago, out of the blue, I began to get headaches. Weird ones. According to the docs – it’s migraines. And they have been debilitating, disabling and pretty much took over the last two years of my life. I saw four different neurologists and headache specialists. Not one of them suggested that this sudden late onset of chronic migraine might be a result of perimenopause. Not one. It took the mother of a friend telling me about her migraines ending after menopause and suggesting mine could be the start of that for me to put the possible pieces together. Do I know for sure that this migraine situation is perimenopause? Nope. That’s not really a thing that’s knowable.
You know why? Because despite the fact that every (cis) woman who lives long enough will go through it, there’s no real medical conversation about it. Despite the fact that there are very real, very serious, very debilitating experiences for many women in the middle of that transformation, no one seems to be addressing it. So many women my age and older have been struggling all on their own with this or that symptom, while there may be a common explanation for our pain or our sense of doom or discomfort.
Perimenopause is the process that leads to menopause – menopause being the definitive end of the menstrual cycle. And of course, this kind of reverse puberty, is a perfectly natural organic process. But just because it’s natural and organic, doesn’t mean there won’t be trouble and that we shouldn’t understand what’s happening. Childbirth is also perfectly natural and organic but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t understand all of its phases and aspects. Just because something is natural, doesn’t mean there won’t be trouble.
And I have run into trouble. Many of my friends have also run into trouble. And I find myself pretty furious about how little the medical establishment has to say about it.
In this same time period, my doctor insisted on my getting a mammogram. Just because I am 44 and now’s the time when they give them. There’s quite a bit of controversy about the efficacy of all this breast screening – quite a few people have suggested that it may do more harm than good. There’s no history of breast cancer in my family and there was no reason to suspect anything wrong but my gynecologist said she couldn’t give me the medication that might help with the hormone migraine situation without one.
So, there I was in a women’s imaging center, getting my boobs squished in a machine and then called back the next day to have them squished another way because of “asymmetries” and then be sonogrammed and pushed around with a sonogram wand and after all that stress, it turned out my breasts were fine. As we thought.
So here I am, having a completely unnecessary set of procedures that are uncomfortable, stressful, anxiety producing and time consuming – while the thing that is actually wrong, that is actually causing chaos in my body, goes completely unaddressed.
And sisters, I got really fucking pissed about it. I suddenly felt like – oh, this goddamn medicalized world is like a Hollywood adolescent boy – obsessed with boobs and vaginas (-we’ve been pried open by speculums from an early age-) but not particularly concerned with what is actually going on inside the person. The fact that we have this insane assemblyline for mammography and no understanding or plan for perimenopause is ridiculous. Yes – breast cancer screening is important. I get it. But not every woman gets breast cancer (gratefully!) And almost EVERY SINGLE (cis) woman will go through perimenopause. That’s half the adult population.
And before it (maybe) kicked in for me, I knew next to nothing about it. And I’m a pretty reasonably informed woman.
I knew about hot flashes. That was about the extent of it. Which you know – it’s okay. I’m allowed to not know things – but I get the sense that that’s all a lot of doctors know about menopause as well.
Here’s the thing – aside from compulsory mammogram and pelvic exams – women’s health is dramatically under examined. For the majority of modern medicine’s history, men have been seen as the norm and women as the deviation. In clinical trials of many things, only men were studied and the results were applied to women. And one of the extraordinarily infuriating facts about this is that women were excluded from such things because we have a menstrual cycle. So rather than study the hormones or the varieties of the menstrual cycle – science and medicine have mostly just told women to go ask our mothers. (An actual thing a doctor said to a woman asking about menopause.)
In treating my (possible) perimenopause symptoms, I’ve seen four neurologists, several physical therapists, two opthamologists, two behavioral optometrists, tried antidepressants, anti-convulsants and endless triptans. The first thing in two years to make a real dramatic difference is a low dose of estrogen. I mean…here is modern medicine looking at everything but the source, everything but perimenopause.
No one wants to talk about perimenopause or menopause. It is incredibly taboo. Initially, I suspect the more medically accurate language was supposed to help us make it less so. Like the movement to use anatomically correct language for our genitals, calling menopause menopause was once thought to be a way to liberate us from the stigma. But I don’t think it has.
So, I’m liking “The Change” – even if it sounds a little old fashioned. It is a good descriptor for what I’m experiencing. It makes me feel like a superhero in mid-transformation. I’m Peter Parker in the process of getting bitten by that radioactive spider. It doesn’t necessarily feel good during the transformation itself but once I come through it, I fully expect to be a more powerful superhero on the other side of it.
And since no one can tell me whether or not the change I’m in the middle of is actually perimenopause – since there is no medically precise definition of this moment for me – The Change is actually a more accurate description of what is happening to me. It’s certainly A Change if not The Change. And a lot of my friends are also going through A Change. A transformation. We’re going into a phone booth – like the one Clark Kent changes into Superman into. Maybe since we don’t really use phone booths anymore, we could co-opt the word. Like, when I explain what’s been going on with me these last few years, I could just say, “Well, I’ve been in the phone booth.”
Because, while these headaches suck, a lot, while it has been no fun in this phone booth, I will say that the benefits of this transformation are not bad. Pretty much everything that drove me crazy about myself in my 20s has faded. In my youth, I was constantly beating myself up for being too nice, for putting up with things that I didn’t like, for not saying what I thought. And I have, as I have entered the phone booth, grown much bolder, much less concerned about others, less fearful and much more direct and clear. It’s everything I wished I could be twenty years ago. The phone booth has these terrible health side effects but it has given me the super power of transforming myself into the person I wanted to be and never thought possible.
This blog is also a podcast. You can find it on iTunes.
If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Anchor, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs, an album of Love Songs, an album of Gen X Songs and More. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: age, art, clown, comedy, music, theatre | Tags: cheese, compliments, feedback, Hamlet, mature, mothballs, Shakespeare, wine, wise
I have arrived at the point in my career wherein people are starting to call my work “mature.” It has happened with my playwriting. It has happened with my singing. And I do not like it. In both of these instances, “mature” seemed to be meant as a compliment. “Mature” is not (yet) code for “old” – but meant to suggest a kind of complexity and evolution. I think. So why don’t I like it? Surely I want my work to mature, right? I want my work to age like a good cheese or a fine wine, don’t I?
Don’t I? I don’t know. I’m trying to understand why “maturing” doesn’t please me. At the heart of my discomfort of it is the dismissal of what came before. If this play is mature, it suggests that the plays that came before were immature, just little adolescent saplings running around untethered. It implies a kind of linear artistic development and I just don’t think such a thing exists. An artistic life does not travel in a straight line. It circles. It comes back around to ideas from the past and brings them to the future.
It’s like this conversation my partner and I had about Shakespeare. He noticed that sometimes when scholars don’t have definitive evidence for when a play was written, some of them will group the plays thematically. That is, they think because Shakespeare wrote a play about fathers and with disobedient daughters in one year, that that would suggest the undated father-daughter play would be around the same time. To me, that’s bananas. While certainly we all have our artistic phases where we obsess over one thing for awhile – we also have artistic touchstones, ideas that we return to again and again, ideas that we investigate anew from a new place in the life circle.
And maybe that’s why I find the idea of maturity so uninteresting. I mean, Shakespeare, again, is a good example of this. Some might say Hamlet is his most “mature” play. It sits at the top of achievement in Western literature. And yet it sits right in the middle of his career. Probably written in 1600, Shakespeare had many more plays to write after that one. Some of those plays are very silly and some of them are quite wild (including my favorite, Cymbeline.) Which are the most “mature”?
Maybe it’s my clown training but I am not particularly interested in maturity. Maturity has airs of seriousness, waves of severity that just don’t connect with my sense of play. When someone calls me immature, they are usually pointing out my irreverence, silliness or non-conformity. I value all those things tremendously.
I know maturity doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve lost my irreverence but maturity smells like mothballs to me. What I hope people who tell me my voice has matured (either metaphorically or literally) mean is that my stuff is complex, layered and interesting. I sometimes get called “wise,” too. And I like that just fine. I like it a lot, actually. Because there is always space for a wise fool.
I suppose, too, that I can’t help but keep returning to the idea that labeling my current work as “mature” suggests that my previous work is less than. And I just don’t appreciate any compliments for my newborn that insult my previous creative children.
I don’t mean to make anyone self conscious about giving me compliments. I don’t receive quite enough of them to start getting picky about them. Believe me, I sincerely thanked every person who called my work “mature” because it feels appropriate to accept a compliment in the spirit it was given, even if it has an odor of backhandedness about it.
I will say, though, that no one has seen enough of my body of work to make such a judgment. The only human to have a thorough enough experience of my oeuvre would be my mother. She’s the only one who’s seen enough of it to make that call. And I think the last time she called me “mature” was when I was a teenager. (I was very mature then. I’m not sure I am anymore! )
So, if you are tempted to call someone’s work mature, maybe dig a little deeper. What do you mean?
Is the work complicated? Layered? Deep? Rich?
I mean – let’s look at wine and cheese. We don’t stop at describing a wine or cheese mature. We call it nutty or grassy or robust or smooth.
I would be so delighted to have my work described with the subtlety of wine or cheese descriptions. Some of my work may be mature. It may be immature. Neither of those categories is useful to me. Call it robust or nutty, though? I’m gonna eat that up.
This blog is also a podcast. You can find it on iTunes.
If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Anchor, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs, an album of Love Songs, an album of Gen X Songs and More. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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You can help support both my maturity and immaturity
by becoming my patron on Patreon.
Click HERE to Check out my Patreon Page
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog (but aren’t into the commitment of Patreon) and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Filed under: age, dance, Feldenkrais | Tags: dance, Feldenkrais, Movement, one song, pleasure
One of my Feldenkrais clients was pretty much house-bound when I met her. She could get around her apartment with a walker but going out was really challenging for her. She used to go out dancing once a week but now she barely moved at all. Mostly she sat in her chair or propped up in her bed.
In addition to our Feldenkrais Functional Integration work together, I saw that I needed to find a way to keep her moving when I wasn’t there. I tried to give her some audio Awareness Through Movement exercises but she couldn’t really hear them so that possibility was out. I needed to help her find pleasurable movement, movement she could do. Since I knew she liked to dance, I recommended she dance in her chair once a day. We found a Beatles song on her phone and did some sit down dancing for a couple of minutes before she got tired. When I left, I gave her a prescription of dancing to one song every day. (We don’t do prescriptions in the Feldenkrais Method so I found it hilarious to use this language for dance.) I was pretty confident that this was going to help her. I know just a little bit of twisting and weight shifting would do her tremendous amount of good. And it did.
Then I realized I should prescribe myself the same thing. I love dancing and it always makes me feel better but I don’t do it as often as I might – usually because I don’t feel like I have the time to commit to a class or an extended dance session. It is very easy for a day to go by without any non-utilitarian movement – despite my firm belief in pleasurable movement as a beneficial practice. Additionally, I have been reeling from movement triggered migraines – so movement has been a bit of a landmine for me in the last couple of years. At their worst, the migraines just want me to lie very still in the dark.
But. One song, I can do. Not in the MIDDLE of a bad migraine obviously. But I can find a way to dance to at least one song once a day. Working with a client with such a limited range of motion has shown me how easy it is to lose flexibility, to lose the ability to experience movement as a pleasurable sensation. But it also shows me how much benefit there is in just moving what you can move. If you can’t move your arms, move your legs. If you can’t stand up, dance sitting down. If you can’t dance sitting up, dance lying down. Even if the only thing you can move is your eyelids, it is worth dancing those around or dancing in your imagination.
When we experience injury or pain or any movement limitations, we often shut down more than we need to. We think if we can’t dance the way we used to we can’t dance at all. But we can always dance something in some way. A finger dance? A nostril dance? I don’t know. But I do know that a little bit of dance goes a long way for the whole body.
In helping my client experience pleasurable movement again, I saw that I also helped her re-establish pathways in the brain that remember how to walk with more ease, to be able to get up off a bench unassisted, to regain balance and so on. When I saw her last week, she joyfully told me how she went out into the world four times that week. Once even, she went out unassisted. I attribute that regaining of independence to the dancing (and to the Feldenkrais, of course.)
I know the aids in the next room think crazy things are going on when they hear me singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” but I’m working on getting her to dance with her arms while lying down, which will eventually allow her to roll herself over. Extra-daily movement like dance helps the brain understand that you want to be able to move in many directions. We have a use it or lose it brain and if we only move in our habitual paths, we lose our capacity to move in other ways. For myself, I wanted to be able to keep moving in many directions, which I do with Feldenkrais but I also knew it was possible that I would enjoy my life more if I followed my own advice and danced to one song a day.
And, of course, once I’ve started dancing, I tend to go on. One song becomes two, two become three for as long as is pleasurable or as long as I have time for. It’s an incredible mood adjuster. There have been many times that I did not want to dance because I was feeling hopeless or angry or sad. I danced anyway because it was only one song, after all – and most of the time I felt better. At least a little bit. I have a little note stuck to my computer that says “One Song” so I don’t forget to do it. Sometimes it’s late at night and I see my little note and realize I still haven’t done it. So I put my headphones in and do a late night boogie before bed.
In our time strapped world it is so hard to find time to enjoy to move our bodies, to listen to music with attention, to “indulge” in non-utilitarian tasks. We can find time for one song, though. And one song can help.
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Need some help choosing a song? This is my dance playlist. Just hit shuffle and go!
This was at a college reunion. There was a DJ and a dance floor. That stuff is super awesome and fun. But I don’t wait for that stuff to find a way to dance.
This blog is also a Podcast. You can find it on iTunes. If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Anchor, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs, an album of Love Songs and More. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
*
You can help me keep dancing
by becoming my patron on Patreon.
Click HERE to Check out my Patreon Page
*
Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog (but aren’t into the commitment of Patreon) and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Filed under: age, business, feminism | Tags: age, being seen, Cool, dentist, invisible lady
The last time I was at my dentist’s office, he passed by while I was in with the hygienist, waved, said hello and then, as he walked away said, “You’re so cool.”
It was very charming and he said it in such a way that made me feel very cool. Like he’d just seen Lou Reed or something. Or Laurie Anderson.
And my dentist is also pretty cool. He has this extraordinary quality of being genuinely excited about teeth while simultaneously being exuberantly curious about the people those teeth belong to.
But that day, the day he said I was so cool, he did something kind of uncool. Instead of giving me the dental exam himself, he sent in his new partner. He declared that I would love the new guy and that the new guy would love me and then my dentist was gone.
You may not be surprised to learn that I did not love the new guy and I’m pretty sure the new guy did not love me. The new guy barely even saw me. He was polite enough. He smiled and asked how my day was going but it was pretty much like talking with a flight attendant on the way out the door.
Now why did my dentist, who thinks I’m cool, who has a sense of me as a human being think this guy was so great? Probably because that guy is great to him. Me, though, the new guy just saw as a lady in her 40s with a set of teeth that were going to help him get paid that day. To him, there was nothing to see. He had no curiosity about who was in the chair in front of him.
I’ve come to recognize that sense of not being seen, particularly by younger men. The socialization of women being valued only by their youth and/or beauty means often that men, like the new guy at my dentist’s office, only manage the bare minimum of social politeness with women like me. The new guy will never think I’m cool. Not ever. Even if I came in arm in arm with Laurie Anderson and Kendrick Lamar. Not even if the entire cast of Hamilton sang me an entrance number and surrounded the dental chair.
And I don’t need my dentist to think I’m cool. It’s nice – but it’s not what I go to the dentist for. However it IS what I pay extra for. Not the coolness part but the being SEEN part. See, I have, periodically, in brief interludes, had dental insurance and I saw other dentists (some adequate, some rough, some appalling) but none of them saw me. And I went to see my dentist, even though he didn’t take my insurance. I could have gone elsewhere for cheaper, but I came to see him because he saw me and that seeing was coupled with a kind and gentle quality of care that was worth a lot to me.
But…I won’t go see the new guy. And I probably won’t see my dentist now either since there’s a good chance he’ll just toss me over to the new guy. I’ll go get my teeth cleaned and x-rayed and examined at a cheaper, less cool office my next go round.
And if I’m very lucky, there’s a chance that the new place will have someone who’ll see me and maybe, if I’m extra extra lucky, just maybe think I’m cool.
Laurie Anderson is SO COOL. SO COOL.
This blog is also a Podcast. You can find it on iTunes. If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Anchor, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs, an album of Love Songs and more. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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You can help me keep me be cool
by becoming my patron on Patreon.
Click HERE to Check out my Patreon Page
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog (but aren’t into the commitment of Patreon) and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Filed under: age, feminism, Leadership, resistance | Tags: #MeToo, #TimesUp, Alyssa Milano, Brian Lehrer, Feminist, Generation X, Tarana Burke, women
Y’all. You guys. I was done. I was totally done with this piece. I was not going to write another word about Generation X but I’ve just realized, in the midst of the current river of men being called to account for their years of harassment and abuse, that the majority of the women who kicked this off were Gen X women. Harvey Weinstein harassed, abused, raped or assaulted women in their twenties when they were young and no one cared what they thought then but those women are in their 40s and 50s now and I don’t think that’s insignificant. I would also like to point out that Meghan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, the two women who broke the Weinstein story that jumpstarted this moment, are both Gen X, as well.
Gen X women have stepped out of our victim years and are stepping into our power. We thought were the Only Ones but have woken up to the fact that we are not alone.
These aren’t our middle aged years – these are our power years – our witch years. We’re not going to take it. We are sisters who twisted ourselves into knots for too long and no, we’re not going to take it anymore.
Look at who is at the forefront of this movement – Tarana Burke, Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd, Mira Sorvino, Salma Hayek, even Gwennyth Paltrow. These are all Generation X women. And now, with the Time’s Up initiative, Gen X-ers Shonda Rhimes, Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston have picked up the baton.
This watershed moment was kicked off by Gen X women. But I have heard nary a peep about that. In fact, on the Brian Lehrer show, there was a segment called The Generational Divide in the #MeToo Movement. It was a conversation between a Baby Boomer and a Millennial – how differently those two generations see this moment. Gen X barely got a mention throughout the hour long discussion. That’s when I knew I had to come back to this Generation X opus.
I do not think it was an accident that there was a twenty year gap between the crime and the reckoning. In part, it’s the changing of the times, sure – but it is also that women stepping into our 40s and 50s are stepping into a new power. I suspect that young women are still dismissed when they make claims today. I suspect that young attractive women are still less likely to report harassment or abuse – not because there’s something “weak” about them as I’ve heard some people say (WTF?!) but because young women are in an incredibly awkward position. They have a whole lot more to lose – they have not much career behind them and a great deal to gain in the future. Predators prey on young women precisely because of that vulnerability of position. Young women have historically had no real authority and are judged almost exclusively on their ability to be pretty and compliant. Disrupt either of those and your currency as a young woman goes down dramatically.
As we’ve seen, even just rejecting advances causes tremendous consequences – Mira Sorvino was blacklisted and had her entire career derailed because she fought off Weinstein’s advances. Rose McGowan was called crazy for years because she said something at the time. Young women are believed less than older ones. And now that the majority of the actresses who were abused in their twenties are now in their 40s and 50s, there’s nothing to lose and no reason to hide the truth anymore.
That is, Gen X women are no longer really seen as bankable young women so are now in a key position to call people on their shit.
I also don’t think the fact that many of these women are now mothers is insignificant. Every woman I know who became a mom became more fierce and stronger and determined to fight for their children to grow up in a better world. I know that that’s a part of why my Baby Boomer mother is out resisting every day – to make the world a better place for me. And Gen X moms are fighting, not so much for themselves, as for their children. Many Gen X women waited a while to have children and are now not only entering their power years, but are entering their power years with the ferocity of young children to defend.
I think the moment that this movement will really soar is when all the Dads join in, too. Some are already on it. But, at the moment, men are mostly still leaving the heavy lifting of social change to the women. While women addressed #MeToo and #TimesUp at the Golden Globes, the extent of participation from men at that ceremony was to wear a button.
Gen X women kicked this off and while I don’t want to see us left out of the conversation, it is my hope that the cause gets lifted up by all genders from all generations so that Gen X won’t have to keep this movement afloat by ourselves. We’re good at going it alone but change works better with everyone involved.
In part, I think Gen X women are leading this movement because, at our age, we are suddenly confronted with, not only the sexism we’ve endured for decades, but also ageism. The culture wants to put us out to pasture and Gen X is just not having it. We won’t accept invisibility. We won’t accept things the way they’ve always been. Suddenly our ability to call bullshit is coming in very handy.We’re not going to take it anymore. Time’s Up.
You can support this Gen X woman
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Click HERE to Check out my Patreon Page
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This blog is also a Podcast. You can find it on iTunes. If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Soundcloud, click here.
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
Filed under: age | Tags: Baby Boomers, feud, Generation Jones, Generation X, Generation Z, Grumpy Old Man, Millennials, resentment, rivalry, robot overlords
This brings me to this supposed rivalry I’ve been reading about around the web. According to the AV Club, Gen X and Millennials are in a battle. There are articles like What Are Millennials Killing Today? and Why Gen X is So Pissed at Millennials. This “blood feud” seems unlikely to me. I recognize that there’s a lot of anti-millennial talk out there and maybe Gen X is to blame. If so – on behalf of Gen X, I would like to apologize to you, Millennials. That’s shitty behavior and we will try to do better in the future. But…I think it’s kind of hard to be in a rivalry with a group of people when you are outnumbered by them so dramatically. I suspect it’s hard to be in a rivalry if the other side doesn’t even know who you are. A Gen X friend of mine recently described having to explain what Gen X was after being mistaken for a Baby Boomer by a young bartender. The bartender didn’t even know Gen X existed.
I have seen some resentments bubble up, of course. Gen X is outnumbered and that’s never an easy position to be in. It’s like, a few locusts are cool, they make cool sounds and they have cool legs but when there are more of them, they can be a little overwhelming, especially if they get into your trees. So sometimes it’s just a numbers game, a situation of feeling alone in a room, like no one understands where you’re coming from. And sometimes it’s a sense of having waited years for your work to pay off to be promoted or signed or published or produced or whatever and then while you were waiting patiently in line, someone came up with an app that eliminated the line completely and they leaped into rewards that you’d been waiting for for decades. Articles about Gen X at work point to a kind of skipping over us that seems to happen to a lot of Gen X-ers. So if some Gen X-ers resent you, Millennials, it’s not personal – it’s just a bit like watching one’s parents change all the rules for your younger siblings and also not giving you the present they promised you.
And my fellow Gen X-ers, it’d probably be best if you toned the resentment of Millennials down, otherwise we all end up like the Grumpy Old Man from the SNL sketch of the 90s.
“In my day, we didn’t have smart phones, no, we had dumb ones, ones you had to dial with your finger in a little plastic or metal prison that you raked across the surface below the razor sharp end point over and over again until your fingers bled. And when you finally finished dialing the number, if they happened to be on the phone with someone else when you dialed, you’d have to hang up and go through the whole process again until you got your bloody-fingered call through. And we liked it! We loved it! We were bloody-fingered, exhausted, desperate dumb phone callers without a hope in the world of reaching anyone and we liked it. We loved it!” (*Not an actual Grumpy Old Man sketch)
Also, it wouldn’t do to get our future overlords angry. (JK, Millennials, we know it’s actually the robots and sentient smartphones who will be our overlords.)
Maybe we should all just pile on to Generation Z, who are growing up with Smartphones and are clearly the worse the wear for it. By the way, while growing up with Smartphones is a legitimate concern, one of the things that Sherry Turkle has often pointed out in her work is that it is often not the child’s use of the Smartphone that is the problem, it is the parents’ use of the Smartphone (and tablet and so on.) That is, the thing we blame younger generations for may in fact be our problem. We’re the ones who can’t put our phones down and talk to each other. We’re the one who get anxious, living in a constantly plugged in world and we project that onto kids. Or in the words of an often mocked Gen X ad, “I learned it from you, Dad. I learned it from watching you!” So I don’t think piling onto Gen Z is the answer.
We need to find ways to work together. Generationally, Millennials and Boomers are better at coming together within their own generations than Gen X. That’s something for Gen X to explore doing more of. Simultaneously, what we all need to look at is including a diversity of age and generations in our structures. If you’re not Gen X, you might not notice when Gen X is missing but it’s worth paying attention to, I think, because we do have quite a lot to contribute. If nothing else, we can provide missing Gen X. If ping pong games at the office are always Millennial vs Baby Boomer, you’re missing someone. It could be Gen X or it could be Generation Jones AKA OG-Xers AKA Shadow Boomers AKA The Following Edge – or as I like to call them, the heroic generation. Because damn, Gen Jones! You got Barack Obama, Rebecca Solnit, Sally Yates, Jaron Lanier, Billy Bragg, Angela Merkel and so on. I mean – Gen Jones is badass and even less often discussed than Gen X. Probably because they didn’t get a trendy nickname at an opportune time. I think Gen Jones is so cool, you guys.
Which makes me think about generations a bit like a family. See, I tend to idolize Gen Jones, like a really cool big sister or brother and I see Millennials and Z as spunky younger siblings. And Gen X starts to get resentful when our younger siblings start to behave as if they are Only Children – when all we ever wanted was for our little sisters to know how cool we are and we were. If there is a rivalry (again, I’m not sure there is) this is what it’s about.
This familial feeling is a huge aspect of the “rivalry” conversation and age-ism is another. Often, the generational shots fired are age-ism in disguise. Ageism is usually thought of as an issue of the old but it goes both ways – ageism can impact all ages. Our culture fetishizes the young and dismisses the old, particularly old women. This TEDtalk by Ashton Applewhite makes a great case for why ageism is everyone’s issue. I imagine we can all do a better job of listening to and learning from each other.
I heard some Millennials on the younger side of the Millennial spectrum chatting in a coffee shop recently. They were sure that they’d have their lives completely figured out by the time they were 30 – that they’d stop caring what anyone thought by then. This made me laugh. Because the gift of not giving a fuck anymore is probably much further away than that, if my generation’s experience is anything to go by. Most of us just entered this stage in the last few years and we’re long past thirty.
See, this is why it’s worth it to talk to each other about this sort of stuff – to know how other generations made it through the same things that are coming down the pike for you. To find inspiration and courage from the heroes ahead of us and the heroes behind us and the ones we’re standing right next to. The more we talk to each other, get to know each other, have some of those valuable conversations Sherry Turkle talks about in her newest book – the better off we’ll all be.
In diving deep into my generation with this series, I’ve not only learned a ton about my cohort but also about the rest of you. It helps to get together. It helps to learn about ourselves and it helps to learn about each other. Even things as seemingly small as what songs meant something to you in your youth or what TV shows shaped your world can help us understand one another. A generation is a way of understanding waves of experience, of understanding the formative landscape for each group of people. I want to read your generational analysis, too. I want to know what it was like to grow up Millennial, to know what it was like to grow up Xennial (yep – that’s a thing) or to grow up Generation Jones or Baby Boomer. Generational Thinking may be bullshit. It may be a marketing ploy. But it is still meaningful bullshit.
I think I was born at the right time. I belong here in Generation X. But I also think you were born at the right time. We were all born at the right time to teach each other what we missed or what we still need to learn.
This is Part 7 of a 7 part series.
You can read Part 1 here Part 2 here Part 3 here
Part 4 here
Part 5 here
Part 6 here
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Filed under: age, art, dance, theatre | Tags: commitment, cost, dance, dancers, dedication, injuries, Monica Bill Barnes and Company, performance, performers, scars
Because one of my beloved collaborators loves the work of Monica Bill Barnes, I sought out a performance. As soon as I saw Happy Hour, I, too, was in artistic love. I laughed and cried. I laugh-cried and cry-laughed. It was one of those shows that made me feel as if there might be a reason to go on. I’ve seen it multiple times.
I’m not going to lie; there are some days in this artist’s life in which I get a bad case of What’s-the-Point-itis. When the labor and heartbreak of making theatre just doesn’t seem equal to the reward. For me, seeing Monica Bill Barnes and Company perform is a great cure for that feeling of wondering what the point is. Good art is the point.
Monica Bill Barnes’ latest show (One Night Only) was no exception in this way – but it also brought to the surface a new “-itis” that I wasn’t quite sure what to do with at first. I learned in this show that Monica Bill Barnes and I are the same age. I learned that we share a lifelong commitment to our respective art forms. And in learning about the cost of that commitment to the dancers during the show, I learned about the cost of my own.
This may be a spoiler (DANCE SPOILER ALERT – skip ahead if you’re going to this show and would prefer not to know what’s going to happen -) but towards the end of the show, the two dancers listen to a list of injuries they have sustained over their lifetimes in dance, as we watch them continue to dance. There is a concrete cost to dedicating your life to dance and as I listened to it, I cried my face off.
Partly I cried out of admiration for the performer/creators who are facing the accumulation of that cost (for my benefit as an audience member) and for whom there is a finite amount of time to continue to dance the way they want. But I think I also cried for all the things my own dedication to my art has cost me. I can’t list them for you, not by year or by category – but watching this show made it very clear to me that all these years of dedication to art have taken a toll. Is the toll physical? Maybe not directly – but as everything that happens to us mentally, emotionally, spiritually, happens through the body, I don’t see how it couldn’t be. There is a cost to this kind of dedication. I knew there would be costs and I made my choice to pay that cost willingly a long time ago. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have scars.
Watching an artist (who is my peer in age and commitment) honor the injuries, the pain and the cost along the way helps me honor my own. Seeing the sacrifices of a life dedicated to art laid bare, I can see my own dedication, my own sacrifices and how hard the road has been but also why it was worth it.
Seeing the cost, I also understand the point. The point is that we keep dancing, we keep writing, we keep creating, we keep producing, we keep performing, we keep making things because art is important to our humanity and each encounter with it, whether in the audience or on the stage, has the opportunity to teach us something about ourselves.
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One Night Only is still running for another couple of weeks, click here for info. And Happy Hour comes back soon, too, I think.
photo of Happy Hour by Grant Halverson (I lifted it from MBB&Co’s Website.)
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This blog is also a Podcast. You can find it on iTunes. If you’d like to listen to me read a previous blog on Soundcloud, click here. And I usually sing at the end, if you want to hear that.
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. If you liked the blog and want to support it but aren’t quite ready for patronage on Patreon, You can tip me a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
