I Feel Old: 3 Tips On What To Do About This Discomfort
That today’s society puts a lot of pressure on us to give an attractive and desirable image is no secret. For decades now, people have been writing about how in apparently free countries there is a tendency to make all citizens fit into a mold of what is considered aesthetic, pleasant to look at. And that this pressure falls especially on women is not something that surprises anyone either.
This phenomenon is related to the thought of “I feel old”, very common in adult women of a wide variety of ages. However, contrary to what one might think, the personal aspect is not the only thing that explains this phenomenon. Yes, it is true that there is an obsession with wrinkles, skin that loses firmness and gray hair, but the problem, although partly psychological and imagined, goes deeper. Understanding this is essential to stop feeling the anguish and sadness that a large part of the female population suffers.
In this article we will focus on what happens when a woman feels old despite not being very old, given that in elderly people who feel old age as something bad, the problem is of a different nature.
When it comes to alleviating discomfort of this type, everything involves understanding the material reasons that lead us to feel old even long before we have entered the vital stage of old age, since feel bad about it It is worth highlighting the latter, since old age in itself does not have to be something that produces sadness; Although in practice it goes hand in hand with certain physical limitations, how we experience it when we reach this phase depends on how we value those limitations, not old age itself.
In women who feel very old despite not belonging to the elderly, what happens is that the concept of old age acts as a “bridge” between the way we imagine real old age feels, on the one hand , and the current situation, on the other. And why does this happen? Fundamentally, so society dictates that it must be a woman not because of the fact of having entered what is biologically old age.
For centuries, women have been sexualized to the extreme, to the point of converting reproduction into their main task, along with taking care of the home, which is the place in which the fruits of that reproduction must be protected and educated. And since the reproduction clock runs somewhat faster than the life expectancy clock, During the earliest stage of youth, all the social pressure to have children is concentrated while having passed that vital stage, the lower chances of having babies are associated with old age in general, and uselessness in particular.
As much as we have come a long way in terms of sexism, the idea that a woman’s main goal is to attract a good husband and have children still weighs on the way we unconsciously value women. In a context in which the reproductive role of women is constantly reminded, the smallest signs of aging, which usually appear around the age of 25, can cause obsessive thoughts to appear. Sometimes, it is not even necessary to have seen objective signs of aging: It is very common for 19 or 20 year old girls to feel old when anticipating the moment in which they will stop looking so young, and considering it as soon.
As we have seen, the thought “I feel old” is based on a paradox. On the one hand, it is based on an imaginary concern, which is normally not based on any specific characteristic of one’s own body that is objectively harmful or makes it less functional. On the other hand, it is not simply a problem belonging to the mind of the woman as an individual, but exists because Being a woman of a certain age has certain undesirable social consequences because of sexism.
Any initiative that a woman wants to undertake to stop feeling bad for being the age she is necessarily requires taking action to prevent the rest of society from assigning less value to her because she is not a post-adolescent. Thus, some useful proposals to follow are the following.
1. Don’t let your culture be limited to the mainstream
Mainstream culture is that which reproduces the most deep-rooted and widespread cultural vices, and if a woman exposes herself exclusively to it, you are much more likely to feel all the social pressure linked to gender roles
Therefore, frequenting social environments in which the idealization of extreme youth has less power and is questioned is very beneficial, since it provides a critical perspective that allows us to stop seeing what is felt as exclusively our own problem, and move on to See it as the consequence of a social and historical phenomenon, which may disappear in the future.
2. Look for networks of female solidarity
This measure is similar to the previous one, and has to do with stop depending only on male approval, whose perception of women, traditionally, extols extreme youth. The simple fact of surrounding yourself with more women with this critical vision of what society expects of them is very beneficial.
As we have seen, the reproductive role assigned by society is part of the core of the problem. If it is said that men age better and more slowly than women, it is partly because the reproductive pressure does not fall on them: whether they are parents or not matters much less than whether a woman is or has been a mother or not.
So that, stop making your life revolve around creating a family as if you couldn’t be happy outside of this (regardless of whether that family exists or not), is part of the solution to stop feeling old in the bad sense of the term.
