Growing Older: The Struggle with Ageism
Recently I watched a television show called Younger. The premise of the story is about a woman who decided to put her career on hold to raise her daughter and nurture her family through a nasty divorce. After her daughter is raised and in college she decides to return to the workforce but is met with rejection because of her age. She then decides to lie about her age telling everyone she is 26 years old instead of 40. This gets her a slew of opportunities with a younger group of friends, a younger boyfriend, promotion after promotion and opportunity after opportunity.
“The more life we live makes us better not inadequate.”
Unfortunately, there is a stigma against the inevitable. We are all going to get old, we are all getting older every day. Instead of embracing our timeline we try to run from it. Women get the brunt of the ageist society. There is a slew of remedies for our aging skin, sagging breasts, droopy faces ETC. We are taught early on that age is scary and bad and closer to death. Although the latter is true, it doesn’t have to be scary or bad. We should embrace our age and make ourselves as valuable as we can to society while we are still able. Doing that seems to be the hard part. How can you change a view of society that is very relevant? Ageism is instilled in the minds of people.
Growing up my grandmother never spoke of her age. To this day I still don’t know how old she is. From that instance, I have been on a mission to reach goals before I am a certain age and the older I get the more terrified that my time is expiring to be something great. I hate this mentality. I keep trying to tell myself that I am still young, but then someone younger just flies by me even though I am more experienced and have a stronger work ethic. No matter what I do, fighting time is a losing battle.
Ageism is the discrimination against a person because of their age. Meaning that someone could not give you a job because of your age, or someone passes you up for different opportunities because they feel that a younger person can do better. Granted there are things a younger person can do more effectively, but those things shouldn’t affect the lives or well-being of an older person. The decisions that are made by others should be true and fair. I am not sure how we can get there, but I know that we can start to speak wisdom into reality. The older we get the more we’ve learned and the more we know. The more life we live makes us better not inadequate. The more experience we have makes us more of an asset. Until we are too old to function we are still alive. Society needs to quit placing the stigma of older age (more than 40-years-old)being too late in life to do anything. Anti-ageism is an easy societal change. We can just respect all people’s progress and push each other to be the best person we can be no matter what our age. I for one, know that the older I get, the more fabulous I am and you can’t tell me any different.
