We sat down with Jacinta to discuss the quiet revolution unfolding in the lives of older women, and why there’s never been a better time to embrace who we’re becoming.
A Wisdom of Age shares powerful stories from older women and explores a “revolution” in how we experience ageing. What does that revolution look and feel like to you?
It was incredible to travel the country speaking to groups of women about how they felt about ageing. What became very clear, very quickly, was that it wasn’t ageing in itself that was causing the greatest issues for most of them, but the way they were suddenly perceived as ‘old’ and disregarded. The message that was resounding is that the revolution has begun, women are pushing back against these ideas and are looking to take control of the narrative. Ageing is one of the great human experiences.
Many women feel like they become invisible as they age. How did the women you spoke with respond to that idea — and how do you personally navigate that space?
In my second book, A Question of Age, I spoke about how women suddenly become invisible when they hit middle age. Middle age really is a time for many women to recalibrate and ask the hard questions of the world we live in, ‘were we really only interesting to you when we were young?’ And for a lot of women, it comes as a shock. But what is interesting about older women in their 70s, 80s, and 90s is that they are living the liberation that this invisibility affords. Once you come to terms with the way society treats ageing women, something gets unleashed – and there is a certain freedom that it allows to be and say whatever you want.
The idea of “reclaiming the fierce girl inside us” is such a powerful image. Do you think we lose her as we age — or is she just waiting to be reawakened?
She is always there, waiting for us to remember her. But yes, as we go through careers, families and domestic life in our middle years, she is often lost. It’s in the elder years that she is reawakened as we find ourselves, hopefully, free to pursue what she had dreamt for us. That fierce girl is the embodiment of what we can be, if we are allowed to listen to her. She is our instincts and our guide.
You’ve said ageing requires “love and rebellion.” What do those two forces look like in practice?
The love part of this equation is the need for us all to be gentle with ourselves and each other as we come to terms with what it means in this society to get older. The pressure for women to defy age is pervasive, and if they don’t, often they are forgotten. So, love is essential to give to ourselves and others to understand that each of us will deal with that in our own ways, and no way is better or worse. But the second part of that is the rebellion required for us to push back against these demeaning ideas of being an old woman. It will take a whole movement away from concepts that women are only valuable during their younger years and to reframe ageing as a process that is desirable to undertake. In fact, ageing can be both a desirable experience and an essential one for the full experience of being human.
There’s a strong theme of intergenerational wisdom in the book. How do we ensure the stories and insights of older women aren’t just heard, but truly valued?
I think intergenerational wisdom and connection between our generations is the foundation for the revolution in how we encounter ageing. For too long women have thought about themselves as belonging to age silos.
But the reality is that we are simultaneously every woman at once – we are the girl, the teenager, the young adult, the middle-aged woman, and the elder.
We need to connect with each other across our generations so we can see each other anew, so that we can see ourselves in the experiences of women who are younger or older than us. Listening to each other is a vital step in changing the ‘othering’ of ageing.
What’s something you once feared about growing older that you’ve now come to embrace?
I have worried for a long time about Alzheimer’s disease after watching my grandma go through it, but a woman I met on a plane trip helped me see it differently. She had found peace with the fact she couldn’t remember how to finish her sentences. When I asked her if she found it frustrating, she just smiled and told me that she had accepted it now. And we delighted in each other’s company because we communicated with each other differently. Linear wasn’t the expectation for how we connected in conversation, rather, we moved and shifted in whatever direction our connection took us. What she taught me was that nothing needs to be what I fear. It might be that there can be choice even in the most challenging of experiences.
For many women, life beyond 50 is a time of profound reinvention. What’s your advice for anyone stepping into this chapter unsure of who they are or where they’re going?
Embrace not knowing! There is a potential new life ahead if we begin to regard ourselves differently. We are not ageing and becoming less, our ageing can provide us a richer and more alive second half of our lives. Don’t believe the hype – getting older, clicking over 50 is a time of great potential.
There’s often pressure to “stay young” — to defy age, rather than inhabit it. How do you personally resist or reframe that narrative?
I am so cross at the pressure women have been under to feel that if they defy age, they are successful. What is it to defy age? What does that mean? What are we defying when we seek to remain young? There is no doubt, women are responding to a real and present pressure that equates youth with value. There is no judgement for the women who seek to deny ageing through the creams and surgeries – because the reality is, that if you do, you are rewarded. But how can we wrestle this back and find our own power again, outside market forces? This is where the collective of women, highlighting each other across the age spectrum, reframing what beautiful is, what power is, what wisdom is, will slowly turn this.
If you could go back and tell your 40-year-old self something about life beyond 50, what would it be?
Every pain, every challenge, every darkness you have gone through over your life, will come home to you in your 50s as some of your greatest gifts. All the love you will know as you age has been built from the years that you have lived in this body. None of it was in vain. Getting older is the pay off. There is so much adventure for you ahead, strap in, because it’s about to get wild!
A Wisdom Of Age by Jacinta Parsons. Available now at all good bookstores. RRP $35.99
