Diane, a 72-year-old woman, tells in first person her feelings upon reaching old age. Reaching that age, for many retirees, is synonymous with power travel cheaper, rest by spending time with family or doing things that, during the time in which one has been working or taking care of children, was impossible.
As recounted in a text collected by the media Expert Editorwhile talking to her daughter on the phone, she began to consider her situation and found some answers to her feeling of sadness. “I’m 72 years old and I realized that I haven’t felt really excited about anything since 2015. Not about traveling, not about a promotion or the arrival of my grandchildren.” He tried to explain what was happening to him, but “I can’t find the words.”
Ander (82 years old), bus driver: “I feel so good that I could continue for another 20 years”
A farmer refuses to sell his land and now harvests grain surrounded by buildings and roads
Because what he describes is not depression or sadness, but rather an apathy that does not go away and that has become normal. “It’s not that I was missing something in particular, it’s that nothing made me vibrate.”
With forced retirement he had to change his way of life
Diane explains that her downturn began the moment she accepted the forced retirement at 64 years old, when his company was being restructured. “It wasn’t a sudden change, but over the years I realized that I was making gestures that were automated, without thinking too much. And that I didn’t feel them.”
Little by little he learned to understand what was happening to him, to interpret his new emotions. “I knew at all times what I should say, I spent many years in marketing, where I studied different environments and then gave people what they were asking for, and I incorporated this into my personal life.”
Although this new situation, without work and with free time to take care of herself and her family, kept her busy, “I felt like I was missing something, I noticed a gap where there was joy before.”
Nobody realized what was happening
What worried him most was not that situation in which he had less and less desire to do things, but that none of the people around him noticed it. “I continued to do everything, having a social life… I published on social networks and took photos with my family,” although his lack of enthusiasm was increasingly noticeable.
Then, Diane says, she noticed that she was normalizing what was happening to her. “There is a certain shame in admitting that you are not excited to see your grandchildren,” he says, “it sounds like ingratitude, but loving and being excited are not the same thing.” And he thought he had no reason to feel bad: health, family and savings in the bank should be enough to make him happier.
One afternoon, while she was looking through old photo albums, she stared at one of them. He came out as a young man, laughing and with his eyes closed. “I looked at it for twenty minutes, trying to remember the last time I laughed like that.”
That was when he understood that he had immersed himself fully in a life of routines, that every moment he passed through seemed to have been lived before. “I was inside a prison,” he points out.
“It’s time to do something that scares me”
When she hung up the phone on her daughter, she thought, “maybe it’s time to do something that scares me.” And the thing is, when you turn 72, “people stop expecting you to surprise them, but I think that if I was happier at 70 than at 40, I thought, why not take another turn?”
That’s when he signed up for a writing workshop, “not because I wanted to achieve something, but because of the emotion and physical reaction that gesture caused me… the tremor I felt was the most beautiful thing that has happened to me in years.”