Why Does Getting Older Feel Like Loss?
The Pattern
You catch your reflection. You see a new line. A new tiredness. A new something. The first response in your body is grief, even before you have thought about what you have actually seen. You wonder why. You like a lot of things about your life. The grief still comes. The grief comes because you live inside a culture that has spent your entire life encoding aging as decline. The body is reading the changes through a frame that was given to you, not a frame you chose. Underneath the cultural reading there is another reading, in which the changes are evidence of having lived. The work is uncovering that other reading.
Origins & Context
Christiane Northrup's work on women's aging describes the specific cultural disenfranchisement of the aging female body. Northrup notes that the wisdom traditions of most cultures historically associated aging women with increased authority, while the modern Western culture has uniquely associated aging women with decreased visibility, value, and desirability. The grief of aging is therefore not the grief of biology. It is the grief of disappearing inside a culture that has not built a place for who you are becoming.
James Hollis, writing on the second half of life, names the related phenomenon. Hollis describes aging as a series of releases, and notes that without a cultural ritual to honor the releases, the experience defaults to felt loss. The losses are real and the framing is also doing significant work. The framing can be changed.
Most of what feels like loss in aging is actually loss of the right to be seen, not loss of who you are.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the way you delete photos. You take ten and you keep one. The reflex is so fast you barely register doing it. You are editing yourself in real time to match the image the culture trained you to maintain.
It shows up in the casual cruelty you direct at yourself in mirrors, in passing, in dressing rooms. You would never speak this way to a friend. You speak this way to yourself daily. The voice is not yours. The voice is the inherited one, and you have been carrying it for decades without examining whose it is.
It shows up in the way certain birthdays land like small bereavements. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. The numbers themselves do not have meaning. The meaning is the cultural reading, and the cultural reading enters your body without asking permission.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Cultural Disenfranchisement of Aging Women (Christiane Northrup), the systemic devaluation of women as they age that the culture has not yet repaired. It is also named as the Unritualized Release (James Hollis), the grief that defaults to loss when there is no ceremony to honor the transition. Mary Pipher's writing names this the Invisible Years.
Related entries in this library: Self-Abandonment, Adaptive Self vs Original Self, Healing Is Direction Not Destination.
Nikita's Note
Aging is not your enemy. The culture is. You can stop being the enforcement arm of a cultural reading you did not write. The work is not to be okay with every line. The work is to notice when the voice in your head is speaking for an industry, and to give yourself permission to disobey.
The practice is small. Look in the mirror once and do not narrate. Just look. Notice what happens in the absence of the editorial. Most of what feels like loss in aging is actually loss of the right to be seen, not loss of who you are. You can give yourself the right back. Nobody else is going to.
From the work
Most of what feels like loss in aging is actually loss of the right to be seen, not loss of who you are.From When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself — available on Amazon.