on age.
in which students, alternately, tell me to stop calling myself old and stop calling myself young in the middle of my mid-life crisis.
[cw: there is a very brief allusion to suicidal ideation in this post]
A couple weeks ago, a student asked me to stop calling myself “old,” and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
We hit the halfway point in our term here at my university in early March, and so I asked my students what they’d like my co-teacher and I to stop doing, start doing, and continue doing. (I borrowed this specific framing for feedback from Sarah Dorr.) Students shared their thoughts anonymously on an online form; I, in turn, shared with the students what their peers had named as things that were working and not working. I kept the age comment in my “report back” because it was light and funny (“stop calling yourselves old!!” they had written) and because it let me name the mid-life crisis I appear to be having in my 30s without having to actually unpack that crisis.
In the context of this class, age comes up with respect to the narratives of political violence that I grew up hearing vs. what is commonplace for my students, who are 10–15 years younger than me. Not only have they never gone to an airport gate without a ticket to meet family, but they also cannot fathom this being a thing. Their first memories of a “terrorist” attack are the Manchester bombings, maybe the Bataclan in France. A student in office hours yesterday told me she had been shown videos of Islamic State beheadings in school, and as she said this, I watched her try to place me. “You wouldn’t have witnessed this…well, maybe,” she said, attempting to assess my age from my face. (I would not have: I was out of college by the time the Islamic State was really a thing.) “How old were you when this happened?” I asked her. “I don’t know,” she said. “Eleven? Twelve?”
I tell my students I am old to emphasize that 10–15 years is an eternity in an era of lightning-fast communication and escalating disaster. It is forever when you are teaching the narratives you’ve lived. I want them to realize that social media not existing was a reality within my lifetime, even though I am not much older than them, and I want them to have to grapple with the relative newness of things that are commonplace in their lives. I try very hard not to present “old” as something derogatory or negative, because it’s not. As someone who spent most of her teenage years thinking she might die at any moment, I find aging captivating. I like being older; I like thinking about how much I’ve learned and how much more I still will. I have a good friend who absolutely dreaded his 30th birthday, whereas I view birthdays as sacred celebrations, and this disagreement was a major point of friction in our friendship because I simply could not comprehend his perspective.
But I do not often feel very old. This has been a particularly stark realization since finishing my PhD and moving to the UK. I am accustomed to being comparatively young in professional settings: I was the youngest employee at the coffee shop where I worked immediately after college, then the youngest person with my title in my first salaried job. I remember noticing this but not being bothered by it; at 22, my feelings on expertise and seniority were naïve and underdeveloped. I do recall wondering where the rest of my age group had gone, because they were not at the workplaces where I spent a majority of my time. I still wonder this.
And I’m thinking about a different recent experience, where a student told me not to call myself young. I was giving a research talk at another university, after which I had lunch with several PhD students. At some point during the Q&A after my talk, I must have referred to myself as young. Within my current professional context, I am hyper-aware of my age compared to that of my colleagues; I told my department chair upon first meeting her that I felt “very young” starting this job and she said “you are.” I suspect at the research talk I referenced my age relative to finding my footing in that same job. Regardless of the context, the comment had upset this PhD student, whom I would guess was at least my age if not older. “Don’t call yourself young,” she said. “It has nothing to do with your expertise.” She meant it kindly, and I took it that way in the moment. She was also, of course, correct, insofar as substantive expertise takes time to acquire but there are plenty of older people who claim expertise despite not having it. (I may have written an entire article about this, though I don’t frame it as being about age.) In retrospect, however, I feel a touch invalidated, and also confused. If both old and young are neutral signifiers, simple statements of feeling and position, and I can be neither, what am I allowed to be?
To return to my mid-but-not-really-midlife crisis: I find myself faced, at age 32, with the ghost of my 11–year–old self. Eleven is significant because that’s how old I was when I started writing a series of fantasy novels. I have been a writer since I learned how to hold a pen. As a child, I would steal reams of clean white paper out of my dad’s printer, fold them in half, and staple them together like a book. I would estimate how many pages I would need for whatever story I had in my head—I was always wrong—and I would write.
When I was 11, I did two things, one of which I have legitimately just remembered. The first, as mentioned, was the fantasy novel thing. It is the closest I have ever come to realizing a dream. The second was a story I wrote for my 6th-grade English class. I don’t remember what the exact prompt for the assignment was, but I do remember turning in 15 single-spaced handwritten pages of story. (This was just on the cusp of making all assignments computerized.) I also remember intending to write more. Being a teacher now myself, I’m grateful my teacher allowed me to so clearly go outside the bounds of what she had envisioned this assignment to be—something I try to pay forward whenever I can. I’m also grateful for the kind things she said about my writing afterward. A few years later, a different teacher would tell me “your ability to write is in a class by itself” (this rush job of a Substack post notwithstanding). Whether through confidence or arrogance, this is something I have never had trouble believing—which I now realize is probably significant, given my general and very physical aversion to compliments.
Anyway, I mention all of this because my inner 11–year–old child, who knew so clearly who she was and what she wanted to become, has started screaming in my head in the past six months or so. Reckoning with that child, healing that child, allowing myself to be that child is not a matter for conversation with my students. I believe we owe our students some amount of vulnerability, and also our students are not our therapists. And so it spills over in other ways: me calling myself old, or young, trying to place myself in my own trajectory. I can devise pedagogical reasons for this post-hoc, and those reasons aren’t invalid or untrue, but I do wonder where else the impulse to call attention to age might come from.
When I started writing this, I had envisioned saying something about youth and gender in a profession whose stereotypical members are either grey-haired bespectacled men in tweed sports coats or young genius men who got their doctorates at 25. Those images are relevant, I think, when thinking through your positioning within the space of a profession that was not built for people like you. For me, though, I would like to just feel my age. I have already failed at least five times to stop calling myself old in front of my students, and I think I will rather intentionally continue to fail at this. But I might add, when I notice myself doing it (which I don’t always), that “old” is not derogatory. “Old” is where we learn, and where we keep learning.