My Second Adolescence

Seventy is the New Pimply Teenager

Despite my amused delight at turning sixty (back when I had multiple lovers and was paid more than I was worth, stereotypes be damned), and despite my subsequent embrace of anti-ageism, turning seventy was no picnic. Several cancers later, I am well aware that seventy is not sixty.

Although I thought of my sixties as my second adolescence, it is now clear that my seventies are even more like the teen years. My voice is getting deeper. I have hair in odd places. My body is changing in ways I sometimes regret. But I’m also more powerful in ways I could not have predicted.

For one thing, I am getting better at writing books, the thing I always wanted to do.

And after appearing on lots of podcasts, I’m improving at public speaking, something multiple surveys say people fear more than death (So, ask yourself: Would you really rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy? That does seem counterintuitive).

As Becca Levy’s new study shows, growth (and not just decline) can be a hallmark of our later years. Which is big news to the medical profession, but not to us.

The Paradox of Aging

The paradox of aging is that there are losses and gains. More perspective, but less energy; more time in the day, but less time in years.

The good memories linger, the bad ones are less fraught, and they’re all material for our creative lives. I just wrote a scene in my next novel where a character sleeps on the floor against her bedroom door to keep out a vampire. That detail comes directly from my childhood, when I slept against the bedroom door to keep my drunken dad out of my room. My life got better over time, which happens to many but not all of us; I’m well aware that not everyone has that privilege. But all of us lucky (or privileged) enough to attain old age have the capacity to be creative.

I’ve also started to understand that the balance of losses and gains shifts with age. Those who are already there assure me that eighty is not seventy. There may be no third adolescence, not even whimsically.

Enjoy It While You’ve Got It

It is an embarrassing cliche to say, Enjoy every day while you have it. I’ll say it anyway, and then quote my favorite Leonard Cohen line:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget perfection, for only the dead never make mistakes. Embrace what you can make and build it now. Play with new forms: Make a collage. Build a sandcastle. Write a book.

We can do wonders once we send our Inner Critics out to play. We can transform the incredible richness of experience we carry into something new, like roses growing on a compost pile.

And then when we get tired (which I’m thinking maybe happens in our eighties?), we can just sit on the porch looking at trees and reading each other’s books.

Let’s enjoy it all. You’re only old once.

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Or you can buy me a cup of tea. That’s lovely too.

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For more reflections on later life, check out my 2025 book, Rock On: Power, Sex and Money after 60. On order from your local bookstore or at all the online places. Better yet: Buy the e-book direct from Stella, here.