Tammy Letherer So now that I’m in my 50s, I’m proclaiming it the official “I don’t give a damn” decade.
I made this proclamation after dropping my teenage daughter off for three weeks of summer camp. Though she was handling this milestone in a calm, mature way, I found myself remembering the kinds of thoughts I had at her age when I went to camp:
What if I’m not good enough?
What if I say the wrong thing?
What if I don’t make any friends?
What if people don’t like me?
I wanted to give her an antidote to every possible insecurity until I realized that stumbling through her own moments of doubts and coming out the other side is the only way she’ll find her strength. As a teenager, she’s just entering the stage where she wants to be like everyone else, while I am, at 53, trying to recover from decades of caring too much about what other people think.
I could remind her to just be herself, but I suspect that the self she’ll become can emerge only after she experiences the pain of people-pleasing, wearing false faces, and saying yes when she wants to say no.
I once heard Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of Goddesses Never Age, say that prepubescent girls are in their joy and freedom, and it’s not until puberty that subtle competitiveness kicks in. Young girls begin to think: What must I do to attract a mate? Who do I have to pretend to be? They compare themselves to those they consider successful and try to copy their behavior or curry their favor. They subconsciously hide those traits that society considers undesirable.
For women, our fifties are about remembering the joy and freedom of that forgotten girl. With procreation no longer programming our cells, we’re free to reclaim those pieces we pushed aside.
Joseph Campbell links this stage of womanhood, called Crone, to the fairy godmother. Crone may not be the most appealing word, but it means someone venerated for experience and wisdom. It’s the age of personal power.
Or, as I said, the “I don’t give a damn” decade.
Michael Singer, in his book The Untethered Soul, says it this way:
“Imagine what fun life would be if you didn’t have those neurotic, personal thoughts going on within you. You could enjoy things, and could actually get to know people instead of needing them. You could just live and experience your life, instead of trying to use life to fix what’s wrong inside of you. You are capable of achieving that state. It’s never too late.”
Thankfully, it’s never too late (or too early) to say the hell with comparisons and competitiveness or to reconnect with that unique essence we knew as children.
And if you can’t manage that today, remember (to borrow a famous phrase): tomorrow is another day.
