Jocelin, Age 70
What a relief!
Thinking back I began to worry in January about my 70th birthday, August 2017. I did not want to leave my 60’s. I loved the 60’s. I had started to live my dreams of traveling with my camera and becoming a proficient photographer. But I was turning 70.
As the year progressed the undercurrent continued pulling me under. To celebrate or to weep or neither. Eventually I decided to celebrate which, in retrospect was fun and the right thing to do – but behind the smiles my life was fragmenting.
I began behaving as I have read other 70 years olds have written. My moods changed to dark, I blamed loss as theft, and there was theft, mistakes were made, I took matters personally, I had several non-serious car incidents, life was becoming intolerable. Worse, I found myself behaving a-typically, doing what I would previously never have contemplated – all because I felt trapped, snared between chronology and not feeling or looking ‘my age’.
Then came the pit, the bottom, the wall, the smash, the fragmentation and the tears … if anything ever ran more true it was the axiom: what you resist persists.
Somewhere something penetrated the funk – ‘the internet – read – there must be others like you’ – and there was 70candles. I read with relief, I read for interest, I sought to identify, I looked for a model – there wasn’t. I am my own model – I have to be. If 70candles doesn’t have one for me, it’s up to me to become my own. And in that dawning came something else.
Acceptance. It was the only way out and it came from a place deep within.
I felt, as I imagine a butterfly must feel as it wriggles out of the chrysalis to spread its glorious wings for the first time. The fears for my future diminished and disappeared. The financial problems swung around to become solutions. Concerns for my animals, (three dogs) vanished. My physical disposition changed as well. Where I had been concerned about falling – I became sure on my feet returning to the gym to once again feel the exhilaration of walking the treadmill. Like the Rubicon cube, my life suddenly clicked – from here on I feel I have the energy to manage.
I found Christiane Northrup’s work Goddesses never Age – that together with 70candles provided the insights for me to do my work. For me to take over and create my role model, my beliefs for going forward, the framework for my attitudes and goals for the next thirty years.
I do not fit in to the general society. I am single, without a partner with no immediate family in my city. The latter is not particularly people-centered. One has to drive everywhere. The thought of living in a community, home or care centre is not one I will contemplate.
My vision for my future is in the making and one I feel sure I’ll continue to design, shape and grow as I move forward inspired by the stories posted on this blog.
Thank you to the 70candles community.