Okay

All right, so I'm told that "you know" post was pretty vitriolic, but it just isn't in me to apologize for that. It's not worth rereading, it's probably more emotional than is appropriate on a blog, but the fact of the matter is, people juvenilize me pretty routinely, and still think I think of *myself* as a kid, and as a general rule I don't fight nor even contradict it. My bed, I'm in it. Sometimes, the sleep gets poor. So it goes.

It does seem strange to me that a forty-almost-three year old woman is still so consistently perceived as being a bit of a child by the people closest in some ways, despite the many evidences of perfectly successful responsibility and adulthood. But I have a personality that apparently lends to a sense of, in different aspects, impulsive childishness (I guess), immature fixations (definitely), perhaps youthfulness, and just a general resistance to age.

That last one I think remains on the surface even though it's no longer as robust as it once was internally. I have habits of behavior that refuse my being middle-aged ... yet more and more, I quite embrace that part of my being. I decided just this week to quit reacting to my physical creakiness, which I'd been growing a bit more theatrical about, and interestingly, not wasting my time at three a.m. or when I get up, noticing and verbally responding to the pain in my feet has definitely made a difference in my experience of it. More generally, I've long had this business with not looking "my age" - but feeling "I earned my age" - and of late, I look at that age and kind of revel in it, more than in my outward nonconformity to it.

I'm not trying to turn into the old person we hated so much when we were kids. But there is POWER in my age. There is a position I've come to I never attained before. Just as a person, I may be at a different place in terms of my physical condition ... but the place I am in terms of my autonomy is second to none. I have yet again, this year, overcome unemployment. This owes no small debt to the level of my experience, and my confidence.

To my age.

Life drags and smears. So it's no wonder many still default to seeing me in the light I used to see myself. I don't resent it often (though, obviously, there's as much power in that resentment as there is in myself), but of course it comes out. The cognitive dissonance - "don't you people SEE me?" - is frustrating.

But what people see is what I present. So it's on me.

Off I go to do some responsible, mature stuff. With a stupid eighties song in my heart, no doubt. Probably turned up "inappropriately" loud.