Being “Cool For My Age” is the Best I Can Hope For Now
Cool is an elusive concept and one that I’m not sure I’ve ever held firmly in my grasp.
It always felt like something that I could aspire to if I chose. Provided I didn’t try too hard, of course. I took it for granted that the option was there.
But at the age of 52, it’s occurred to me that HMAS Cool has sailed and it’s probably quite a few years since it was in my port.
As a Gen-Xer, I don’t think I’m uncool yet — that territory is still fully inhabited by boomers as far as I can tell. But that doesn’t mean I’m in the race either. That’s currently contested between Millennials and Gen-Z.
I mean what even is Gen-X? It’s most notable for being ill-defined. Caught in the middle, the invisible glue that holds everyone else together and keeps things ticking over. I like to think Gen-X is amorphous enough to still hover around the edges of cool without embarrassing ourselves.
Cool is defined by the young. Whatever people in their twenties are doing will be cool by default.
It’s feeling like an increasingly unfamiliar landscape. Nowhere is the feeling more acute for me than when I venture into the world of literary journals. They’re populated by kids in their 20s and maybe early 30s.
I feel out of place reading their contributions let alone submitting one of my own. The message I get says we’re in charge here now. You can visit, you can observe, but you will never be one of us. You’ve had your chance and you missed it.
Okay maybe I’m projecting my insecurities just a bit.
My fear is that just as I’m finally making some headway through the layers accumulated from decades of masking and trauma to feel like I have something to say, I am approaching irrelevance.
It doesn’t matter how good I feel about myself, what nectar of coolness is oozing from my reclaimed core, to others, the keepers of cool, I am just a middle-aged lady. Nice enough, inoffensive, but not particularly noteworthy.
This is no sudden realisation but a creeping one. It’s being called Mam by a customer service person on a regular basis rather than just strange one-off. Or worse, Lady, as in hey Lady I think you’re in my seat coming from an impertinent twenty-something on a plane. At least I haven’t yet been described as an old lady. At least not to my face.
It’s when you realise that you’re old enough to be the mother of the new crop of graduates at work, probably because they’ve told you you’re the same age as their mum. You think they’re talking about an old lady when they say, oh my mum likes Fleetwood Mac/shopping at Aldi/watching the news. Then you realise their mum is the same age as you.
You realise that the baton for who shapes the future has been passed on before you even got to touch it.
The problem is that when HMAS Cool was docked in my port, I was too caught up in surviving. I didn’t have the time or energy to be cool. The all-encompassing intensity of studying law. The roller-coaster of tumultuous, ill-advised relationships and the despair of loneliness. Sometimes all at the same time. My twenties were a shit show.
I had so little idea about who I was and my place in the world when I was in my 20s that I was completely consumed by not looking awkward and out of place. I was a fragile shell of a person swept along by and having little agency. That’s about as far from cool as you can get.
I was part of the cohort collectively responsible for grunge. We wore black. We dressed down not up to go out. I copied Winona Ryder’s haircut in Reality Bites. It felt like the like a high-water mark of cool. But taking on the aesthetics of an era was just skimming across the surface without actually being part of something.
Now I hanker after what I’ve missed out on. It’s not so much that I want others to think I’m cool but because I want to tap into the collective essence of it. I want to feel the exhilaration of being at the centre rather of the action than looking on from the periphery.
It’s only in middle age that I feel sure enough of myself to immerse in something bigger than me.
But having arrived late to the party, I’m stuck on the outside looking in. I’m trying to claw back young adulthood that I didn’t have and probably only realise in retrospect that I wanted. But it’s hard to do that when people at that stage of life are 20–30 years younger than you and most people at your age are at a very different stage. It’s hard to know where I fit.
Plenty of people in their 20s manage to be comfortable in their skin, confident and focused on pursuing their dreams and good luck to them. But for those of us who got stuck behind the door when everyone was partying, we deserve our time on the dance floor.
There are a lot of assumptions about what happens to people as they get older that definitely takes away from the cool side of the ledger. Supposedly, folks get more conservative, yet the more I know about the world, the more I want to rail against it. The more appetite I have to stir things up and bring about change.
Cool is not giving a shit about what people think and being able to give it back to them.
Cool is giving yourself permission to make choices that serve you because you’ve finally realised you don’t need to get that permission from anywhere else. Finally, you’re the boss of you.
I might still be a long way from knowing the answers, but I’ve figured out a few things about the world, about people and most importantly, about myself. I think that’s pretty cool.
And because I have a young person who is a stone’s throw away from being in her twenties, I have a dog in this fight.
Not that I my daughter will every consider me cool. The best I can hope for is cool for a mum. That I’m marginally more tolerable than other mums who attached to conventional social norms.
It’s a cred that comes from being a kind of handmaiden of cool, facilitating her lifestyle. A valued supporting role.
Of maybe just helping her to feel confident enough in her skin that she never feels that she has to miss out on the spoils of being young and cool.
