May I still dress like a 17-year-old at fifty?
It's not always the happiest moments when you suddenly realize: It's over. I do not fit in the tight black part of ten years ago, I look like a sausage with flatulence. High heels increase my hallux valgus. And even if I have beautiful, thick hair, I look forbidden with mantels. Better, but somehow boring: the cut in maximum chin length.
To see what fits visually no longer to the date of birth, is comparatively simple, often enough the merciless comment of a good friend or simply the look in the mirror.
Embarrassing or funny - what is coming now?
A little bit of a shock - oh God, that's no longer possible -, the resigned grip on the future combination black and white, and life can go on. But what about the rest? With our nature, our preferences and quirks? Can they just stay that way?
Theoretically, we know what the ideal maturing woman looks like and how she behaves. She has nothing to do with Botox and liposuction and looks at the 30-year-old she once was with serenity, she knows she now has to score with other things. She is the beauty-graying smart old woman, full of charm and well-hungry liveliness.
What is it really: age appropriate?
Only: how do we get there ourselves? How do we behave when we still feel like 35 inside?
Age-appropriate, say the younger ones, but what is that?
Maybe we just have to figure out what we hope for in the best case of age, to find a suitable answer to this question. For me, ranking first in my personal ranking list is that it does not make everyone happy anymore to be authentic.
And then of course: to know what is good for you. Also indispensable: a certain serenity in dealing with their own weaknesses.
And last but not least: to stay curious, a bit playful and cocky, so that we will not freeze to our own statue because of a responsible adulthood.
Her styling suited a 17-year-old
It is against this background that she can be happily told the story of appropriate behavior. It was a rather cool colleague of mine, who recently appeared in a hippie dress and with a red hibiscus flower in her hair for a business lunch.
Four of us were sitting at the table, staring at her in complete astonishment, this flowery girl in her forties, who was grinning and heading toward us. "It was summer to me today," she said cheerfully, and then she told of a great new assignment that she was glad she had just planted on her balcony and the extremely lovely, freshly-recruited neighbor she had just visited would have drunk a coffee.
Her styling, which would have been best given to a 17-year-old Hawaiian, blended in nicely with her inner glow, it was definitely not age-appropriate, but very appropriate - her mood.
Sometimes, the older we get, the older we look
Of course, we know them enough, the embarrassing examples of self-perception and perception of others, such as Birkenstock sandals and high heels. If someone is especially old when he thinks he is very young.
"Cringe factor" Americans call the acute strangeness of the observer when the 59-year-old girlfriend flirts wildly with a daring cleavage at a party and does not seem to notice, as the request "I want to know again!" who steams from every pore, making her an embarrassing figure. At best, the unkomischen old.
If the man at our side in the squash with clearly younger also looks a bit wrong, if he does not have to be carried with a herniated disc from the square. If over 40-year-old "How cool is that please?" or "I'm really super on it today" say.
Are you not allowed to be embarrassed or funny in old age?
Life is unfair. Not only that more and more people are younger and more beautiful than us, they are allowed to do everything without anyone blaspheming.
The Hamburg psychologist Oskar Holzberg says:
"True, young people are allowed wildness, aliveness, even stupidity, they should try themselves, run over the shore, be energetic, and if they are embarrassed, we forgive, because there is always the expectation and hope that the embarrassing will happen loses, through experience, learning, growth. "
We, by contrast, are already fully grown. And yet they are often "stuck in these wild, provocative, extroverted behaviors like a needle in the record groove," says Holzberg.Hang tight, with all our rough edges, impatient, immature, unteachable, as if there was an expired "expired" date only for others.
Should I be inhibited while dancing?
"Mom, that looks awful," said my 22-year-old daughter to me as I happily danced to myself at a birthday party after the hot sounds of "Sex Bomb," she called it "peeled off," "your moves from the last millennium. "
I did not even know that dance moves "age," but she was probably right. Only: what follows? That I dance from now on like an inhibited twelve-year-old at the school disco, so that no one laughs? I'm definitely too old for that. And knows too well what makes me happy. Dancing is definitely one of them. If I look like a fidgeting fish with gasps, a few shy spectators just have to go through it.
Like a women's bowling club on bus trip
There are plenty of things to do voluntarily with age, such as tents, long nights, and too much alcohol. And then there are some that we can not easily say goodbye to.
"I'm just a loud person," sighs a friend, "laughing, talking, singing while driving, I'm all loud." I realize that as a 58-year-old woman, I should be quieter, but I find it hard. "
To be honest, it would be pretty hard for me to give up her volume. When we go to the theater together every few months, we behave like a women's bowling club on a bus trip during the break. We drink sparkling wine, giggle about smart-talking men in ugly jackets, and sometimes we skip the rest of the show, because chatting is funnier.
Precious moments of exuberance
It may be seedless and yet independent of age, it is small, precious moments of exuberance that we need to use because they inspire our liveliness.
At every age we set new expectations. Children are allowed to play, teenagers are overpowered, and adults have to take responsibility for work and family. "Anyone who moves in this standard does so to be safe from shame, guilt and devaluation," says psychologist Holzberg, "but those who do not do so will receive criticism and rejection."
"Your child is so far away for his age", we say admiringly, also "you are young for your age" is a compliment, but certainly does not mean my 68-year-old friend, who recently in tight leather pants in front of the cinema I was waiting. "I just can not part with the part," he said, as he caught my eye, "I feel so young in it."
Wonderful, then he should just feel young again, downstairs around. Given the choice to do it himself or the others, he made a very old-fashioned decision that evening.
The beauty grows inside
We value, we put in drawers, that's human. And a young person gushing about his retirement with a lukewarm beer seems as out of his own time as an older person listening to hiphop in skinny jeans with their ears stuffed.
The boys, however, are not expected to have found their "inner center", with us this is assumed. As we grow old, our beauty grows inward, as American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson has said very aptly.
Become a shimmering pebble
And yet, there are these weird birds - artists, snobs and divas - to whom we allow everything that "ages well" in our eyes. Because they have developed their own style and thus a certain timelessness.
But since we are neither Nina Hagen nor Karl Lagerfeld, we prefer to stay behind. There is nothing wrong with picking up the spines at the latest from the age of 50 and slowly turning them into a smooth, pebble shimmering in all colors. Wonderfully round, inwardly and sometimes outwardly. To let others have the precedence and the last word, not to constantly insist on our opinion, to criticize less and to praise more, to invite instead of to repudiate.
But that does not mean that we should not let ourselves get bogged down. Even a well-worn pebble is occasionally seized by a violent current, and then it whirls through the water, bangs on the ground and jumps back up. Until he comes to rest again. If we succeed in seeing this calmness as a privilege and not as a sacking out of a glorious phase of life, only then is it a real gain.
Actually, I'm a very impatient car driver who is constantly on the horn, a bad habit that does not get any better as we get older. So now I brake generously when other cars want in my lane. Recently I was standing at the traffic lights when an angry car driver threw me through my open side window with a crumpled paper bag. "You can let off steam at home, not on the street," he shouted. I felt very much like screaming back, but I only smiled. Relaxed and age-appropriate.
