Is this because people are generally willing to nod and smile while a young person regales them with the details of her life but don’t really want to hear about a middle-aged person, least of all a middle-aged woman? Perhaps in part. But, more than that, I think my reluctance to write about myself comes from what may be the primary difference between the young and the old(er). When you’re young, you think that everything you’re experiencing has never been experienced by anyone before, ever. […] It’s because finding something unique to say about the situation, finding something that wouldn’t be drowned out by what everyone else was saying, would require me to assume a position that suggested no one else had seen quite what I had seen. […] And if there’s anything I’ve learned from growing older, it’s that usually everyone is walking down the street in exactly the same way: preoccupied with their own problems and, nowadays, engrossed in their phones.
I’m tool old to write about my life by Megan Daum.
