Imagine stepping off a dock into an inflatable kiddie pool filled with Jell-O, which is sitting in a rowboat, which is in turn floating on a lake. No, you're never likely to have to do that, but do me a favor and give it a mental go. Freaky, right?
That's how wobbly I felt when I first realized, in my late 30s, that I wasn't the woman I had been for the first several decades of my life. Like all of us, I'd been many things-daughter, wife, writer, great lover of chocolate hazelnut products--but the one chunk of my identity that was slipping away and so was at the top of my consciousness at the time was that of attractive female, a woman who navigated the world partially aided by the advantage of her looks. I was one of those pretty girls who can't read a book alone on a park bench, because too many passing men are all of a sudden intellectually voracious, the kind of woman who gets on the bus for the cost of a smile if I she doesn't have enough change. Being young and considered beautiful was good and bad.
Okay, I won't lie to you: It was mostly good.
Regardless, one day it seemed as if I simply wasn't that woman anymore, and I felt off kilter. My face hadn't been ripped off by a mad chimpanzee, of course; in actuality, the transition was gradual and subtle. While I wasn't paying attention (too busy working and having kids and trying to figure out the mass appeal of Celine Dion) something had shifted, and it hit me all at once that it wasn't going to shift back. I was no longer that woman, as evidenced by the lines, the postpartum droop, and the metabolism that stuck its lip out and refused to cooperate, or would have, it metabolisms had lips. People treated me differently, because I was different, and my self-definition was a little slow on the uptake.
That feeling of instability-having my self-definition yanked out from under me, with no equally appealing replacement in sight--was much more difficult than the fact of not looking as good as I once did (I actually look fine for my age) or the loss of any particular aspect of youth (Like many of my peers, it turns out that I'm also Formerly Hip, Formerly Relevant, and Formerly Free to Dispose of My Leisure Time as I See Fit). I felt briefly like I was disappearing.
I'm not a psychologist, but I learned that this sense of not existing, at least as you have known yourself to exist, is referred to by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut as "disintegration anxiety," and is the mega-ultra super-sized extreme of what I felt when first I realized I was no longer who I thought I was. You begin to feel disintegration anxiety when the self you know and are accustomed to is no longer being mirrored back at you--your self-concept begins to fragment. "Threats to a central self-view," writes the sociologist William Swann at the University of Texas at Austin, "challenge the effectiveness of the way we perceive the world. For this reason, people who suffer from disintegration anxiety may fear they are losing their grip on reality."
That unsettling feeling of not being myself anymore-of being Formerly me, yet not sure what I was turning into, prompted me to start my website, Formerly Hot. I had to find a way to laugh at myself for caring about such seemingly superficial stuff as much as I apparently did. But when legions of women (and some men) logged on, I realized it wasn't only about the surface. People talked about being Formerly Workaholic, Formerly Carefree, Formerly Married, Formerly Badass-there was no end to what we were no longer. Some of those Formerlies were happily shed (I, for one, am Formerly a People Pleaser, and it's such a relief to have put that behind me) but some, of course, were a bit harder to say goodbye to. The blog turned into a book, My Formerly Hot Life: Dispatches from Just the Other Side of Young, which is coming out in August, all about that which we lose when we start to put our youth in the rear view, but also the enormity of what we gain: A learned happiness that is richer and more gratifying than we could have appreciated years earlier.
Now, I'm comfortably settled into my life as a Formerly, and have come to see how cool is life on the other side of young can be. The transition, however, was a bitch. If you're in the thick of it, hang in there-you'll make it to shore safely, albeit covered in Jell-O. And check this space for more about how to negotiate the changes that come when you age out of young.
