Kids. Teenagers. As someone staring 40 in the face lemme tell you a thing.
You are going to be horrified and embarrassed at some point by the shit you are doing now.
And you are going to wish with all your might you’d done more of it.
You’re gonna wish you had more selfies, more photos, more videos being dumb with your friends. You’re going to wish you’d had your hair even higher or your shoes even sparklier.
Go. Document the shit out of your ridiculous life. Fuck trends but if you wanna be trendy, go all in. Fuck in-groups and subcultures but if one sings to you, do it all. Be exactly as cool or punk rock or goth or fandom or country or hardcore or hip hop or whatever, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Just don’t hurt people. That’s the only thing you’ll ever genuinely live to regret.
I think I have talked about this before, but because life doesn’t end at twenty or thirty or forty or fifty and thinking that folks are going to fall out of social media or that there won’t always be someone your age and my age and twice both of our ages interested in [insert anything, ever] is a very limiting worldview.
Somewhere there is a sixty-five year old who unironically loves Taylor Swift’s music and a fifty-two year old writing Superwholock fanfic and a ninty year old who absolutely lives for the next episode of Archer and a seventy-one year old that can kick anyone’s ass in k-pop trivia. There will always be these folks, and all the Internet has done is give fans of all ages a chance to interact in a way that they never had before.
Before BBSes and the Internet and Usenet and the World Wide Web and fanrings and forums and social media, those people would just love it in their own way, in the privacy of their own homes. But now anyone can make an Ao3 account or a basic fansite or tumbl about whatever they want, and sometimes you’re gonna learn those people are old but they still get it, and sometimes you’re going to find out those folks are still kids, twelve or fourteen at the oldest, and marvel at their maturity and skill and attention to detail.
And that is rad as hell, that is fucking incredible, that is… whatever the kids are saying these days, hah.
As a corollary to this, the cultural idea that women over forty just kind of… stop? That they no longer have value or beauty or skills or interests beyond the blandly domestic; that they just kind of universally blend into a kind of social wallpaper? Yeah, that’s misogynistic as hell, and it also puts a super toxic pressure on younger women, who are effectively taught that everything they love about themselves has an expiration date unless they can successfully beautify themselves into looking vaguely 35 forever. And I get that it’s something most of us have been indoctrinated into by, oh, pretty much every aspect of TV, films, politics and popular culture, but if you see nothing incongruous and a great deal that’s wonderful about a fortysomething guy like, say, Misha Collins using the fuck out of Twitter, but can’t understand why a woman his age would want to be on tumblr, then that’s probably an excellent starting point to investigate your biases.
We need to stop imagining that there is a magical age, or range of ages, in which we are : supposed: to be or do things. When I say that I have literally 40 years of participation in nerdlife or fandom, it’s not to say that this makes me better or more authentic than someone who has less time in. It’s really just a way of refusing to be delegitimized by people who think that because they’re dudes or even professional whatever, they get to be the arbiters of who is valid in a sphere they’ve claimed as their sole purview. We don’t stop loving things. We don’t stop learning, unless we choose to. We don’t stop being human. And we don’t stop wanting to share all of it.
And if you think intellectual curiosity and cultural involvement come with expiration dates, that is a sad bit of social programming you’ve bought into.
I used to have a friend who had passions and stuff, but she bought into the whole “that’s not for people my age / I can’t do that anymore is not my age” mentality. She became obsessed with being An Adult™, with the perfect magazine apartment and she stopped having fun. To the point that, after having consulted for a few months, she told me “I decided I need a hobby”. She was empty and unhappy with life because those ideals? Not reachable. The fun stuff she stopped doing because society told her she was too old for it now was her center and she let it go.
And tbh I was starting to do the same, because everyone my age did it and it seemed the only way.
Thank goodness for tumblr (and the fact that I have a very good friend 10 years younger than me. That helps keeping perspective lol) which helped me shrug the mentality off. So hell yeah I’m on this hellsite. Just try to push me off it!
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