Have you tried saunas to ‘stay young’ forever? What about hot/cold therapy? Botox? Swearing off alcohol? As everyone seems to be in a race to live forever, Sarah Catherall tries to keep her sanity…
Welcome to Midlife Musings with award-winning journalist Sarah Catherall. Sarah has spent more than 30 years writing for publications such as New Zealand Listener, The Post, The Spinoff, Vanity Fair and the BBC. She’s also the author of How to Break Up Well: Surviving and Thriving After Separation. Sarah is currently embracing her midlife years and in this instalment she writes about the trying to stay sane amid the anti-ageing movement.
My grandmother blew out the candles on her 100th birthday cake and we read her a congratulations you’ve made it to a century letter from the Queen. A few weeks later, she went to sleep in the night and never woke up. Hers was a peaceful, beautiful death, the kind you wish on everyone.
Throughout her life, my grandmother ate a diet of meat and potatoes, and fresh boiled vegetables from her garden. Her attitude to health and longevity was low-key. She played bowls for enjoyment, and tended her plants.
In her 100 long years, she never stepped inside a gym, or went for a jog for health benefits, nor did she do saunas, and cold plunges, and all the modern-day anti-ageing fads everyone my age is currently obsessed with.
I’m thinking of Grandma Catherall and her cruisy attitude towards old age on a warm night when a friend tells me I should come over to her house for a sauna. As I wriggle on the hot bench, my friend tosses water on rocks to make the room even hotter. The sauna is about the size of my home toilet, and I puff, breathless, the sizzling air heating my mouth and even my throat.
I feel like a rotisserie chicken cooking in an oven. “All good?’’ my friend asks.
No, I’m not good. I’m disturbingly hot and my contact lenses are drying up. I last a few more minutes before I thrust the door open, and lurch out into the cold air.
She comes out later, her lobster red skin slick with sweat. Her eyes are bright and then she dunks herself under the icy cold outdoor shower, emerging, floating, like she has been reborn. Meanwhile, I’m ready for a lie-down, drained from the heat, and annoyed that the hot-cold, life-extending craze doesn’t work for me.
Everyone my age is doing their best to try to live forever. Not quite forever, but we’re all aware that our past is catching up with us and what we do over the next years – and decades – could make for a pleasant or a pretty horrific old-age.
Well, the hot-cold craze doesn’t work for me. Nor does going completely sober. I’m a breast cancer survivor and I know that a mere sniff of the Pinot Gris or prosecco I enjoy increases the chances of my cancer coming back. But I counterbalance that with the sensation of having one glass of wine with my partner or a girlfriend, which makes me feel happy and glittery. I also know that laughter and lower cortisol levels are an antidote to ill-health.
Another insight from the planet of mid-life is that something does shift when you get to your mid-fifties and you start to value how you feel – mentally and physically – as much, and possibly more, than how you look.
Yeah, sure, I get my frown lines ironed out with botox twice a year, and I still bleach my hair because I’m naturally “dark blonde’’ (a euphemism for mousy). I don’t pretend that I’m completely natural, but I also have told my girlfriends to tell me if I go a bit far. The fear is a frozen, robotic face with chipmunk cheeks and lips pursed like a puffer fish, when you’re a carbon copy of every other woman in your pilates class.
At 56, I care about my overall wellbeing much more than I care about whether I’ve got wrinkles and my bum is firm and lifted. There are no more wolf whistles when I walk past a building site, but I delight when I sleep all night without needing the loo, and my mammogram comes back all-clear.
Most people my age display life’s battle scars. On my recent birthday, I did a quick scan of my body and realised much of me is either fake, banged up, or has been repaired more often than my daughter’s dented Suzuki Swift.
I’ve got a silicone implant in my left breast because the real one was cancerous and removed two years ago. I’ve got a repaired knee ligament which was created when they took some of my hamstring, and at the same time, the surgeon scraped away some of my tendon. Two of my besties also hobble around on bad knees. I’ve got scars where they’ve cut out moles and sent them away for biopsies.
When we were younger, we were warned, don’t do this or don’t do that because you’ll regret it in your old age. Most of us live in the moment, because it’s pretty hard to imagine when you’re baking on a beach in your teens, coated in baby oil (yes, we actually did that!), that one day they’ll remove suspicious marks and moles because they might be cancerous. Now, when the knee surgeon warns me: Don’t run every day or you’ll be relying on a walker by your mid-seventies, I actually listen.
Then there are the emotional scars: by 56, I’ve been divorced and repartnered (you’ll read about my mid-life dating mishaps in another article), I lost my darling mother far too early, and I was laid off from a full-time journalism job in my late forties, when the news organization restructured.
But from trauma comes personal growth – thanks to the loss of my job, I’ve got a rewarding freelance career I can do from anywhere, and I’m also an author, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I’d been working full-time.
My wish is: can we stop fearing old age and chill out a bit like Grandma Catherall did? Let’s flip ageing around and think that each birthday is a gift, and each year makes you wiser, more interesting and more experienced.
