Welcome to Mind Your Practice. I’m Beth Pickens and in this episode, I will consider the lies we are told about aging. Want more homework and support for your creative practice? Join Homework Club where you’ll get monthly homework, workshops, live QnA's, and an accountability pod, hand chosen by me. Go to bethpickens.com to learn more. Thanks for listening and keep making art.
Welcome to Mind Your Practice. I’m Beth Pickens and in this episode, I will consider the lies we are told about aging.
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Thanks for listening to Mind Your Practice and be sure to subscribe so you get all the bonus episodes coming your way. Want more homework and support for your creative practice? Join Homework Club where you’ll get monthly homework, workshops, live QnA's, and an accountability pod, hand chosen by me. Go to bethpickens.com to learn more. You can find me on Instagram at @bethpickensconsulting. Thanks for listening and keep making art.
Mind Your Practice is created by Beth Pickens and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Welcome to Mind Your Practice. I’m Beth Pickens and in this episode, I will consider the lies we are told about aging.
Hello artists. I’m recording this as a 44 year old woman, the script written the day after my birthday. What do you remember learning about women in their 40s? Think back to the cultural era of your youth.
I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s and I have a distinct memory of wandering around the Hallmark store in the local strip mall, maybe I was 9 years old, looking at all the cards, party supplies, figurines, and ephemera, which to my desperately seeking soul seemed like an art museum at the time. I would spend at least an hour wandering the Hallmark franchise while my parent grocery shopped next door. There was an enormous party supply section one could get lost in, especially focused on the maligned 40th birthday, which signified to me at age 9, that one was over the hill, close to death, a rejected elder teetering at the grave. The supplies were all black with silver lettering and grave-stone centered. I distinctly remember a toy cane with a mirror affixed to the bottom, a vestige of the well-stocked rape culture I grew up around. Anyway, I learned then and there that once a person reached 40, they were - as written on all the napkins and paper plates - over-the-hill. My parents were young, my older brother was born when they were just teenagers. They weren’t even close to 40 and thank god because, according to the party supply industrial complex, that would mean they were on the brink of death!
As I grew a little older, I understood that really the culture around me meant we were just talking about women the whole time. The world was filled with older men running it all, possessing everything, dictating the terms of living. They could age well past 40 without consequence. It was women who were supposed to shrink and disappear. But I kept finding these other, weirder places where none of these rules applied. First in lesbian culture, feminist scholars, off-the-grid land where people made their own rules for living. Intergenerational queer relationships where young people like me loved and wanted elders. …
I learned that in the world of queer artists, so many died before they got even close to 40. The AIDS pandemic changed death and aging in the queer culture I was learning about. If so many brilliant people would never reach old age, dying young by disease, violence, neglect, or addiction, then aging could transform into something entirely new, a goal, a wish, an ambition, a fortunate destiny. An exception.
Yoko Ono is about to be 90. Right now, as I type, I’m listening to her album from 2007, at the time she was 74. Next Marianne Faithfull comes on and right now she’s 74 and recently put out a new album. Cookie Mueller died when she was 40. What I wouldn’t give to read what she would’ve written at 74, at 90.
Rejecting the dominant narrative about age and aging, especially for women, emerged as another gift of queerness. Another layer of the larger world I could duck away from, shrug off.
This is not to deny ageism and the actual system of age-related oppression we all live within. And aging, as any elder will remind me, is not for the faint of art. Our bodies change in ways that confound and scare us. Our beloveds die.
But artists, you are the ones who teach us new ways of living and being. You have real power to thwart and sabotage ageism. It starts with you unlearning your internalized beliefs about age in your own life and in the people around you. You at 26, 42, 67, 81 are not too old to have the creative life you want. Or something even wilder, beyond the confines of your limited imagination. In fact, it’s your duty as an artist to keep changing and getting bolder as you age, modeling for the emerging younger artists the many ways a person can make a creative life.
And yes, I have some homework for you on this very topic.
First, finish this statement without overthinking it:
As an artist I am too old to____________
Now unpack that belief. Is there a real limitation because of age or is it perception? If you’ve aged out of something by a number or by limitations of the body, consider what better, bigger thing could you have?
Next, you must cultivate a list of artists, both living and dead, who live outrageous lives making work on and on and on into their elder years. All disciplines, all kinds of artists in every demographic. This is a crucial step that you must not skip. Dive into their lives and their work.
Then, I want you to imagine yourself in your furthest elder years. How old is the eldest self you can conjure? Bring that perfect person into your consciousness and ask them how to live a life that at every turn satisfies and scandalizes you. Your eldest you has the answers for present day you.
Finally, let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear from you.