Front Porch: For age, mental math often isn’t accurate

How old do you feel inside your head?

A writer dealt with that question in an article in the Atlantic recently, and it got me thinking. For most of my middle age, and now my senior years, I’ve always thought of myself as younger than I actually am.

This pretty well mirrors a Danish study that showed most adults older than 40 perceive themselves as 20% younger than they are.

This isn’t the same thing as how old do you feel physically. In the throes of COVID or when recovering from surgery or dealing with chronic back pain or having endured too many physical or psychological blows in life, a person can feel older than Methuselah.

But how do you see yourself inside your head? Younger, always younger. A person with things to do, deadlines to meet, contributions to make.

When I was 60, and left full-time salaried work to return to the freelance writing I did when my children were babies, I felt, oh, somewhere around 45 – full of energy and enthusiasm for this new chapter of my life. And I moved and acted like it.

That was good because it fueled my energy and outlook. And now, many years later, I still see myself younger than my actual years, but not by quite so many perhaps.

There are some physical and not-so-gentle reminders that it ain’t actually so. I am not anticipating the coming dawn’s possibilities as regularly as I used to. Sure, still planning things and anticipating upcoming events and visits and such. But I’m starting to reflect more – recalling past adventures and not so much preparing for new ones.

That’s a change going on in my head.

In a recent edition of The Spokesman-Review, there was a story about Spokane pioneer Peter B. Barrow, a prominent African American resident of the city who contributed so much to its development and whose descendants continued doing the same. One of his children was Eleanor Barrow Chase, a woman of distinction in her own right and also wife of Jim Chase, who Spokane’s first, and only, Black mayor.

I’d met Jim Chase through professional connections, and my mother was friends with Eleanor Chase. That was just last year or maybe the year before that.

Actually, no. He was elected mayor in 1981. My mother died in 1987. Eleanor Chase died in 2002. No, no, no … wait a minute, I’m not old enough for that much time to have passed. At least I’m not old enough in my head.

And then, just last week, I sent my husband’s and my passports off for renewal, a process that required new photos. When I saw my photo, taken by the nice young man at Walgreens (who told me not to show teeth when I smiled) and sized appropriately for the passport book, I was startled by what I saw.

Now, I’m quite familiar with my face. I see it every morning in the mirror as I wash it, brush its teeth, comb the hair on top of its head and generally give it a quick look-see to make sure it’s ready to go out and greet the world. In the morning-mirror time, it’s not static. Its moving and participating in the getting-ready-for-the-day process.

But staring up at me from the still photo with no surrounding scenery, people or distractions – yikes.

There in the photo was this woman (who doesn’t wear makeup) staring back at me, with an awkward almost-smile on her face, with hairdo rather too casually paid attention to for a permanent record photo, and whose eyebrows – much like a bridge whose side spans are slowing sliding from the riverbank – are collapsing at the ends, being pulled down by sagging eyelids, one more so than the other, giving a slightly drunk affect. And her lips are disappearing. Good god, who is this old crone?

She looks much older than I perceive us to be, surely. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that she looks old. She knows she is. But the woman standing motionless in the photo clearly doesn’t look how we feel inside, and that’s a little unsettling. And, no, the answer isn’t cosmetic camouflage. It needs to be an attitudinal whomp alongside the head.

How do you embrace your true chronological age (because, frankly, I’m delighted to have gotten here) and still allow yourself to perceive yourself as younger? I’m going to have to figure that out.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.