A Wrinkle in Time

When you get a rock dipped in chocolate in a candy box. Laurie Stone contemplates how we navigate stealth insults, especially as we age.

Laurie Stone at 76.

Today I read two posts on social media about women considered old. Old women, old ladies. When I see my age group—I am 76—depicted as a newspaper turned brown around the edges, a light goes on over the bathroom mirror. If you are a female human—and many other kinds of human—your life is a trail of insults that leads to someone telling you what you can eat.

One of the stories was told by a granddaughter, the other by a daughter. The stories were meant to be heartwarming chucks under the chins of the older women for their pluck and gumption. Both contexts, however, were so horrendously narrow, the older women came off damned by too much praise.

In one story, a woman secures a toaster offered to new customers of a bank by threatening to close her account, walk around the block, and open a new account. In the other story, a woman in a care facility wrangles a dish of ice cream restricted from her diet, only to take it to her room and throw it away. Her daughter asks why she went to the bother, and the woman says, “They should be asking me what I want, not telling me what to do.”

When I see my age group—I am 76—depicted as a newspaper turned brown around the edges, a light goes on over the bathroom mirror. If you are a female human—and many other kinds of human—your life is a trail of insults that leads to someone telling you what you can eat.

Hear, hear, indeed, but why have the younger women chosen to share stories of tiny, personal rebellion as a way to charm their readers? It’s easy for the tellers to believe they are writing with love—and only with love—because the way it’s unconscious to patronize the old is the way it’s unconscious, often, to patronize: women, girls, the poor, the disabled, the homeless, etc.

I took a bath while color set in my hair. In the bath, I thought about a life lived inside a net of insults and how it’s not a fit subject because all lives are lived inside the insult of having to end. I thought about how I had learned to maneuver inside the net of insults that ping off you about your value as a female human, your value as a female human who wants not to be judged for wanting experience, only to be judged for not wanting to be judged. I thought about the times I had pointed out to a person they were insulting me or the times I had written that the unconscious setting of the insult toward women was guiding human society with a broken compass. I thought about how seldom I had actually said any of these things in order not to sound like a nag and a drag, and also because I often experience a delayed reaction between the insult and knowing it’s happened.

Yesterday as a gift I spent a day at a spa, and one of the perks was a massage. The woman who worked on my body was about my age. She told me how common it was in her line of work to be insulted, also intimidated or made to feel unsteady in other ways, but mostly insulted, and she told me what she does with the anger that wells up in her. She conducts various conversations with herself, reminding herself she can detach from the ways people see her. She doesn’t have to incorporate their views into her sense of self, and when she is able to create a barrier between herself and these hurts, she feels freer, happier, and in all senses more flexible.

Why have the younger women chosen to share stories of tiny, personal rebellion as a way to charm their readers? It’s easy for the tellers to believe they are writing with love—and only with love—because the way it’s unconscious to patronize the old is the way it’s unconscious, often, to patronize: women, girls, the poor, the disabled, the homeless, etc.

She asked if I felt anger. I said, “Enough to power New York City.” She suggested I use her practices. I told her I thought they could help in my personal dealings but probably not with the larger world. It’s hard to know how to live. I will never figure it out, and no matter. To speak to the injustices of the world, it seems to me, you have to register insult and not let it float by. It’s not floating by, anyway. It’s eating the world. And even though I have entered the category of the old, where I may be assumed to be X while in reality I am neither X nor Y. I am also not neither X nor Y. Even though another broken compass is mapping directions for my life, if you call me by a name I do not think of as me, I will remind you I’m not your slum.