Our age is only one dimension of who we are. But it is a dimension. Isn't it? Or is it? This is what I was thinking, in relation to blogging, as I drifted to sleep last night. I enjoy reading bloggers of all ages--my blogroll attests to that. I have friends from the blog world on both sides of my 40 years.
But I do admit to an affinity for reading bloggers who wade around in the same 40-ish trenches as me. What they write, because of where they are in their journey from birth, often resonates with me. They're looking back at the hard stuff that brought them to this edge of mid-life, and they're looking ahead, lugging a backpack of worries and concerns not unlike my own.
Naturally, I hyperlink in my head to what blogging must feel like for the 20-somethings who've grown up online (like we didn't), and for the 60-somethings who are braver than most of my relatives of the same age for just being online. If bloggers are, in some way, a family--which many of us have said is so--then our ages, our birth order, do come into play in what we say, what we write, how we relate. No? I think yes. Not every post, certainly, but in the bigger picture of our blogs.
I think of how boring I must seem to some of the cool, hip, young bloggers who probably aren't so interested in my meanderings over my daughter, house, family, work. I think of how trite I must seem to some of the older bloggers who've walked this road before me.
They must want to shake me sometimes.
I think of Elaine who is a blogger, mother, grandmother, on the far side of 60. I try to put myself in front of her keyboard and wonder what it must be like to watch the younger bloggers leap, stumble, fall, and how if I were her, I would probably want to be forever saying, "Watch out!" or "Oh no, don't do that--I tried it and it did not, I mean not, work."
I admire Elaine and other bloggers of age for mostly taking a seat beside us as you watch us fumble along--sometimes succeeding, sometimes realizing, sometimes hesitating--on a road of years you've already traveled. For trying to stay positive and reassuring as we find our own way. Please do that--we need it.
And I am going to try to remember these thoughts I've had, 20 years from now, if I'm still here, if I happen upon a post of some 40-something blogger who's making her way through an unkind world as best she can, revealing herself online as she goes.
I'm going to take a seat beside that woman-I-once-resembled and maybe I'll place my hand on hers, just for a moment, as she looks out her window to the East, and I look out mine to the West, as we take this ride together.
