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Essay
Jane Fonda Says Being Young Is the Hardest Part—And I Believe Her
"It's really, really hard to be young"
Jane Fonda said in Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Wiser Than Me podcast.
“People always think it's hard to be old. No, it's hard to be young,” she said dead serious—and I don’t think I have ever appreciated something more.
Not because I’ve put a lot of thought into how hard it is or isn’t to be older, but because I’ve never felt familiar with the description of how being young was easy. I never found it easy, not since being a young child. Really, I can’t remember ever feeling that life was easy. It’s always been something; I wasn’t thin enough, not as pretty as my friends, the boys in middle school didn’t like me, I didn’t have the cool clothes, I wasn’t good enough in school—even though I was smart and had good grades, I also had friends who were smart and had good grades, so it was never good enough.
I played football, but I was anything but a runner and couldn’t compete with the other girls who were really good and fast and seemed able to run for hours. The high school I went to, I chose partly because I did have decent grades and wanted to use them for something, and partly because my friends with good grades also went to that school. But here, everyone was smart, so I wasn’t really smart anymore. And I didn’t fit in with my classmates because they were really smart, especially in science subjects, and I was more of a writer and a thinker. This school was also not mainstream, and people had more of a hipster vibe, which I liked, but also didn’t like, because my body didn’t fit those clothes. Even in university, I didn’t really fit in, even though I went to a uni that was the complete opposite of my high school. I met new people, made new friends, and I won’t say I didn’t like it there at all—but I often felt lonely, and the studies often felt useless.
I’m not trying to say that growing up was awful or that I hated any part of it (I probably did hate a lot of it, but not to the extent that I think about it much now). My point is that it was never, ever easy. And every time I read or hear someone say, “Being young is so easy; just wait until you grow up and have to take responsibility for all kinds of things,” I can never really understand what they mean. Then again, I’ve always felt more comfortable talking to people older than me. And by that, I don’t mean friends two or three years older—I mean adults. I loved talking to adults, even as a child. When I was about, I don’t know, maybe ten, I went on a trip to Germany with the school band (I was playing the cornet, mostly for my mother’s pleasure). Anyhow, my best friends also played the cornet in the same school band, and they were on the trip, too. Still, I cannot, for the life of me, remember hanging out with them at all. I remember becoming really good friends with one of the older girl’s mothers, who was older than my own mother—and I remember thinking about how cool the oldest girl was, who was practically a grown-up, probably almost ten years older than me. Even as we got older and entered that age where parents are the worst, both your own and others, I was always the one who stood in the living room talking to my friends’ mothers, even though my friends were like, “Ugh, mom, go away.” I don’t know, maybe I’m just an old soul (I might be, but I was also a child and must have seemed funny to these grown-ups, enjoying their company more than my friends’).
It’s hard being young. I’m twenty-six now and am still reminded every now and then that I am still young. But there’s something changing. Every day, as I get one day older, I feel a bit more at ease. My life is way harder in terms of working, earning money, paying rent and electricity, making sure the winter tires on my car are renewed when they should be, paying attention to the news, and deciding who I’m going to vote for in elections. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that my life is a lot easier. Just from the age of twenty-three to twenty-six, my life has become a little bit easier every day—and I am excited to be getting older. I never feared any particular age, like thirty, which I know was my mother’s “hardest birthday” (yes, I am a bit offended as I was born when she was 29). I always thought thirty was a nice age because that was the age when people seemed to be both more at ease with being themselves and more on top of things like work and money, making them able to travel and do more fun things than is possible when you’re twenty-two.
Also, have you noticed that every time some famous woman (or man, but it seems more often a woman) is asked about something that occurred when they were in their twenties, their answer almost always starts or ends with something like, “Oh, but I was so young!” or “I was just a young girl; I didn’t know (…)” That’s also something I often think about—how, when I’m fifty, sixty, seventy, everything I do or don’t do now is going to be a “but I was so young”-kind of thing, as opposed to being a life-changing event, which is what it might feel like in the moment. Older women say a lot of smart things, and I’ve learned to listen when they talk.
If you ever feel old or that life is ending just because you’re reaching some age like twenty-five or thirty, I urge you to watch the Jane Fonda in Five Acts documentary. Not only is she a fierce boss lady who will give you motivation for whatever you need motivation for—she divides her life into five parts. Five parts is a lot of life. And although you might feel a bit sad that she bases these parts on the men in her life, it also shows how long a life can be if you’re lucky enough to grow old. She’s done so many amazing things in her life; she’s been married like a hundred times (okay, three), she’s working hard for our climate, still acting, and working politically to do everything she can to get the US it’s first female president. Me, sitting here, being twenty-six, got a bit tired just from writing that long sentence.
But I do trust Jane Fonda, I really do. And together with a lot of other older women, like Maggie Smith, Lily Tomlin, Mary McDonnell, Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep—I will always open my ears, my brain, and my heart to what they have to say. It’s been two years since I heard Jane Fonda say that being young is hard. I haven’t forgotten it for a second. It is like comfort and motivation in one sentence. The worst is behind me, and I no longer have to try fitting in or spending time with people who take more than they give. And for that, I’ll accept whatever wrinkles and back pains come my way.
Essay
DON’T LOOK AT THE TRUCK
I few days ago, maybe a couple of weeks—I don’t have good concept of time—I read (or heard?) about not having a plan B. How if you have a plan B you have already set yourself up to the possibility that you will fail plan A, which is what you really want to do. And it stuck with me.
You see, when I was learning to ride a car before taking my drivers license, I was driving with my instructor, who was one of the most relaxed people I think I have ever met. He was so chill, when I was anything but. And one day I was driving on the main road, and I was uttering my fear of passing large trucks. They felt so huge, and gave me the impression of having the smallest car, not enough space to drive my little car and very much thinking about how, if we crashed, the truck would drive right over me and I would become a flat human pancake. If you’ve ever driven a car on a main road, you probably know the feeling. However, my driving instructor being the chillest guy ever, said to me: “Andrea, if you don’t want to hit the truck, don’t look at the truck—look at the road. Always look at where you’re going, because you will automatically drive the direction you are looking”. And while he did not at all mean this as a metaphor, it always stuck with me; both when I am driving a car—which I have been successfully doing for eight years without hitting any trucks—but also as a metaphor in life. Looking where you’re not going will throw you off your track.
So when I learned about how not having a plan B, I thought about this metaphor. Because having a plan B, is like looking the wrong way, even for a second, and it’s gonna make you stagger. And if you stagger, you either won’t hit any of your marks, you hit the truck or you fall with your face (or ass) first.
While I’m writing this, I realise how many metaphors there is saying exactly this. “Keep your eyes on the price” for an example. It really does say the same, doesn’t it? But still, it really never resonated with me. I have never heard that expression and got any feeling of let’s fucking go—anything is possible. Yet, this kind of made up metaphor about looking at the road and not at the truck, looking where your going because you will automatically go that way—it gives me that feeling of opportunity. Capability. Prospect.
When I quit my job to do my own thing, I never consciously thought about not having another plan. I never wrote it down or told anyone. I probably said some version of “I’ll just have to get another job, then”, but I never really made myself any plan B. An escape plan. The get-another-job-plan is more of a thats-what-people-do-thing, than it is me planning it. I don’t think I ever doubted it would work. That I would find a way to live my life the way I wanted to live it. Obviously I’m damn lucky being born in one of the worlds richest countries, with health care and gay rights—but I have never, ever wanted to live my life in the 9-5-kinda way that is the norm. I never felt like a traditional person. So when I actually got the chance of making my own way, the thought of what if it fails never really entered my mind. And still, a year later, even though I haven’t in any way made myself rich or famous or anything like that, I reflect, probably even more than a year ago, about my life in the future with the money and the freedom. What I want to do, when I’m actually able to do mostly anything. And by thinking about it every day, I also never look in the wrong direction. I haven’t once looked for other, conventional jobs or thought about giving up. The thoughts of should I do anything different, what’s gonna be my main offer, how can I do business better, how can I earn more money—these things I think about mostly everyday. But they never move in the direction of quitting. Because I’m not going that way, so why look in that direction?
Now, this sounds nice and all, right? But there is one other factor, and it’s important as hell. In the year or so I’ve been doing my own shit, I’ve surrounded myself only with people who believe I can make it. Or mostly that is, I’ll say 99 prosent, because I really cannot choose every person I talk to in life. But the folks I have closest to me, the ones I actually talk to most days, those people never questioned anything. And for me it’s not that they believe that I am able to run a business and earn the money—its’s the general belief that it is possible to live a different way. The openness to the fact that working nine to five at an office isn’t what everyone wants. And I think we all know that a lot of the people who don’t believe it’s possible to do anything else don’t necessarily want to spend their life in an office either, they just don’t know how to do anything different. Or they are small minded human beings who don’t want anyone else to do what they really want—and those people I don’t care about for a second anymore. You see, I’ve had people close to me that didn’t do anything but limit me. And without those people I do have a lot less friends, but a lot more belief in myself and a lot more energy to put into the things I wanna do. So it’s not really a loss.
Who you surround yourself with is important for your ability to keep your gaze straight ahead at where you want to go. And if the people you have close to you make you look towards the truck, maybe you don’t need them—because it takes a lot of energy to keep turning your gaze in the right direction again and again. And it takes a lot of courage to choose plan A as the only plan there is, but it is the only plan there is. Because it’s the plan you want. And you can change plan A how many times you want, but you never need a plan B. Plan B is the truck, not because it is going to make you a into a human pancake, but because it is a distraction from plan A.
Short story
THE ELEVATOR PITCH
“Hold the elevator!!”, he yelled, a lot louder than he intended. ”Uhm, please”, he added awkward, embarrassed that he had sounded like some kind of military dude with way too high thoughts about himself.
As he got to the elevator, he saw a foot in between the doors, and from the simple, black leather boot, his eyes followed the leg, passed the ancle, the knee, the thigh and then he realised what he was doing and forced his eyes to go straight to the face of this person. A woman looked at him. She was smiling, more than he would have expected, but she also had this kind of face that he didn’t have any doubts that this woman smiled a lot. Probably to everyone she met.
“Thank you so much”, he said—not waiting until she could answer he kept going, “I didn’t mean to shout, I am just really running late for this meeting, and I am not really my boss’ favourite person so I kind of have no room for screwing up, uhh I mean fucking up, oh fuck I’m sorry I mean I really shouldn’t be late for this meeting”. He was out of breath and everything he just said was true, but the nice woman holding the elevator did not need to know any of it. He put his palm to his forehead, sighing loud from his own socially awkwardness. Why did he always do this?
When he dared to look back up, he looked straight into this woman’s eyes, and she had the nicest eyes behind the non-framed glasses. She was probably some years older than him, maybe in her late fourties, she looked confident in a non-arrogant way. When she smiled, which she seemed to do all the time, her eyes were friendly, in her cheeks a small dimple appeared on each side and her plump, dark red lips did not let one single one of her teeth slip out. He had a habit of not really looking at people, not in the elevator, not in meetings, not anywhere he didn’t have to. His mother had always said “look at me when I speak to you!”, usually mad at him for avoiding eye contact. But this woman, he just couldn’t stop looking at her. Not in a oh-my-god-she-is-so-hot-kinda way, but she just had something to her whole person. Like he didn’t want to take her to bed, he wanted to take her to dinner and listen to her talk for hours even though he had not yet even heard her voice. Her outfit both chill, beautiful and professional at the same time, a combination he couldn’t remember anyone ever pulling off. Her dark, low rise loose jeans, dark red shirt with only the two upper buttons closed, some kind of top inside, tight and black, showing her body in a non-revealing way. Her leather jacket hanging over her shoulders like they just happened to fall over her when she left the house. She was pretty, hot and looked like the most intelligent woman he had ever seen—all at the same time.
After a few seconds, that felt like hours, where she just looked at him and smiled with both her eyes and mouth, she said “no problem, I am in no rush”. Her whole presence was controlled and relaxed, she was the perfect combination of cool and kind.
Just as he finished the thought, the elevator started shaking, then a loud bang and they both knew what had happened. They were stuck.
“Oh, fuck”. The words just slipped out of him. This happened all the time, but this time he really did not have the time for it to happen. He looked at her with an apologetic face. She smiled, again, but this time she seemed different. Nervous. He looked away, not wanting to bother her, but it was like his face didn’t want to be facing anything but her. The elevator had no mirror, it was just a brown box. Not small, but in no way large. Just a regular elevator. Her face had gotten paler, and the confidence she had just a few seconds ago had faded into something else. Fear maybe? He looked at her, on purpose this time, and heard his own voice, calmer than ever. “Are you okay?”. She looked him straight in the eyes and he realised her gaze had gotten cold. She tried to smile, but it was in no way convincing.
“I’m just not really good with small spaces”, she stuttered.
“Oh, it’s probably just a short stop, no problem”, he said.
It got quiet.
A few minutes went by, and no sign of the elevator moving. The silence was loud. He hated silence. Couldn’t bear hearing his own blood rushing through his veins. He had to say something, but in the same exact moment he opened his mouth to say something stupid about the weather, he had another thought. If he could hate the silence so much, how scared was she actually of being stuck in an elevator. He had no problem being stuck in an elevator, he had even crawled through narrow pipes when he worked as an electrician, having to take his tool belt off to be able to get back out. In other words, he could not at all relate to the fear of tight spaces. But he hated, like really hated, every social event. Whenever he had to talk to other people than his friends and family, he startet spewing out words, telling details nobody cared about or even wanted to know, his face turned red and his palms sweaty. Even when he talked about the one thing he really had knowledge on, electricity in large, public buildings, he cramped up. What if this woman had the same feelings about being stuck in a small, wooden elevator without mirrors or air for that sake, as he had when having to talk to people? Oh no, he thought to himself. What if she really has anxiety for cramped spaces and he said “NO PROBLEM”?? What ass of a guy says that??
He felt stupid. She was probably claustrophobic, and his take on it was “it’s okay”??
Now his palms got sweaty. He had to say something. She had sat down, and leaned her back and head towards the inner wall of the brown box they were stuck in. He sat down leaning to the same wall, but as far away as possible from her. Which was not really far as the box was maybe five feet wide. His head tilted slowly towards her, and he could see she was not okay. Her hands were shaky and she had her eyes like kind of closed, but still open. What could he possible say to make it better?
He cleared his throat, which obviously made a lot more sound than he anticipated. He rolled his eyes and shook his head annoyed of his own lack of being normal. Then without thinking he opened his mouth and out came the most stupid words he had ever uttered.
”You’re really not good with small spaces, huh?”
Oh my god, what the fuck was that???
She opened her eyes a bit more and turned her head towards the left so he could se her confused and probably very annoyed face. She turned back, pulled her legs towards her, put her hands around the knees and leaning forward with her head to the kneecaps.
He put his stupid face in to his stupid palms. Everything was sweaty.
The next minutes felt like days. They both sat there, with their gaze turned down, wallowing in their own anxiety. As the elevator light turned back on, and they could feel it moving again, they both got up. It still took a few second before it stopped—on her floor. As she was about to exit the elevator she turned to him, held the door and with a glimpse in her eye she said
“you’re really not good with social interaction, huh?”
And then she left and the doors closed. She was gone.
Short story
THE PRINTER
There is a reason why I always, always, always avoid having to print something. Obviously there is a climate factor, but that’s not the biggest reason (don’t tell anyone that). The biggest reason is this: there’s not one single thing in this world that makes me feel less smart, than trying to manoeuvre a printer and getting it to give me those words on paper. But this time I had to. There was just no way around it, I had to have those words on paper, to do my job (maybe I should get one of those pad-thingys that let’s you write straight on a document without printing, but then again, there is a climate factor to that too, and let me just love my pen towards paper for a few more years).
The problem is—yes, is, not was or usually are— that the printer is it’s own type of awfulness. It’s just like that one friend who says yes to everything, but backs out five minutes before you’re meeting up. You know it’s going to happen, but still you have hopes every time that she won’t. That she just shows up, or at least responds with a polite “I can’t” when you call the first time. Because all though it sucks to get rejected, it’s worse to get stood up last minute. And in the exact same way being stood up by a friend (can we even call her that, still?) hurts the long lost self esteem, being fooled by the printer hurts the part of the brain where you actually feel there is some hard working cells. The part where you feel quite capable. I think it’s referred to as intelligence?
And you know, I did say is, so there should be absolutely no surprise that this time was no exception. I said, both to myself and to the black box supposed to be fast and reliable, that today this is going to be no problem, no stress, just a woman printing out some papers. This time it even started out fine, the box I’ve named Jack (Jacks are always unreliable) even told me he was connected to WiFi, the right WiFi, and ready to go do his job so that I could go do mine. But then, when we were almost there, he goes … nothing. And there’s that feeling, that feeling you get when that friend texts you “something came up, gotta reschedule”.
So I did what anyone raised in that period where technology was existing, but no one had any idea how to use it would do. I turned it off. And then on again, wondering if this technique would work with humans. Put them in just a tiny coma, to kinda restart everything, maybe they would wake up a little bit more cheerful. Maybe even a bit more polite (you know, the ability to not say yes, when you mean no, for an example). It worked with Jack. At least I thought so, but as that one friend, he loves tricking me into believing he’s changed. Approximately five seconds after we were back on track, he went “there is something wrong” and I went “okay, what” and he went “…” and I went “hello? you’re the one there’s something wrong with, and you don’t even know what it is??”. I know, it was a bit rude, but then again, he deserved it. After four more tries, disconnecting, connecting, smiling, crying, trying, failing, restarting, laughing, dying—I gave up, sat my ass down and started writing. By hand. On paper. Two pages on the laptop, how long could it take? Spoiler: two pages on a computer is a lot more when you write by hand. And if you can believe it, Jack left me hanging just until I had one paragraph left, no feeling in my shoulder, a new chronic posture and this distinctive pain in my right wrist, and then, like he just got out of coma, he was back. Happier than ever. Giving me both pages as if nothing happened. Just like that friend who always cancels, and then suddenly is at your door with wine and food, going “thought you might wanna watch a movie”, as if you have no life and couldn’t possibly have other plans on a Saturday night, but then again lying on the floor with your cat, listening to stories worse than yours isn’t really socially accepted as other plans, so you say yes.
And there I am. With the two pages Jack was handing me, and the five with my sloppy handwriting on the desk (not very climate friendly), trying to convince myself to use the once handwritten, because it’s five sheets of paper, should be used for something. I can almost hear him laughing at me, because he knows that I’ll end up using his two, instead of my five in the end. Of course I will, they’re better.