This is the inevitable thread for ILxors in their forties

Just don't recognise anything in this thread. Including the posts I posted so that suggests it was probably a crap idea. Oh well, it was worth a momentary try.

Please to God never let me actually become a "fortysomething."

One upside: being a dirty old man sort of suits me.

What are the characteristics of a fortysomething? (I bet I have most of them).

I can legally have an affair with someone half my age!

so, is anyone on for it?

thread is otm, though now I can also see how it mightn't be otm, and would not be surprised to find myself arguing either side of the question for fifteen minutes or so before getting completely distracted by some other stray thought

They say memory is the second thing to go. I can't remember the first one.

My drug of choice these days is Back and Body aspirin, for that extra frisson of caffeine.

Memory is going, true, but at least I remember the 70s

Memory is going, true, but at least I have begun forgetting the 70's.

hi.

um, I'm OK.

What are the characteristics of a fortysomething?

Being aged between 40 and 49. Anyway I though we were all 'middle youths' nowadays.

sorry to have woken you oldtimers up . but. I misread Marcello's OP as

Yes, I know, creeping balkanisation etc. but why should we be left out?

But please leave cheeky Ovaries at the door.

-- Marcello Carlin, Wednesday, August 27, 2008 2:35 PM (7 hours ago)

I'll have you know my ovaries are extremely well-behaved; veritable paragons of polite ovarian society.

The ovaries are fine, but I'm prone to brain farts now.

The world's worst song.

Comparing your ovary to a Bronte C/D?

Wuthering Ovaries

Thrustcrotch Minge

Carry On Bronteing

One upside: being a dirty old man sort of suits me.

-- Rock Hardy

^^^

haven't you all heard - us 40+'rs are saving the music industry.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/stevelamacq/2008/08/to_bb_or_not_to_bb.html

Come on - you're not too old to have forgotten this thread already...
I am too old for this...the 40 plus thread.

Don't even remember that thread but this one could do with a few more ovaries...

my right knee

wait, is your right knee also my right knee. Because - my right knee.

No knee problems, but a lingering cough and all.

my left knee

Knees still fine, but ow my aching fibroid. Roll on the menopause, please.

back pain... bruised rib?

Have you banged a rib?

Not that I remember ... had a sidewalk fall about 6 weeks ago but I'm positive I landed on knees.

I always have back pain. I just attribute it to "lol old, also sit up straight dummy" at this point.

Had surgery three weeks ago to correct a compressed ulnar nerve in my left arm. Incision is taking it's sweet time healing all the way.

The rest of my 40s are going to suck, aren't they.

Upper, lower, middle back, Morbz?

left middle-lower

Saggy mattress? I can definitely trace my back pain to mattress + increasing girth.

Yeah, I try to sleep flat on my back w/a pillow under my knees when I get back pain.

well I sleep with my bed titled to ease the acid reflux. But yeah, mattress is old and crap.

Lord Paillasse?

Tilted means your back is still bearing weight.

usually sleep on my side (the right since pain started obv)

but pain is not as bad as it was in January.

Seen a chiropractor at all or anybody, really?

as an ILXOR in my 40s, I can confirm that GOOD POSTURE is urgent and key - even making the effort to sit up straighter at yr desk can have a tremendously positive effect on neck and back pain

I sleep on my side as well, and trial and error has led to this successful formula: an extra pillow to straighten my neck, and a pillow between my legs to elevate my top leg and straighten my spine. I'm still grinked up in the morning, but it eases by my 2nd cup of coffee.

I see my GP every summer, and that takes effort.

ppl our age really can't eat Indian food w/out sacrifice, eh?

tmi

wow, earliest sign here of my back pain that turned out to be Something Serious, unrelated to posture. Had no idea it started in winter.

Hesitated this time before throwing out mailing w/ AARP card.

My vision has gone 'bifocalish', ie I gotta take the glasses off to read.

― Dr Morbius, Wednesday, August 27, 2008 11:05 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is driving me fkin CRAZY. I just got new frames, which I love, but I only get to wear em 15% of the time. I opted not to get the progressive lenses bc I was afraid it would be annoying but...

Also damn but I (b.1970) spent 2012 feeling just physically OLD.

I feel great, I realize I'm fortunate to remember things other people don't, and I wouldn't trade that for anything. My sister doesn't remember our grandfather, for example - he died in 1975. I think she feels this loss, it's a piece of her history she can only access through pictures.

a sign of middle age truculence ids you're stil lwilling to put up with the morning after Indian food.

(yes i have passed out of strict eligibility for this thread, whatcha gonna do abt it?)

Maybe you're not totally wrong, Kate. My dad very possibly has narcissistic personality disorder. I think that's why he gave up on trying to make or maintain friendships after his attempt to force my mom to be his only friend failed with the end of their marriage. She told me he flunked out of college the first time through because he was a bright kid who got to Madison and met people who were truly brilliant and it crushed his spirit. So he just has my brother and me as consolation for whatever he imagined his life was going to be, and he putters around doing things out of a performative sense of whimsy the rest of the time. He's nice in some ways but also terribly cynical and convinced he knows best about everything, I think. He passed on all sorts of weirdness to me that I really used to resent him for but have come to terms with especially since I think I've stamped out most of the narcissistic traits that I detected in myself. I'll miss him but there's a lot about him that I never even got to know because I was always engaged with him on his terms.

Maybe you're not totally wrong, Kate. My dad very possibly has narcissistic personality disorder. I think that's why he gave up on trying to make or maintain friendships after his attempt to force my mom to be his only friend failed with the end of their marriage. She told me he flunked out of college the first time through because he was a bright kid who got to Madison and met people who were truly brilliant and it crushed his spirit. So he just has my brother and me as consolation for whatever he imagined his life was going to be, and he putters around doing things out of a performative sense of whimsy the rest of the time. He's nice in some ways but also terribly cynical and convinced he knows best about everything, I think. He passed on all sorts of weirdness to me that I really used to resent him for but have come to terms with especially since I think I've stamped out most of the narcissistic traits that I detected in myself. I'll miss him but there's a lot about him that I never even got to know because I was always engaged with him on his terms.

― servoret

IDK, maybe I'm not totally wrong. I mean, I don't know your dad at all, so I can't say much about him. Some of the stuff he does just reminds me of myself. Not in a good or bad way. Just does.

It sounds like your dad maybe hasn't treated you as well as a father should treat his child. Maybe not. That's just the impression I get. I know my dad, well, he wasn't a very good dad. He abandoned his kids. The thing is, I don't actually blame him for that. He blamed himself. Like your dad, he put all his hopes on his kids - he kind of thought of us as the one thing of value that he ever had anything to do with.

I didn't find out a lot of this until after he died, when my ex-wife and I travelled to the nursing home where he lived, talked to the one friend he had. She seemed like a decent person. She converted him to Christianity, when he was dying, which he'd never been for the entirety of his life, but I guess I don't hold that against her. You know, he was just afraid to reach out to the people who cared about him, so who he wound up with was whoever showed up. And I think she did genuinely care for him as a person, not just as a soul to win for Christ.

The funny thing was I had all this guilt and shame about being a bad son, which I guess I was, though not for the reasons I thought. It never occurred to me that he might be a bad father. I thought his abandoning us was my fault somehow, because I was an ill-behaved child. Like I said, I don't blame him, though I can understand why it caused him so much pain. He couldn't save us. All he could do was get out of a situation that was, well, really not good for him.

I don't blame anyone, really. My mom, I mean, she had some pretty serious failings as a mother, and that sucked for me and for my siblings, and she did the best she could. She loved us and she did the best she could. I'm glad she's in my life now. My dad wasn't really in my life when he died, because he didn't answer the phone when I called. My mom has worked really hard to grow as a person and she's not perfect, but it's paid off. I've tried to work really hard to grow as a person, and... I don't know. It's hard when the people I've loved most in my life are people who haven't necessarily treated me well.

I've always been a quitter. It frustrates the hell out of the people who love me. I don't have a lot of... what do they call it... resilience. I encounter a setback and I figure that there's no way I can possibly succeed at what I'm trying to do, and I give up. The thing about... I've been diagnosed with BPD, and that's considered a personality disorder, clinically, like narcissism. And people treat personality disorders as some sort of innate thing, some sort of innate flaw in a person, but that's not my experience. My experience is that people aren't born flawed or broken. If there's anything that holds me back, it's the way I internalized the idea that there was something flawed or broken about me. What gets called "personality disorders", to me, that's learned behavior. And to me, narcissism and BPD, they both kind of stem from the same thing, which is people who don't have a lot of self-confidence, don't believe in themselves. So they - we - have a tendency to seek externally what's missing in ourselves. There's some crossover here with the masculinity thread, with what they're talking about over there. But it's not just a gendered thing, it's not just a guy thing.

For me, with BPD, my whole thing is that I just want to be loved. But the way I've learned to go about it, that's not effective. In fact a lot of times it's counterproductive. If there's one line I think sums up that kind of unhealthy behavior pattern, it's "All shall love me and despair". And narcissism, it's kind of the same thing except that what people there seek is external symbols of status. So a narcissist isn't going to care about other people really, they'll toss people aside if having that person in their lives doesn't help them get power and status. The thing is all that power and status isn't going to be satisfying, no matter how much they have, just like no matter how much other people love me, it's not going to substitute for me loving and valuing myself.

Well, these days I don't think there's something broken or wrong with me, but I also don't... I don't entirely trust myself. I don't want to ask for help because I worry that I'll get hurt. I got.. again, it's the lack of resilience. My therapists call it the "biosocial model". Like some of it is learned, but some of it is just, well. Stuff that doesn't bother other people hits me like a mack truck.

I grew up, you know... I didn't think like other people, I was autistic, I had ADHD, but I wasn't diagnosed with any of that. I had this weird body that didn't feel like mine and that I couldn't figure out how to use. And at the same time I was really intellectually... "gifted and talented", they said. I knew a lot of things, and I could talk like an adult at a young age, and when you can talk like an adult people tend to treat you like you're an adult. And I wasn't. The thing was I didn't really learn a lot, as a kid. I didn't learn _how_ to learn. I was weird and didn't have much in the way of social skills, so I got bullied a lot. That's not to say it's my fault I got bullied, that's just what happened. And because I didn't have those social skills, and because people didn't take me seriously, I tended to resort to extreme behaviors to try and get my needs met. It was just hard for me to learn what worked and what didn't, compared to a lot of people. I wound up doing a lot of what gets called "masking", trying to make myself look like I was normal and ordinary, because, I mean, the extreme behaviors didn't help, so at some point I just stopped trying to get my needs met.

And I still do have trouble with that... not because I'm asking in an inappropriate way, but because the world I live in, you know, whether or not I deserve to have my needs met, the resources aren't there. The resources aren't available. I give up, really, because I feel like nothing I do will ever be good enough. I've had that message reinforced again and again. I'm having that message reinforced in me, systemically, right now. Is it personally anybody's fault? No, but it's not like anyone here can change the world so I don't experience that. It takes exceptional resilience to be able to make it the way things are for people like me right now, and I just don't have much of it. So yeah, I give up.

Plus, a lot of the things that are hard for me are things that, you know, people think shouldn't be hard. Going to buy groceries? That's really hard for me. But people act like all of these things, all of these normal things that people are supposed to do to take care of their lives, that they're not hard. I would do something that was really difficult for me and I didn't get praise or positive feedback. Instead people would be sarcastic and be like "What do you want, a medal?" Tying my shoelaces was a lot harder for me than getting an A on a math test.

So I hit college and I just didn't have any of the skills to succeed. For me it wasn't that I met people who were "truly brilliant". I didn't think that I was "truly brilliant", I didn't believe in myself, but it's not like... even to this day, I honestly am just... smarter than most of the people I know. It's not something I'm bragging about because it's privilege. It's like bragging about having passing privilege. At the same time it's stupid to pretend I don't have passing privilege. I obviously do. It's just that people would get dazzled and thought that someone as smart as I was, of _course_ I was going to succeed.

I just didn't learn the skills. I excelled in the actual classes, but when it came to registering for the classes... that I couldn't manage. I didn't really know how to study. I'd never had to study before. No matter how brilliant someone is, if they don't have the skills eventually it will catch up with them. All of a sudden I wasn't succeeding, I was failing, and I didn't know what had changed.

I guess I've had other forms of privilege in that I've had people in my life who were willing to do everything for me, whether I wanted them to do those things for me or not. Because they saw how upset I was at not being able to do it, and it was easy for them, and they said oh the heck with it, I'll do it. And they dragged me kicking and screaming through college, and I graduated at the age of 40, but... I mean, there was a price to that. I had to leave that situation, just like my dad had to leave the situation he was in. At least I didn't abandon any kids. Wasn't ever able to have any. Which also means I'm not tempted to say, well, I may have failed but my kids, my kids will be able to do things that I couldn't. I don't think of myself as a failure. I just haven't been able to do a lot of things that, by rights, I should be able to do. It's not anybody's fault. It's not even my fault, really. I do my best a lot of the time. A lot of the time, though, I conclude that something is beyond my ability. And that if I don't know how to do something myself, well, I don't believe anybody is going to help me. Yeah, sometimes I'll go hungry rather than ask someone to help me with the shopping. Because if I ask someone, and they can't help me, well, that's so much worse than just going hungry in the first place. Because if I don't ask someone, the fact that I'm hungry is something under my control. I _could_ go shopping. I just don't. If I ask for help and don't get it, well, it's hard to not believe that I don't deserve help. Even if I intellectually know it, even if I know that it's not my fault if I ask for help and don't get it, those feelings... I've just been rejected so many times that I expect it.

And of course that does become a self-perpetuating cycle. I know that. I just don't know what to ask for, or how to ask for it effectively. I'm trying to figure out what a life worth living looks like for me, and it just seems impossible. Totally impossible.

I don't know. Maybe your dad has similar feelings. Maybe he doesn't. People who have those feelings generally don't talk about them. I mean, why bother? We don't believe it's going to change anything. Sometimes I just talk because I don't know what else to do. I don't really expect anyone to listen. I mean blah blah, another sob story, I try not to pity myself but people often act as though I am self-pitying or trauma dumping when I talk about this stuff.

Anyway. I know it's hard to love and care about someone like your dad. If someone doesn't care for themselves, you know, what can anyone else do? Nothing. It's possible to support people if they ask for help, if they _want_ help, but if someone won't ever ask, if someone rejects help when it's offered... it's an impossible situation. All you can do is hope against hope that they'll change. Me, I've tried really hard to change, and I guess I have in a lot of ways, but I've kind of run out of ideas. I don't really have any hope right now, any ambition, any desire for anything more. Again, maybe your dad has similar feelings. It's really sad and difficult when someone lives their life like that. Other people, I mean. Theoretically I at least have a choice. I just can't see any choice right now, for some reason.

Thanks for writing, Kate. Yeah, maybe my dad did want to change at one point and it was just beyond him. I had similar problems to you with being "gifted and talented" but not having good social skills or knowing how to mesh with my peers, because I was off in my own world following my muse (and copying learned behaviors from my dad and not paying attention to other people's feelings a lot of the time).

I don't know what to tell you about figuring out what a life worth living for looks like. For almost all of my adult life, I gave up repeatedly on that, starting when I went away to college in '96 and realized that I had made the wrong choice, exacerbating my mental illness into full-bore bipolar depression. For me, Zen was the answer because it gave me the freedom to look at the unhealthy sides of myself and do something about them. Now I exist to appreciate whatever spark of life carried off my attention when I was a kid while at the same time occupying reality with other people finally and finding fun in things like acknowledging strangers on the street, something I was deathly afraid of for years and years but always secretly wanted to do. It's dumb; I have no career prospects and probably will never fall in love with anyone at this point, but whatever moment I'm in is more than sufficient.

Pardon me for asking: Are you a new poster or a veteran poster with a new name?

(it's not that Kate)

No I meant servoret

I am a very old returning poster. I used to just go by "Chris F.", and I think I just used my gmail address as my login or something, because if you look at my old posts it gives my username as "servoret" but clicking through says that I don't exist, and I remember running into someone IRL in 2006 and giving out my email and him instantly recognizing me from that as an ILX0r. Sorry to come off as out of nowhere confessional. I was never a very good poster here; many apologies to anyone who ever read me and wished they hadn't. I just missed this place for some reason and there's thoughts I can't share with anyone IRL that I feel like I have to get off my chest; like I'm never going to tell my brother I think my dad might have NPD and that it fucked us up. I don't know, I could be wrong. I do love my dad; he's just got very clear limits as a person and it's frustrating to interact with that sometimes. My mom thinks he has autism; that's also quite probable and maybe it's both.

Is it too late to start skating again? Santa Cruz blue dot being delivered Monday

My wife, who is 50, recently got a pair of rollerskates and I’m terrified for her but acting like it’s cool because she’s a grownup. She was briefly flirting with the idea of roller derby and I gently reminded her how many back operations/injections she has had and I think she’s backed off of that.

Edit; It’s never too late to skate

Im at the coffee place and I order a small drip. Server takes my 4 dollars cash, makes change, I place the coins in the jar, she looks at the next customer. I stand there and she looks back and “oh!”

you got change for 4 bucks in a coffee shop in 2025??

for a small drip, there better be change for $4

It’s like that scene in caddyshack
“I ain’t paying no 50 cents for no coke”
“Then you ain’t gettin no coke my friend!”

Feel like I'm having my first bout of diverticulitis. They told me I had the pouches indicating diverticulosis earlier in the year, and I've had every symptom all week.

Ugh. Dad suffered from it around same age

Sorry to hear Neando— as someone who went through a major stomach related issue this summer, my sympathies are with you.

A colleague, unprompted, put my age at "about 27" today. I like him.

ha, i am lucky to also be pegged as much younger than i actually am, but usually it’s 32. i will take it.

I should add that when I went for a haircut last month I was asked (for the sake of discounts) if I was over 50, so I dunno what's going on.

yeah, I recently got a couple of people who thought I was roughly 10 years younger than I was. But my hair going gray really quickly these days so I think that might not last much longer.

ive always presented as ten years older than i am, since probably early twenties

it keeps them surprised when i nip at their heels at the five a side matches at least

if i am like either of my parents, i won’t start getting a noticeable number of grays until i am in my sixties.

ok ok youve made yr point youngfella

lol

I think at my age (38) my father was already mostly grey, and he turned white in his fifties. I've definitely started greying but I'm only at the point where I've stopped plucking them out, and I can draw some Schadenfreude that my younger brother is greyer. I must have been eating my vegetables, or been less stressed. As my partner would remark, I have seen everything under the sun and behold, it is all vanity and a chasing after the wind.

In other news (seems pointless to unearth the other thread), I am now on regular BP meds, I have gotten myself some orthopedic insoles to address the balance in my feet and the stress fracture that has been lingering there (and of course my mom wears the same soles), and on Monday I'm going into surgery (the most common one for men). Anesthesiologist called and tried to open with a reassuring "so Mr ***, I see in your file that you've been operated before" and I was like "yeah, it's been a while though (I was 7)". Now I can look forward to that big needle entering my spine.

on Monday I'm going into surgery (the most common one for men)

dick reduction?