The angst of an almost-“older worker”

In a couple of years’ time, I will be officially classed as an “older worker.”  I found this out only recently, doing research for an article about the many injustices faced by “older workers.”  It was a shock to realise I was very nearly writing about myself.

(I keep putting “older workers” in quote marks because I still can’t believe I’ll be joining their ranks quite so soon).

I find this unwelcome snippet of knowledge sobering.  The term “older worker” suggests that there’s nothing new for that worker to learn.  It also suggests that there’s a finite window of time in which a person can be vigorous and relevant and productive.  While there obviously is such a window, I think it looks different for each of us.

Remember those windows on Play School?  If you’re nowhere near “older worker”-dom you definitely won’t.  For you, then, Play School was a kids’ TV show that featured some creepy dolls (Hamble, anyone?) and a selection of windows.  There was a round window, a square one, and one shaped like the end of a phallus (though that wasn’t how it was described on the show), and you’d look through one of them in every episode.

The hook?  You never knew which window you’d be looking through until the moment arrived.  Never let it be said that 80’s kids’ TV wasn’t endlessly scintillating.

Hamble is the creepy one with the black hair, just behind Humpty.

My main point is this: just because some people are ready to start winding down at 50, doesn’t mean everyone is.

Some of us are just getting started.  I am just getting started.

I began my writing career a little later in life, so it feels like I’m just getting started because I actually am just getting started.  That’s why the idea of being an “older worker” now makes me feel anxious. There’s still so much for me to learn and achieve, and ideally I wouldn’t be doing all that against such an obviously running down sand-timer.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, of course.  I’d wanted to be a writer ever since I realised that words are a kind of magic that makes you feel powerful things.

As a quiet, over-sensitive kid with a badly-cut fringe, I found it hard to make myself understood when I spoke.  My words never sounded the way they had in my head.  Writing them down felt different, and I loved the idea of making people feel powerful things without having to talk to them.

I didn’t become a writer, though.  Not just then.  I didn’t think I was good enough, and no-one encouraged me to think otherwise.  As a single parent, my dad was stressed enough trying to bring up three little girls on his own, without one of those little girls opting for an unreliable ‘arty’ career with no discernible prospects.  My deserter-mum was too busy shopping and drinking.  My school careers advisor thought I should be a secretary: “a stable job that does include some writing”.

(I suppose meeting minutes and passive-aggressive memos involve putting pen to paper, and they do make people feel things.  It’s just that mild apathy and pent-up irritation weren’t the only feelings I had in mind).

So I became a customer services advisor instead, and then I worked in HR.

But I still wrote behind the scenes.  I joined writers’ communities and I started a blog.  One of my stories got published.  I won a competition.  Some of what I wrote made people laugh and cry and, well… feel things.   I didn’t think I could ever make a career from it all, though.

Then I got divorced and my world broke into pieces.  As I stuck those pieces wonkily, carefully, back together again, I wondered if it might be worth trying to make money from writing after all.

Turned out it was.  I still think I’m not good enough and I suspect I always will.  But I’m getting better, and that makes me happy.  I want to get better at writing forever and I want to make people feel things forever, and that’s why I’m not ready to be an “older worker” just yet.