NEVER TOO OLD FOR A LABUBU

Being old sucks. There is no other way to state it. My knees hurt. I had to let go of my heavy bags. And I can never ever go bungee jumping ever. Not that I would want to. But there’s something to be said about it just being there and can be done when the time comes.

I’m in my later fifties so I’m raging against the racing of the time. A woman of the same age once told me she was about to cross the line to irrelevance. I am afraid of crossing the line to invisibility.

It’s not fair to women. The workplace that glorifies salt-and-pepper-haired men is the same one that loathes the sprouting white roots in women’s hair. The man who becomes more distinguished as the lines on his face deepen is different from a woman who gets excluded as her own wrinkles do the same.

It is unfair.

I was watching Lessons in Chemistry on Apple TV, and it was set in the 1950s and a brilliant chemist was not allowed to go up the academic ladder because she was a woman. And I thought to myself, “Welcome to 2024.”

No matter how much we deny it, the gender-bias, the age-bias, the pretty-bias, they all exist.

And no one feels it more than a woman in her fifties who is a middle-manager in the corporate world. I have worked all my adult life, started as a junior copywriter, jumped from one industry to another, carrying just my two skills precious to the corporate system. And I’m still doing it.

I can stop doing the same thing, but I do not want to slip into the realm of invisibility.

It’s my biggest fear.

But I love my life. I can work, I can do my chores, I can pursue whatever it is that makes my heart sing without leaning on anyone. Alone is a powerful word.

And as an act of defiance to the age bias, I created a YouTube channel called @HowToBeFifty because fifty is not something to dread. It’s meant to be celebrated.

Afterall, “The Golden Years” was not coined for nothing!

The best thing about being old (yes, get used to it) is we can buy our own toys without asking for permission. I jumped on the Labubu craze head on, snagging the hard-to-find Popmart x Labubu x Pronounce Wings of Fortune by going to a reseller.

There’s a certain standard when you are of a certain age, surely, you just don’t get the ordinary Labubu that anyone can get. That’s obscene.

Another thing about being old is that wildly deprecating word called wisdom. I know. When someone’s presenting an idea, it’s guaranteed that I had seen it, flipped it, threw it in the trash or dressed it until no one could recognize it. When someone’s going through something, I can reference it to twenty years down the road when someone else was going through it. So, an old person has context. And the future that everyone sees already happened in her past, dressed a different way.

We are walking geniuses.

The other “best” thing about being old is that we see patterns. Having lived long enough, we can predict how things play out. In fact, the Labubu craze or any other craze that hits a certain level of virality can be explained by Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. I know that’s old. But Malcolm Gladwell just released the follow up to his idea twenty-five years after he launched it. So, the Labubu craze can be better explained by Malcolm’s Revenge of the Tipping Point, released October of this year. Ideas do circle back. And once you reach a certain age, you can recognize them.

So, I write this for all the Titas and Aunties struggling with menopause, anxiety, the unreasonable demands of the society, and the dizzying challenges of social media. They tell us to be pretty, be young, be current.

Well, we can’t be all those. But we can be brilliant.

Hugs,

Tita B