I do not recognize myself anymore. In photos, I mean. I jump every time I see my face on a screen. As if the features I discovered there were not mine. The gap between the image I project and the one I have of myself, in my head, is astonishing.
But who is this gentleman with increasingly white and thinning hair, a disheveled white beard, who has two kangaroo bags under his eyes? Which facial aging software transformed the cherubic face of my thirties into the one, weathered by time, of poster boy of Good age ?
Sometimes in life I have forgotten my age. Am I 36 or 37, 42 or 43? We just don’t know anymore, as my father would say. I don’t forget that I turned 50 last year. My age has never had such an impact on me. I no longer found myself in these round numbers. There was no longer a match between the age I am and the age I feel like I am.
“How old do you give me?” “, asked the slogan of an Oil of Olay ad from the 1980s. I thought of it when I saw the title of my colleague Valérie Simard’s report on real age and perceived or subjective age. A study carried out in Denmark in 2006, recalls Valérie, showed that people aged 40 and over tend to consider themselves 20% younger than their age.
“See you tonight, it’s my birthday. Well yes, look, I’m 35 years old. I know it, I know it, I don’t look like it. I’m even younger inside”, sang Dédé Fortin on one of the most beautiful songs of Colocs, The answering machine.
Like many people, I feel younger “from within”. Deep down, I’m about 39 years old. But unlike the late Dédé Fortin, people have believed me to be older than I really am for a long time. It’s a kind of double punishment. At 35, my temples were already graying. At barely 40 years old, the late Denise Bombardier already described me in the newspaper as a fifty-year-old.
Do I also have, as my colleague describes in her report, a twisted relationship with time? Without a doubt. When I talk to colleagues in their early forties, I feel like we’re the same age. And when I speak with colleagues under 30, I forget that I am old enough to be their father. They probably perceive me in the same way that I perceived colleagues my age when I was their age…
Last party Christmas The Press, I admit, I was afraid of making a fool of myself on the dance floor in front of colleagues in their twenties. Because I remember that at their age, I saw slightly tipsy 50-year-old colleagues swaying excessively to new wave hits from their youth.
At 50, we tend to perceive ourselves as being 40, researchers note. Maybe that’s true in my head. It’s much less so in my body. The body lies less than the mind, we must believe…
At 40, I was in the shape of my life. I ran marathons. Ten years and a pandemic later, I struggle to motivate myself to run 5K more than once a week. I gave up in front of my dad bod (a real one, not like the one Patrick Mahomes photographed before his participation in the Super Bowl).
I play hockey, which only makes me feel older. On the ice, I am constantly caught up by my age and by my opponents (often older than me). My eyes see the game – especially from afar, damn presbyopia! –, my head understands “the game in the game », as Martin St-Louis would say, but my legs no longer follow and my arms no longer respond.
However, I am not that old, even if I am entitled to discounts from the FADOQ (formerly known as the Fédération de l’agence d’or du Québec). On average, we only become old at 74, according to a survey carried out by the University of Montreal Hospital Center (CHUM) that Valérie mentions in her report. My parents, who have just passed this milestone, do not agree.
“You’re not old until at least 80!” ”, according to my mother, for whom we are still “young” at 50. She who has long claimed, with a smirk, to be 39 years old, does not recognize her real age either. Even if, like me, her premature white hair, which she never dyed, may have aged her in the eyes of some.
A university friend whom I hadn’t seen in years, a runner-cyclist-cross-country runner who keeps in shape, recently wondered when we could have become “guys”. I have a theory that is absolutely not scientific about old age, which I have nevertheless validated with a few men of my generation. I started feeling the effects of aging at 46 years old. The body which recovers less quickly after an effort, small pains that we discover daily and which make us suffer longer than before. “I wish I had known about it!” “, a well-known actor told me.
“Old age is a shipwreck, the old are wrecks,” wrote Chateaubriand. I’m at the age where most of the conversations in the hockey locker room revolve around our ailments, big and small: advice for a good hip replacement or overcoming gout. At the age when, reluctantly, we emit a little grunt coupled with a prolonged sigh each time we have to move from a sitting position to a standing position.
An old friend turned 50 last week. I reminded him, even if it’s a cliché, that growing old is a privilege. It’s true. You just have to repeat it often to be convinced.