Marcella Gemelli, PhD

I noticed it first in small, almost embarrassing ways

I caught myself pausing before answering a question I would have answered instantly a few years ago, not because I didn’t know the answer, but because I wanted to actually mean what I said. I stopped finishing sentences the way I used to, the ones that trailed off into “…or whatever,” as if my own opinion needed a disclaimer. I’ve always been an observer, noticing life events through a lens of wanting to understand, understand the self, understand people and the world around me, but somewhere around turning 50, I started processing things differently. That itself felt new.

I assumed getting older, moving into a new decade of my 50s, would feel like loss, a loss of relevance, of options, of the version of myself I’d spent decades building. And some of that is true. But what surprised me is how some of it has felt like subtraction in the good sense. Less performing. Less managing how I come across. Fewer opinions I’m holding just because I said them once in 2003 and never updated the file.

I’ve spent my career as a sociology professor thinking about how identity gets shaped by our positioning in social structures and the roles we perform – worker, mother, spouse, daughter, friend, colleague –  and how much of what feels like “just who I am” is actually a set of scripts we pick up along the way, mostly without noticing. It’s one thing to teach that. It’s another thing to watch it happen in your own life, in real time, and realize you can’t fully explain it away with theory. Some of it you just have to live through.

Here’s what I’m learning, tentatively, still in progress:

The discomfort of this stage isn’t a sign that something’s going wrong. It’s more like the discomfort of putting down a heavy bag you didn’t realize you’d been carrying. Your shoulders ache for a minute before they remember what it feels like to be free.

I don’t know if I’m becoming a wiser version of who I was, or just taking the time to be more present in how I show up. I think I’m becoming someone with fewer things left to prove, which is its own kind of clarity, but it’s messier than it sounds, and not nearly as photogenic as the phrase “aging gracefully” makes it seem.

So this is where I’m starting:

Not with answers, but with the questions I keep circling back to as I try to figure out what this decade actually is for me, and maybe for you too. Who are we underneath the roles we’ve been playing? What do we keep, what do we let go of, and how much of that is a choice?

I don’t have it fully worked out. But I’ve found that writing down the observations, the missteps, the revisions, the revelations, helps me see a pattern underneath the moment. And that’s usually where the useful part is — not in the moment itself, but in the pattern it turns out to be part of. Maybe naming mine will help you notice a version of yours. That’s what this space is for. Not answers from someone who’s figured it out, but a running record from someone paying closer attention than she used to.