Losing control

 

Subject: Losing control.

"You lose control by degrees". It's not even an event you can put your finger on or even a period of time but it's a gradual diminution of authority not necessarily over others, that's long gone but your authority over yourself. It's one of life's signposts or markers when people stop listening to you, not because they don't love you but because they do. They begin to see you as at first a little irrational because you don't hold their views  and then it progresses to worrying about you because your views are controversial and there's nothing worse than being 'old and controversial'.

Of course it's not just those who know you but it's those who don't but profess they do when you begin to fit into a cohort who need to be guided. "Please take my seat" and "you first" is maybe ok for a heavily pregnant woman on the Underground but it starts to hit at your self image when a young woman leaps to her feet and usher you onto her still warm seat since it wasn't long since you might have wondered about an evening out with the her might be like, we are after all fantasist. Perhaps it's the image we carry of ourselves that is the problem. Unless we accidentally look in the bathroom mirror having just emerged from the shower we wouldn't know we have gone through some kind of metamorphosis. Our brains are still adapt at reconciling images from memory, snaps of us taken in better days, as the brain rummages around for a fit for the profile we are looking for. The image of erudition and knowing, of turning heads on the dance floor, of having something witty to say, even some sort of menace when angry has long ago dissolved and replaced by a "sell by date" label which is a mere heart beat from the one which reads, "do not use"  

There are so many things we need to do or conversely avoid these days  Drink more water, eat less of that and more of this. Don't question the current way of thinking or it's presumptions on everything. Your own experience is trashed, blighted by racism and misogyny and as Rome burns we are told to hold our breath, everything will come right once the new world order is grasped and understood.

We are judged too feeble to understand but it's old heads, without the craze that testosterone brings that's needed, we need to reference the 'last time' long before this younger generation were born, when things were more difficult and yet reality more real, before the discovery of algorithms to ease us from having to use common sense, when modelling was a girl on the catwalk and not the answer to all our problems