“Dear Madam,
We regret to inform you that your subscription has expired. You are officially past your sell-by date.
We are therefore no longer legally and contractually obliged to satisfy your usual request for the world to feign shock and disbelief when you disclose your age.
Thank you for your patronage. It has been a pleasure, but let’s be frank: it’s been a pleasure for an inordinate number of years.
We wish you well in the limited time you have left amongst us.
Yours in Candour,
Young People Everywhere.”
A year or two ago, my mom asked me how many working years I had left before retirement.
In the few seconds it took me to calculate the answer, I experienced a full-blown panic attack.
How did that happen so fast? One minute, I was “the youth”.
Now, the youth – my children – treat me as if I might keel over at any moment.
One of their favourite pastimes is watching my eye twitch when I’ve spent several minutes dispensing what I consider hard-earned wisdom, only for them to reply: “Okay, Boomer.”
They’re well aware that I’m not a Baby Boomer, a term for people born between 1946 and 1964.
I was born into Generation X, a recklessly behaved, self-sufficient, feral bunch who raised themselves while their parents were out working.
My children know it and they also know it will never not be funny each time they say it.
I get red-faced and prickly when I remind them, for the trillionth time, that Gen X is the best generation.
I’m joking, of course. While we’re an undeniably impressive bunch, “self-aware” isn’t a term anyone would use to describe Gen X.
As young people, we were resourceful, independent, and fearless, and we’ve largely remained so. Unchecked, those traits can become destructive.
I’m the poster child for independence gone rogue. I clung so tightly to my autonomy that I failed to notice when it turned into an inability to ask for help, coupled with a feeling that no one would help anyway, so I had to do everything by myself.
How do I know this? My children taught me.
I used to find it hard to accept that people who were born yesterday (anyone born in the year 2000 and after) could teach me anything.
Listening to them, putting my biases and beliefs aside, I’ve realised that their generation has grasped some concepts that mine ignored or misunderstood.
The world in which I reached young adulthood spoke in hushed tones about mental illness.
It was not only rare to receive a diagnosis, but also taboo, because mental illnesses like depression were stigmatised.
These days, it’s common to hear that someone at work has taken a “mental health day”.
Not a vacation day and not a sick leave day, this is taken when you’re overwhelmed, stressed, or just need to reset mentally.
When one of my children was diagnosed with anxiety, I immediately interpreted this to mean that their response to stressors, like exams or heartbreak, would be more intense than the norm.
And who could be more qualified than a Gen X-er to help someone cope with stress?
Over time, I learned that anxiety often has very little to do with everyday stressors.
An ordinary day can trigger symptoms normally associated with being in physical danger, like heart palpitations, sweating, or panic attacks.
I’m almost certain there hasn’t been an era in which two generations haven’t experienced some form of disconnect, or generation gap.
My children and their peers speak openly about mental health and are fluent in the language used to describe it.
My generation knows very little about these concepts and we tend to get tetchy when “the youth” accuse us of being ignorant.
I’ll never be convinced that Sophie on TikTok is a good place to learn about bipolar disorder, nor that she even suffers from it.
What I am convinced of is that Sophie and her generation have de-stigmatised conditions, disorders, and illnesses that would have been very isolating when I was growing up.
While I might be older than time, I’m not too old to learn.
I learned that by listening to my children.