When I was in elementary school, I started watching old movies and became obsessed with stars from the 1930s and ’40s. My classmates, however, did not share my enthusiasm: My Mae West imitations weren’t exactly a hit on the playground.
Instead, I was called a weirdo, which mortified me.
But I’ll be 60 next month, and as my birthday approaches, I’m realizing that I’m getting weirder by the day — and I don’t mind at all. In fact, getting weirder without any embarrassment is one of the best parts of aging.
I recently came across “The Smallest of Joys,” the new book by Diane Shiffer, the 69-year-old TikTok star known as Your Chubby Vintage Nana. In it, she writes that weirdness isn’t “a flaw to fix, but a thread to follow” back to “your truest self.”
So I decided to ask her and a few researchers about embracing our “inner weirdo” as we get older. While “inner weirdo” wasn’t a term many of them used in their research (and they all cautioned that there’s no universal experience of old age), they did give me a few ideas to support my theory.
Becoming a Character
Rebecca Schlegel, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at Texas A&M University who studies the “true self,” told me people can feel that they become more authentic over time. In her research, participants aged 19 to 67 were asked to think about life as if it were a book and rate each “chapter” using an authenticity scale.
Dr. Schlegel and her co-author found that the subjects tended to believe they were getting closer to their true selves over the course of their lives. “They also think they’re going to be even more authentic in the future,” she added.
Often, when we’re younger, “we’re still trying to find ourselves,” said Dr. Ebony Dix, a geriatric psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine. That journey can mean exploring different identities and spending energy trying to “convince everybody of the person we wish we were.”
But older people have had many decades to get clear about who they are and who they aren’t, said Rosanne Leipzig, a geriatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital and author of “Honest Aging: An Insider’s Guide to the Second Half of Life.”
“I love my current time of life,” said Dr. Leipzig, who is 74. “You come into yourself.”
Getting Comfortable With Who You Are
Research suggests we’re also less likely to compare ourselves with others when we’re later in life. As a result, “you’re more comfortable and confident with who you are and what you believe,” Dr. Leipzig said.
I still have some years to go before I’m full-on weird. Maybe in my later years, I won’t walk around with a parrot on my shoulders, but I can be someone with colorful sayings and colorful glasses.
For now, I have no qualms about sharing that I have long “conversations” with my cat, George. I attend fungus festivals. I regulate my nervous system by cruising the orderly aisles of office supply stores.
I also follow a group on Facebook called the Dull Men’s Club. It boasts about two million members who enjoy “ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill things.” (Women are welcome, too.)
One poster in the Facebook group showed three dollar bills with “sequential serial numbers” that he had found in his wallet, while another displayed his “priceless collection of Allen keys.” I have found my people.
If you have a weird streak, people might appreciate it more than you think. I was at a party recently and someone warned me that one new guest “was a little eccentric.” Thank God, I thought.
Being weird also requires a bit of risk. You’ll have to accept that not everyone is going to celebrate your particular brand of oddness, Shiffer told me. But the trade-off is being — finally! — at peace with your “whole, weird self,” she said.
I still love Mae West, although I don’t do imitations of her anymore. It’s not that I feel self-conscious about it, either. With my decades of wisdom and experience, I can see now that those impressions were just pretty bad.
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Jancee Dunn, who writes the weekly Well newsletter for The Times, has covered health and science for more than 20 years.
The post The Gift of Getting Weirder With Age appeared first on New York Times.
