Three years ago, when I met someone 21 years my junior in an online class, I never thought we’d become close.
Each week in a writing class, we filled the video call with highly personal details about our lives as we learned how to tell our stories. We spilled our emotions in front of dozens of strangers and eventually branched off into our own smaller writing group, bridging the divide between New York and Chicago, where we each lived.
The vulnerable elements of our work were much more revealing than meeting a new friend in any other environment — and we were instantly connected on a deeper level.
Our relative ages weren’t actually important.
At first, I was jealous of her youth
My anxiety about aging creeps into consciousness every time my knee makes a weird clicking sound or I find myself pulling up the edges of my neck on a video conference call. I spent several moments during our weekly calls wanting to look more like her than anything.
I found myself envying her porcelain skin without the wrinkles I have on my forehead, and her perfect curls that I can’t replicate on my frizzy mane. Comparison became a preoccupation as I regretted the things I did at her age — getting drunk with my friends and making bad decisions, kissing boys, and smoking cigarettes, while she was so much more disciplined and accomplished. She seemed so thoughtful about the direction she wanted her life to take. She worked hard to earn multiple offers to graduate school. She didn’t waste her weekends wading through hangovers and guilt from poor decisions.
Shining through almost everything she did was this admirable quality of self-knowledge. I noticed simple things when she came to visit me, and I took her to get her first manicure — she asked the nail tech to be gentler with her cuticles.
A social media meme helped me become more of a role model
As I was beginning to appreciate who she was deep down, someone sent me a popular Instagram meme that said, “The goal isn’t to look 25 in your 40s, it’s to make 25-year-olds excited to be 40.” Instantly, I realized that in our intergenerational friendship, I needed to step up, stop comparing myself to her, and show her that I was proud of my age.
Since then, I have thought less about how either of us looks and much more about how to be a role model who can usher her into her 40s. And, if one of the benefits of an intergenerational friendship was an unparalleled perspective, I knew we could share even more with each other.
She helped me see that mentorship can be reciprocal
She inspired me to step up as more of a mentor. Instead of downplaying my experiences, I started to see my age as a badge I’d well earned. Getting divorced twice was tragic for sure, but it also gave me the opportunity to bring someone so much better into my life. When I visited her, I brought my longtime boyfriend along. She commented on how healthy our relationship was.
Anytime she fretted over graduate school applications or the terrifying ambiguity of her mid-20s, I tried to be a calming voice from the future, assuring her that she’d end up exactly where she was meant to be in life.
She reciprocates the mentorship by inspiring me with her unfiltered authenticity — the way she openly talks about complex topics like sexual compliance and family estrangement leaves me wanting to clarify my own views on important cultural issues. I see her taking chances with her narratives and challenge myself to do the same, digging deeper into my prose.
She doesn’t have the protective layers of cynicism that decades of corporate life and romantic heartbreaks built in me. When I get stuck in the rigid “this is just how the world works” mindset of middle age, her fierce worldview demands that I ask, “But does it have to?”
By pushing me to refocus on what matters, she didn’t just make me a better writer; she showed me how to finally love the woman I was becoming. I spent years wishing I could rewrite my past at her age, but she taught me that the real art is showing her how beautiful the next chapters will be — for both of us.
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