What if I’m Too Old?

The surprising truth about starting over mid-career

“The girls in my physiology lab thought I was in my mid-20s!” I jubilantly texted my husband.

“Just wait till they hear your Robert Moses lecture,” he wrote back. “They’ll think you’re 80.”

True. I read The Power Broker last year and not a week passes without me going on a regrettable tangent about it. But whatever—the point here is that my classmates mistook me for much younger than I am, thank you very much. Little did I know when I sent that text that this would happen over and over in the months to come. Just recently at the hospital where I volunteer, a nurse asked me if I felt comfortable feeding a baby. I told her yes, explaining that I have one of my own, though he’s not a baby anymore at seven.

“You don’t look old enough to have a seven-year-old!,”she exclaimed. (Full disclosure, I was wearing a mask at the time.)

I’d love to say this is all because of my preternaturally youthful looks, but I don’t think that’s it. The same thing happened to one of my classmates, Joseph, a married father in his early 40s who, like me, spent last year working through nursing school prerequisites at the local community college.

“Anna,” he said conspiratorially one morning outside anatomy class, “everyone here thinks I’m 25! It’s so crazy!”

He does look younger than his age but, for both of us, I believe this Benjamin Buttoning is more about energy than appearance. We’ve all met old young people, and young old people. I think I used to be the former, but now…maybe…I’m turning into the latter?

To explain what I mean, I need to back up.

When I was nine or 10 years old, I told my mother I wanted to try gymnastics. She said I was too old, and too tall. Now, I’m not bashing my mom, who passed away in 2023. She was extremely committed to giving me opportunities to excel, and I’m grateful for all I gained from that. But it also gave me an early sense of time as the robber of opportunity—and a hyperawareness that certain doors close if you don’t walk through them fast enough.

So when I hit certain milestones later than my peers—learning to drive in college, meeting my first boyfriend at 23, getting my first real, career-track journalism job at 25—I didn’t just feel behind. I felt ancient. Like I’d already missed some critical windows, and I never fully shook that idea.

Is it any surprise, then, that when I first thought about switching from journalism to medicine, one of my big fears was being too old? I’ll fast forward here through some decision-making that I’ve written about before to say, I eventually made the leap anyway, despite the anxiety. I braced myself to feel like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School as I prepared to take my nursing school prerequisites. (I feel compelled to point out that I didn’t go see Back to School when it came out in 1986 because I’m not THAT old, but caught on TV somewhere along the way.)

Anyway, the reality of going back to school was the exact opposite of what I expected. I didn’t feel out of place. Nobody else seemed to notice me as out of place either. Why would they? They’re busy living their own lives. No one is scrutinizing my face. I sort of just…blended in. Instead of feeling like an old buffoon, I felt young.

I read once about a famous experiment by researchers at Harvard in the early 1980s, called “Counterclockwise.” It involved two groups of men in their 70s and 80s. One group spent five days in a retreat designed to resemble the year 1959 and pretended to be 22 years younger. The other group simply reminisced about the past, without the immersive environment or pretending. At the end of the week, the men who actively pretended to be younger showed improved physical and cognitive function, and were also rated as younger-looking than the control group.

I honestly think some version of this happened to me and my classmate Joseph. Being a student and a volunteer again, having new goals, learning new things—it’s not unlike a full-immersion experiment in pretending to be a 20-something. Perhaps that’s caused some tiny shifts in how I carry myself, or has some sort of placebo effect.

In the past year, several friends have remarked that I seem to be “glowing” or “vibrating” with positive energy. That could partly be the low bar I set for myself as a sad sack throughout 2023 and some of 2024, but I’ve also come to believe that a fresh sense of purpose and joie de vivre turns the clock back better than any supplement, diet, exercise routine or injectable.

This lines up with my own anecdotal observations about others too. For example, there are these two guys I’m acquainted with, both in their 50s. One is a former punk rocker and the other is a doctor. The doctor is probably healthier, definitely wealthier, and if I didn’t know either one and you showed me their photos, I might guess they’re the same age. In person, however, the onetime punk seems decades younger. I’m not sure what it is; vibes, basically.

Ironically, in the midst of a late career 180, on the cusp of definitively crossing over to not being a young person anymore, this is the first era in my life where I don’t hear a giant ticking clock in my ear. I’ve got my plans—a two-year MSN-E program starting in August, then a new graduate residency in emergency care (if I can get one), and then a dual FNP/ENP program while working—and I’m as excited about the process as the outcome. For the first time, all those cliché sayings, like, “the time will pass anyway,” mean something to me.

The time will pass anyway! Ain’t that the truth, if you’re lucky. Why not spend it pursuing something that lights me up? Time feels expansive right now, which comes as a revelation. Really, when I think about it, what could be more pointless and self-defeating than worrying about getting old? Who cares? Moreover, what’s the alternative? I’m much more afraid of death than I am of aging.