I can tell within a few minutes of meeting someone my own age whether we’ll become friends, and the answer is usually no.
It isn’t that they’re doing anything wrong. It’s that I can feel the work going on under the conversation—the small adjustments, the angling, the quiet calibration of how much to be—and I’ve never known how to do my half of it.
Which is probably why my closest friends are all in their sixties. With them, that undercurrent is just gone. Nothing to match, nothing to keep up with.
I always explained the whole thing in a flattering way: I was an old soul, born matching people thirty years older than me. But I don’t think it was ever about being old inside. It was about the performing. They stopped a long time ago—and I never quite had the stomach to start.
What it looks like to be done
The first thing you notice about these women is how little of their energy goes toward managing what you think of them.
When I ask one of them how she is, she tells me. Not the polite nothing version—the real one, the one with the doctor’s appointment and the thing her son said and the fact that she’s been a little low this week and doesn’t fully know why. She isn’t oversharing or performing vulnerability. She’s just answering the question because somewhere along the way, the cost-benefit math of editing herself stopped coming out in favor of the edit.
They say no without a paragraph of justification. They leave parties when they’re tired. They wear the things they like. They tell you when you’ve hurt their feelings, plainly, and then they’re over it, because they said the thing instead of filing it away. They have opinions they don’t run past a committee first.
Watching them, I started to see how much of everyone else’s day—my day—goes into a performance so constant we’ve stopped clocking it as effort.
What I took from them wasn’t a set of tips. It was a kind of permission. They are proof that you can put the performance down and the floor does not give way.
People still love you. You are, if anything, easier to love, because there’s finally a person there to love instead of a very polished surface.
The part I got wrong
For a while, I thought what we had in common was the not-performing. That they’d quit and I’d quit, and that was the bond.
But that’s not what happened. They stopped. I never started.
That sounds like the same thing, and it isn’t.
They spent decades inside the performance—the marriages, the workplaces, the school pickups, the endless social arithmetic of being a younger woman in the world. They did the whole tour. And then, slowly, through some combination of exhaustion and clarity and just running out of reasons to care, they set it down.
Their ease is earned. It has all those years pressed into it.
I didn’t earn anything.
I just never had the appetite for the audition. The small talk that goes nowhere, the enthusiasm you fake to be easy company, the opinion you soften so nobody’s put out—I could never make myself do much of it, even when doing it would have cost me less than not.
Where they opted out, I never opted in.
Those look identical from across the room, but they are not the same. One is arrival. The other is just never having left.
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Outside, either way
What nobody warns you about skipping the performance is that it doesn’t get you out of being on the outside. It just changes which side you’re standing on.
My friends who are also in their mid-30s are mostly still in it, still doing the constant subtle work of being palatable, and I was never fluent in that work, so I drifted. But I can’t fully claim the ease my older friends have either, because I didn’t pay for it the way they did.
I’m in a strange in-between—too unpracticed at performing to belong with the people still doing it, too unseasoned to have truly arrived where the older women are.
They got to the outside by walking all the way through the middle. I just started out here.
I don’t think being an old soul was ever the right name for it. It was a kinder word for something plainer: I never figured out how to want what I was supposed to want, or to fake it convincingly enough that it didn’t matter.
On the women in their sixties, that reads as wisdom. They earned the reading.
At 34, I just have the distance without the years that are supposed to explain it.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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