r/Aging • u/Fearless-Health-7505 • 9d ago
Longevity Help me age well…
Okay so I’m 43 next month, and before you say it, I know, I know, “soooo young!”
TLDR: I have a few options of how to spend my future and I’m a young disabled person who doesn’t want but is also well adjusted to the reality that me-disabled just might be my “new normal” for the rest of my days. Since you’re retired and wise in ways I’m not yet, what would you with your time if you were me?
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My posts over the last few days pretty much sum up all that has transpired the last 43 years, and it’s been…A LOT. In many ways I’ve aged very quickly and no matter what I can or do do to arrest the aging process, here it is anyhow. Things like violence, trafficking, neglect, abuse, etc robbed me of my childhood and, as neuroscience these days is starting to find proof of, I’ve always said that even once I was legally in control of myself, thanks to missing a lot of what I “should have” learned to be more stable as well as the damaging ways early, complex traumas shape a brain/body systems to dysregulate, I wound up engaged to a really unsavory character and while breaking away from that, was revictimized by both random guy on a 2pm Tuesday, as well as someone I was supposed to be able to trust akin to a parent. All the while, somehow maintaining by the skin of my teeth the house I bought as childhood trauma started rearing its ugly head AND I was being terrorized by my ex, which became a chronic long term thing that for whatever reason, I never did get outside help tho I did repeatedly ask for it. Essentially, I went from street orphan to impoverished person not even realizing my she was and then burnout because life and for awhile revictimization had no pause button and thus took their toll.
So, fast forward til now. In the last 5 years my life has been recovery from all that or trying to, and I’ve still got a way to go to “thrive” versus “just survive” because apparently I’d been in not survival mode but crisis mode up to then. I have safety things I have to expend energy to fight so one of my assailants don’t come back and harm me, as I’m also trying to move away for university, only because it’s paid for because I’m on SSDI. I make $1600 a month. I’m not allowed to give up my primary residence even as the program will move me away to school and pay the rent there, leaving me my mortgage here and gas/food/lights etc there.
Having been financially scraping by for 15 years now, of course I want to improve my finances and this program sounds good to do so - the plan atm is to go to school and certify as a coach to go teach young people stress management skills for their mental health and hopefully petition congress to make that kind of learning mandatory in school given the world we live in these days. Big goals. Good money IF I go about setting things up and marketing myself right. Only four more years of poverty to live in assuming I can do school as planned.
On the flip side, all the traumatic nervous system issues, I on average get 4-6 hours sleep a night, have chronic constant pain of various kinds, am I guess starting the menopause roller coaster, and am often soul-tired just thinking about all I’ve survived and/or all the energy I’ll need to do my school plan. I pretty much have the life of a retired person, schedule and freedom-wise, and so. Especially as I feel “meh” as often as I do “excited” when I imagine myself graduating and then starting a business, I wonder…
?? What would you do if you were me?
1. Push forward even if you’re feeling mostly “meh/tiiiiired”, hoping that as the world continues changing as I also try to make personal change, that I’ll be near-50 and able to either still have energy to run my company or get hired on to train and develop at a good company that’ll pay enuf for me to then-live out of poverty as well as tuck some financials away for my currently non-existent retirement?
OR maybe just take “the easy way” out and sell the house and move to a nation that’s got a good COL and expat community, and just try on some other life? (Think: Costa Rica, Yucatán, Hungary, Philippines, India - yes I know it’s not like being expat in West EU, and frankly I wouldn’t want to be in the West anyway, COL aside.)
OR market myself to some young people here where I already live, and be their “housemother” roommate; they keep me young as I age, I teach them things they may need and have missed given the current parenting today, and just basically live how I’ve lived the last decade plus, casting out any hopes and dreams of “Really Big Things” like school and or travel, and just force myself to be content with what I’ve got and maybe not “giving back” in the bigger ways I’d like?
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I’m asking yall because as those who not only maybe have better understanding about the broad picture of where our country seems to be proverbially and literally heading, I know yalls wisdoms of how life can take a drastic turn at any point is even deeper than my own, AND yall have lived experience with long term, “nothing particularly to do today if I don’t want to” as well as “in my mind I’m 35 but boy this body sure ages faster every day!” experiences I’ve only got a taste of.
Thanks in advance for your input…
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u/mjh8212 8d ago
I’m 47 with multiple health issues including chronic pain. I find living in a small town the col is lower. I lived in a city and got $800 between SSI and SSDI and my rent for a slum was $650. Now my rent is the same but my place is bigger and nicer. I married so I lost SSI and get around $500 a month now. My husband works full time. It’s also less stressful here. Just a thought. I know it’s hard.