Róisín Ingle on . . . the joys of being forever 17

I ’m open to new experiences but I’ll happily live out the rest of my life without taking part in a webinar. I don’t know why I keep being invited on them. The emails are piling up:

“Join us tomorrow for a special webinar . . .” No thanks, as my toddler niece used to say, but thanks for asking. It’s a sign of ageing, I think, my antipathy to webinars. I mean they sound harmless enough, it’s just, well, could they not come up with their own word for it, instead of appropriating good old-fashioned seminar for their web-based means. Call it an online seminar can’t you? Webinar! The only word more galling right now is mompreneur.

Even if it is a sign of ageing, this new-word resentment, I think I'm still a way off "grumpy old woman" status. Each year as another birthday rolls around, I check in with myself to see if I've started to resent getting older. I believe it's supposed to happen around now. I hear other people my age talking about it. We are supposed to start getting annoyed about the crepey bits around our eyes and the three-day hangovers and the forgetting everything five minutes after we hear it aspect of getting ageing.

Luckily, I’ve always suffered from the forgetting everything ailment so this is not new. And I think also suffer with/benefit from a kind of age-dysmorphia.

You know that phrase, “Show me the girl age seven and I will show you the woman?” (Well it’s boy/man but it works for both genders). There is a whiff of truth off it but seven might be a bit previous. I met a friend for a drink the other day and he thinks we all, most of us anyway, are still who we were when we were 17.

Life would be much more straightforward if we all just realised that we are all who we were when we were 17 and that we are never going to change. We are not going to improve. We are probably not going to become the version of ourselves that we keep thinking is suddenly going to manifest in the mirror one day. My age dysmorphia means I feel my seventeenness keenly. I am in touch with this 17-year-old. I think if you can keep in touch with her/him the years, when they get added, don’t matter quite so much.

It also helps that I like my birthday a lot more since having children. They care about the day more than I do. My daughters are militant in their determination to celebrate their mother being another year older. I didn’t know this when they were born but it turns out it was worth having children just to turn 43 and have them call you “the birthday girl”, and not in a sarky way, all day long.

We are all still our 17-year-old selves. There are people who ignore that, or forget that or think this is a nonsensical notion. I embrace it with probably too much gusto. It’s why I like being around young people so much. They remind me of myself, not just of who I was but of who I still am. I met an impressive young man last week who introduced me to the modern version of a very old concept: social enterprise. He wants to team up top-flight graduates like himself with disadvantaged young people so they can set up companies that will generate employment. The profits will then be fed back into community projects.

When he started his business degree he thought he wanted to become a rich investment banker. But then he discovered social enterprise and now that’s what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Being around his box-fresh idealism put me in a good mood for the rest of the day.

The next day I met a young woman who had just landed her dream job. She got that longed-for appointment with no connections or relations in the business but through sheer talent and application. Oh, the pink-cheeked glow on her when she told me the news: “I feel,” she said, “like I’ve won the lotto.”

And down in her home place, they were celebrating her success as though she had won the Nobel prize. “I’ve been carried through the town like a prize pig,” she laughed and I laughed. I was laughing about this image all day. God, I remember getting my dream job and feeling like I’d won the lotto.

A top anti-ageing tip is standing next to a young woman to whom something wonderful has just happened and basking in the glow of her achievement. It has rejuvenating qualities. It puts a spring in your step. In fact, it’s such an interesting and life-enhancing phenomenon that someone should make it the subject of one of those webinars. (Just don’t invite me.) ringle@irishtimes.com