midlife change

Some Romantic Advice From a Sexagenarian!

/ Laura Lee Carter / 2 Comments

Happy Valentine’s Day To Everyone!

What a crazy celebration this truly is, considering this Hallmark holiday where some get a temporary high from spending lots of money, began as an excuse for pagan partying. Yes, Valentine’s Day began as a raucous annual Roman festival where men stripped naked, grabbed goat or dog skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility!

As you might guess, in my many decades of romantic experiences I have earned the right to be called a ‘sexagenarian” (better known as a person between 60 and 69 🙂 ) You might have heard that older people spend more time thinking about their past, which only seems natural since we have more past to look back on. It only seems fair that I share a few wise nuggets from my decades as a single and married woman. Here’s the most important romantic advice I can give to you, especially if you are still young:

If you allow someone else to control your emotions, you’ve already lost.

I know, you’re probably thinking, but isn’t love when you don’t control your own emotions? Isn’t that what being “lost in love” is all about? Well, that’s what they’d like you to believe, especially the person who is trying consciously or unconsciously to control you. Which brings me to my second most important piece of human communications advice:

You cannot control how other people receive your energy. Anything you do or say gets filtered through the lens of whatever they are going through at that moment, which is NOT ABOUT YOU.  

Now I know this is probably not what you want to hear about falling in love, but I sure wish someone had shared this kind of advice with me when I was young and falling in love on a regular basis.

Now I finally realize that I regularly mistook “falling in love” with having any kind of deep, meaningful conversation with a male I was even slightly attracted to. Now I have these kind of conversations regularly without mistaking them for romance or love. Yes, hormones are awfully powerful, but don’t let them take full control of your emotions or your brain.

We all will make plenty of stupid mistakes when it comes to love, or what we sometimes mistake for love. Just try not to do any lifelong damage to yourself along the way. Trauma is such a painful teacher, and it can keep you stuck emotionally for years.

Falling in love is the BEST high I have ever experienced, even at age 49 when it last happened to me. After that Mike and I decided to fall in love all over again, as many times as possible until we die. Why? Because falling in love rocks!

Postscript: The absolute best book I have ever read on finding success in love is called, “How to Be an Adult in Relationships” by David Richo. Check it out!

How writing can improve your mood and keep your brain moving forward…

/ Laura Lee Carter / 6 Comments

In the process of writing my last post about AI and writing, I learned quite a bit about exactly how good writing is for our brains. First of all I learned that writing by hand is better for the brain than typing. Although a slower task, research indicates that physically writing things down appears to make the writer become more selective in what they write. What’s more, when you pen words on paper, the neurons in your brain fire signals at rapid speed, enabling you to make more neural connections.

Writing is a stimulating yet strenuous activity for the brain. When you write, all parts of your brain are actively engaged. Thanks to the brain’s neuroplasticity, it can grow and change over time. Just as athletes train their bodies, writers can do the same with their brains.

The process of recalling something, writing it down, and reading it back on paper boosts memory and comprehension, leading to improved cognitive processing. Given that many areas of the brain are engaged, the more you write, the more neural connections are formed within your brain.

Writing every day can benefit everyone, not only professional writers. It improves your memory, builds vocabulary, and refines your communication skills. Writing can also be very relaxing, especially if you lead a busy or stressful life.

When it comes to emotional stability and development, writing can be quite therapeutic. Writing gives some structure and organization to anxious thoughts and feelings. It can help the writer feel more in control of their negative moods, thus helping them get past suppressed difficult or traumatic events.

I have always been a avid writer since I first learned how. Writing is my way to have someone to talk to about difficult thoughts or feelings, a way to process my feelings to make me feel better. These days I find writing to be essential to both my mental health and brain health. Although I sometimes find it quite challenging for my brain, I do need this challenge to keep moving forward after a few serious head injuries.

5 Surprising Benefits of Writing by Hand

What is great about Spanish Peaks Living?

/ Laura Lee Carter / Leave a comment

Nine years ago this month, Mike and I drove down from Fort Collins to choose a few acres in Navajo to buy. We didn’t know much about this area, only that we loved how it felt to our suburban souls. It took us another year to build our passive solar home facing the Spanish Peaks and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains with Mount Mestas to our west.

I was reminded again early this morning why I love living here. I woke up around 6:30 AM to see an unobstructed view of a bright red sunrise to our southeast. This is BIG SKY country to me, where the landscape and the silence are the main characters! Every time I go outside in the morning I stop and feel astounded by the silence. This is what the earth used to be like. Maybe a few bird sounds, but otherwise perfect silence…

Sure there are also unattractive features to this area, but the land is encouraging and haunting all at once, and the summers are glorious!

Our first summer here we had so much fun exploring the back roads and back stories, like this dilapidated adobe schoolhouse slowly sinking back into the earth west of here…

or taking the train up to Fir to hear the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band play in a big mountain meadow.

When I first met Mike he said he wasn’t moving again until he could look at something besides the house across the street.

We found this cartoon in a magazine and laughed together about it. Then we went in search of someplace with truly ‘spectacular views.’

We found those here and so much more…

“I’ve spent too many years at war with myself…”

/ Laura Lee Carter / Leave a comment

Every time I listen to Sting sing “Consider me gone” I get stuck on these words. Why do we spend so much time picking on ourselves? As a psychologist I assume we learn how to do this from our overly self-critical parents, and then carry on the practice by habit. Some say these patterns get stuck in our brains and are almost impossible to fight against or change.

I know I have been far too self-effacing for as long as I can remember and then, of course, others along the way helped me become even more critical. Now, in my 60s, I’m still working at fighting this pattern in various ways. It helps so much to have a close friend or life partner who points out how hard we can be on ourselves. I remember back in my late 40s I gained a lot of new insight when I read Gloria Steinem’s book “Outrageous Acts & Everyday Rebellions” but this is a process that will last forever I’m afraid.

The three Carter kids at Grandma’s house at Christmas

Just recently I was rearranging things and came across a small photo of myself at around age three, looking pretty sassy in my new Easter clothes. Now I focus for a few minutes everyday on that little girl, on loving her all the way through and sending good thoughts for the many ways she might feel really good about herself for the rest of her life. I feel so much compassion for the battles she has fought in her war against herself and visualize how much easier her life could have been if she had learned self-love at an early age. I seems it has always been easier to be critical rather than compassionate towards myself.

I watched a marvelous 2005 movie recently called, “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.” It’s about a retired older woman, played wonderfully by Joan Plowright, who befriends a young man, played by Rupert Friend, (YUM!) by chance on the streets of London. It’s has a lot of insights into aging and how we treat our elders with a number of great lines, but the one that keeps coming back to me is:

“It’s very important to praise people a lot early on, otherwise they might die of disappointment.“

A new stage of life: Becoming a caregiver!

/ Laura Lee Carter / Leave a comment

There are many whom we love, but not all of us are willing to become a caregiver to them. Since I became a caregiver, that distinction interests me. I do understand the urge to avoid taking time out of your own life to be available to help a loved one, but I believe the main reason many of us do not choose to become caregivers is because of the sometimes confusing emotional demands of keeping a loved one going from day to day. Sure most would offer to pick up some groceries or provide other services to their Mom or Dad or sibling, but what about the activities of daily living? What about managing their prescriptions for them or helping them cleanse themselves?

My sister Diane, John and me around 1957 or 1958…

After years of training in emotional caregiving, I am now called to use that training in service to my brother John. My greatest fear at first was to overstep his boundaries by offering more help than he wanted or needed. Just this past week I realized that he so appreciates anything I do for him as his energy and memory continue to fail him. For example, I learned that he can no longer manage his prescriptions and take his drugs on time. I didn’t notice that until he stopped taking his thyroid med and he had all the problems related to that including fatigue, brain fog and severe depression. I got him back on that med as soon as I realized what was going on.

It feels like a lot of responsibility to manage someone else’s life, but I love my brother and I want him to feel better. I can’t imagine not helping him at this point in time. He says he would never go into assisted living or some other care setting like that, so I will continue to help him as best I can.

Here are a few things I have learned about being a caregiver:

Caregivers value and appreciate help from others.

Caregivers take into account their own needs, the persons being cared for, and the other family members involved.

They respect other people’s opinions.

They appreciate the strengths and positive attributes in others and themselves.

They understand that caring for another person consists of letting that person make their own choices without ultimatums.

They wait to be asked for advice.

They are enthusiastic about their role as a caregiver.

They are empathetic and feel love towards the person they are caring for.

They don’t take other person’s words or actions personally.

This is not a job I ever expected to find myself in. I do know it requires patience, compassion, attentiveness, dependability and trustworthiness. I can do that. In fact I cannot imagine not doing it. I just appreciate even more that I’m here to help.

“Meet Cute” made me laugh and laugh!

/ Laura Lee Carter / 2 Comments

From a purely Boomer perspective, this 2022 movie (a Peacock Original) made me laugh a lot! I would be the first to admit I know almost nothing about the “younger generation. ” I didn’t have kids and amazingly no grandkids either, so I have such a limited insight into how they relate and the ways they see their world. I felt like this movie gave me a little bit of insight and I found it hilarious.

To watch it you must be willing to suspend ‘reality’ quite a bit. Luckily Mike has helped me a lot with that. Rotten Tomatoes calls this a “time-loop romcom” where the two main characters keep repeating similar dates over and over again, because Sheila has discovered a time machine in a tanning bed in her manicurist’s backroom. In this process Sheila starts out absolutely loving Gary at first and proceeds to become super critical of him as they repeat their first date over a year. Then it becomes, can she change him by changing some of the traumas from his past?

At first I liked this film because I realized how fun it would be to re-live my first dates with the men I fell in love with when I was younger. In all cases I fell in love very quickly and we had great times together from the very first date.

Then I started to laugh at how differently the younger generation seems to approach tough subjects like depression and wanting to kill yourself. I felt that bad a number of times when I was young, but I never considered speaking to anyone about it except maybe a therapist. With much honesty and a great sense of humor these characters seemed to normalize hating your life. In our generation is seemed to be so hush-hush and such an embarrassing sign of personal failure. To the younger generation it almost seems natural or even normal to talk about how much and how often life sucks.

There are a number of aspects I loved about this film. See it! If you don’t like it you’ll know pretty quickly…