What do you hope for in your older years?

Open Minds Birmingham Group - Aug 23

Let’s try an experiment - imagine yourself in 10 years time… What do you hope your life looks like then? Who do you want to be around you, what do you want to be doing and what do you think you’ll feel like? Now imagine yourself another 10 years older and repeat the same process.

This is what we’ve been challenging our group attendees to do at the start of this cycle of discussion groups. We’re thinking about aging, through the lens of being LGBTQIA+ and having South Asian heritage.

When we took this thought experiment to our Birmingham group, most of the group found it difficult to imagine themselves in the future. Some of the group talked about how they try to live in the moment, to get things right for now, and because of this, it is impossible for them to imagine what they might want or need in the future.

A few members of the group had done the opposite and have already put plans in place for what they would like for themselves if they ever get to the point where their age stops them from being able to make informed decisions for themselves.

We talked about how aging for LGBTQIA+ people can be different from those living heterosexual lives in families with children. We often don’t have the same automatic life stages applied to our lives, like becoming parents, and this means that sometimes we can feel younger or freer than other people we know who are similar ages to us. This is not always an easy thing as it can mean that we’re excluded from a lot of the cultural rituals that might come with being an aging parent or grandparent and we weren’t sure what this might look like for us when we are 70, 80 or older.

This led us to think about ideas of community, belonging and safety. We talked about how growing older and needing care from paid staff might affect how open we can be about our LGBTQIA+ lives. We talked about the fact that LGBTQIA+ friendly care homes and supported living placements are starting to pop up and we hope this will be a trend that increases.

We shared a lot of positive stories about getting older and some of us have become more comfortable with ourselves and our identities as we have become middle-aged. We talked about the freedom that can come with having seen a lot of life and how we are now less concerned with what other people think about us.

We ended the conversation by us celebrating some of the life successes that have come with getting older. It was lovely to laugh and recognise the importance of being able to talk about these kinds of things with other people who understand the challenges of being LGBTQIA+. It’s clear that there is no one-size fits all for anyone who is getting older. As LGBTQIA+ people we have even less of a roadmap. This doesn’t mean that it’s all negative, as it also allows for creative solutions and a potentially freer approach…

We have one more space where we’ll be talking about aging and it’s online on Wed 27th of Sept. See our events page for more details.

With warm wishes,

The Open Minds Project ­

We usually meet on the last Wednesday of each month and if you want to join us at an Open Minds Meeting, please visit the Events page on our website.