Building bridges across the generations.

Open Minds London Group - Jul 23

What does it feel like to be an older LGBTQIA+ person with South Asian heritage? This is the topic that we’re thinking about over the next 3 months. The idea was triggered after hearing the experiences of an older LGBTQIA+ person who experienced significant homophobia as their long-term partner developed dementia and needed increasing amounts of care to help them both manage. You can read about their story here .

Most of the people in our group were in their 20s and 30s with a couple of us in our 40s. This meant that we didn’t have people with the lived experience of being older in the group. We had to imagine what our lives would be like in 30 or 40 years and some of us found this much harder than others.

We talked a lot about the idea of generational differences and how our interactions with older people can sometimes be difficult because there is a culture of ‘respecting your elders’. Most of us grew up in a situation where there we had to be mindful of what we discussed with older generations and sometimes we could be told off for saying or doing the wrong thing in front of them.

As our conversation developed, we started to think about the different experiences that some of our grandparents would have seen and experienced, like the partition of India and migrating to new countries and realised that there are probably lots of things that older people decide to keep to themselves or that we don’t ask them about.

We imagined what it must feel like to become older and feel disconnected from our own history and wondered if we should try and give older generations more time to tell us about themselves. They probably want to be included as much as we do but may not be able to articulate this.

When we’re young we can imagine that looking old means that you think about different things, but this isn’t always supported by the evidence. A lot of older people feel young inside and struggle with the role that older people are ‘supposed’ to take on. Just as we wouldn’t want older people to judge us for the way that we look, we realised that perhaps we should stop judging older people for the way they look too.

Overall everyone found the topic really interesting and we got the sense that everyone was leaving with a lot to think about. We finished the group with a breathing and movement exercise and there was a lot of post-group chat happening as our team left the building - something we love to see!

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.