I’m nearly 60 and my life’s been one big failure

DEAR BEL

I AM approaching my 60th birthday and I feel my life has been one long mess, and that I’ve always squandered opportunities and am coming to the end of things with nothing.

I should be grateful I don’t look, act, or feel 60, but this is a milestone by which I feel I should be ‘sorted’. But I have never been and now feel finished — with no opportunity to make good on anything.

I came from an impoverished background where I was verbally abused and hit, sworn and shouted at, never encouraged to do anything. We lived in a council house and my father skived off work a lot so there was never much money around for the basic stuff; we had to scratch around and I always felt different. I didn’t aspire to much; we were expected to know our place — low down the scale.

I wed young, grateful someone wanted to marry me, but I was not in love. He was useless with money and the marriage was characterised by being skint and struggling — and arguments.

When I was 33 he had an affair and left me in heavy debt — but I finally managed to get out of it.

I found a permanent job, bought a house and everything seemed sorted — or at least a base for future success.

Then I began a relationship with a married man with two small children. We bought a house together but this didn’t work out.

We still see each other after 25 years, but nothing will ever come of it. I’ve thrown away my good years and any chance of building a proper marriage and family. And I’m in debt.

One of my friends, who’s 34, is getting married this year, and while I’m happy for her, this underlines what I’ve thrown away. With no guidance in youth, I hoped I’d learn and make sensible choices — but didn’t. Now it’s too late.

At the stage when people relish their freedom, I’m terrified as I have nothing. No family (all dead for more than 20 years) so it’s just me.

I have good friends, but they have inheritances, whereas I have zero to fall back on. I feel in total despair about what to do. I don’t want to be a pensioner not working. It’s a bitter irony that I feel not only finished, but never started. I’m in a trap I fear I’m too old to get out of — but don’t feel old at all. Any advice?

BRENDA

Regular readers of this column will know I am passionate about the idea that it is never too late to change — and that I can become frustrated by defeatism.

giving talks about my work, I’m often asked if I ever feel like telling a reader: ‘You must pull yourself together!’ (Yes and no — because you have to be careful not to sound lacking in empathy). To say that or: ‘Just get on with it,’ would be two examples of ‘tough love’ — sounding harsh, perhaps, but full of good intention.

For sometimes the only way to make the best of your life is to accept that it is your very own, that you can put yourself in charge, that the bad choices you made in the past are long gone, and new ones lie ahead. So head up!

Beetles and turtles accidentally turned over might lie waving their poor legs/flippers in the air, growing feebler and feebler, until they die. Humans don’t have to be like that.

Brenda, your (very long originally) email piles up negatives until they become as intolerable to the reader as they are to you yourself.

Yes, you had a bad start in life — as many, many people do. But damaging as that is, it does not have to leave an indelible mark, like an unwise, ugly tattoo.

Many people make bad marriages; many others have affairs that go nowhere and end up (women) realising that all their fertile years have gone, sighed away listening to a man who promises that, yes, he will leave his wife.

You have to haul yourself into the present —

right now. You’re a youthful 60, hopefully with years of life ahead. So print out your whole problem, take a pen and circle all defeatist negative remarks.

For example, in one paragraph of the uncut text the word ‘nothing’ booms three times while ‘pointless’ signals what you think of your life.

Now write down every dreary, self-blaming word and phrase on a piece of paper. Crumple it up and hold it on your flat palm. Ask aloud: ‘Can I drop this rubbish?’ You’ll think: ‘No!’ But you know you can. So let it fall — then look, bend, pick up, go to a litter bin and chuck it in.

In a second email, you asked me to suggest ‘some action’ — ‘as I don’t want to bother my friends with this, it’s not appropriate, and I don’t want to go to a doctor as that’s pointless and they cannot suggest practical action’.

More negatives. Why is it ever ‘not appropriate’ to unburden yourself to a friend? And if somebody is feeling sad/low/depressed, then surely that’s the very time to seek out professional help, if not from a GP then from a counsellor (see bacp.co.uk)?

So my next suggestions for action would be to talk properly to those people you think of as friends, to have the most serious, truthful conversation you’ve ever had with your married friend/lover, and then see if a conversation with a therapist might clarify issues about your deprived past.

It also might help to stop this self-flagellation — and help make some plans for the living, breathing, smiling years of your reinvention ahead.