The First Jubilarian

How I named my life

“What a lark! What a plunge!”

Those words from Mrs. Dalloway popped into my head this weekend, and I couldn’t figure out at first where all this irrational optimism was coming from, given everything. And then through the windows I took in the rapturous June day, the sparkling blue of the sky, and felt a distinctly Dallowayish lifting of the heart.

I need a plunge!, I thought. And I need it now.

My new novel Mommy issues, formerly called The Matriarch until Beyonce’s mother used that title first, is out with publishers and producers. I am deep in a reinvention of my website Nameberry. I spent some time trying to decide what to write next, a novel or a TV pilot or a memoir about my life in names or another memoir about how my novel Younger came true for me, until I realized I couldn’t take on a big new project before I sell the one that’s out.

But a plunge! That was what I craved, something brisk, bracing, spontaneous, scary. Something I hadn’t done before, something I didn’t need anyone else’s approval for, something I could do right that very minute.

And then I remembered The Jubilarian, a name I registered with Substack two years ago. A Jubilarian is a woman who emerges on the other side of menopause to find herself in the best years of her life. Maybe it’s laying the baby question to rest forever. Maybe it’s having more time and more money. Maybe it’s coming out of the well-documented happiness trough you hit between 45 and 50. Maybe it’s no longer giving as much of a fuck.

Whatever the reasons, I found myself feeling freer, more positive, more confident, happier as I got older, as did most women I knew. The more invisible we became to the world, the more beautiful we felt. The more marginalized we grew in the workplace, the more excited we felt about our careers. The more loss and pain we suffered, the more we relished what we had.

What was going on? And why wasn’t anybody talking about it?

Part of the problem, I decided, was that no one had come up with a good name for the experience. All the traditional names for the time of life beyond youth were just plain bad.

Middle-aged: Reductive.

Midlife: Boring.

Midlife crisis: Boring and what crisis?

Empty nest: Fiction.

Menopause: The inciting incident, not the story.

Retired: Never!

Old, older, golden, senior, crone, elder: No.

Some people had attempted to find a better name for the new old age, itself the title of my old friend Paula Span’s column in The New York Times. There’s also David Harry Stewart’s website Ageist and Sari Botton’s substack Oldster and Jeannie Ralston’s travel group Next Tribe — all great ideas and great names, but not right for the experience I was trying to define.

I’d spent years searching for the right name myself, with no more success. Starting in 2006 when I wrote the blog How Not to Act Old, I bought a few dozen domain names related to age. Among them:

oldgirlsclubs.com

semiyoung.com

50whatever.com

nextysomething.com

whatsnexter.com

emptynexters.com

I sold that last one for $20,000, so these weren’t objectively bad names, but neither were any of them The One. And without the right name, a thing might not really exist.

Ancient Greeks, for instance, didn’t see the color blue, or at least they didn’t see it the way we do. Homer never used the word blue to describe the sky or the sea, which he famously called “wine-dark”, and while there were words for a bluish-black and a grayish-blue, there was no one unifying name for the color blue. In writings from that time, colors are described more on the basis of movement and shimmer than on a single hue.

Language reports but also shapes experience, according to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis aka linguistic relativity aka linguistic determinism — which, if the theory is correct, might mean three different things. How we perceive a thing, in other words, depends on what it’s named.

My friend Mindy, who’s a lawyer, points out that this is at play in the legal world, when a constellation of seemingly disparate experiences are identified in a new and different way that changes their nature. Sexual harassment is the perfect example. Women have been subjected to crude jokes and sexual pressure at work forever, but no one considered that behavior criminal or even wrong before 1975, when the term sexual harassment was coined.

If the important life passage that I and all my friends were experiencing was ever going to be identified and understood for what it was, it needed the right name. And I was obviously the one who was going to have to find it. I mean, age and names: It was the confluence of the two central passions of my professional life. Nameberry, Younger: everything I’d been working on for decades had primed me to name this life passage.

And then I found it. Googling 50th birthday celebrations led me to the word Jubilarian. Jubilarians. Jubilarianism. That was it. the perfect name.

A jubilarian is, by definition, someone celebrating an anniversary of 50 years or more. It’s a real word but an obscure one, used mostly in the Catholic Church, which makes it both old and new. Check. It’s different from the raft of other names that have been used for post-young life, which signals that the viewpoint it identifies is different too. And it sounds happy. Positive. Upbeat. Celebratory. Jubilant.

I loved the name, I knew the phenomenon was real, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Was The Jubilarian a book and if so, should it be a memoir or a collection of essays or some kind of how-to? Or maybe it wasn’t a book at all but a club, a talk, a shopping guide, a movement?

And then, captivated by the beautiful blue sky, seized by the desire to plunge, it hit me. Instead of waiting to decide what The Jubilarian was, I should just let it be something. Write out loud, take a chance, have some fun.

Someone once told me that there are only two reasons to do anything creative, for the money or for the creativity itself. If you’re doing it for the money, make sure they’re paying you enough and let go of all fussiness about style and prestige. And if you’re doing it for the creativity, then block out all consideration of the market and fully indulge your creative side.

It feels kind of unseemly to meditate on the happiness of privileged old people when so many terrible things are happening in the world. And as we get older, lots of terrible things happen to us too, have already happened: illness and grief and a greater certainty that, no matter how jubilant we feel at any one moment, we are all going to die.

But maybe that makes it more important to let ourselves be transported by the dazzling June afternoon, to turn our faces, whenever we can, toward the sun.

That reminds me of some lines I love from Fanny & Alexander, the Bergman film that inspired my new novel.

“The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”