I’m Not a Stalker…But My New Friends are All 40 Years Younger than Me

Not that I’m counting, but the last time I checked the “largest online community of female nomads” site, I had 542 likes and 153 comments. And all of the comments were at least civil, a strange and heady sensation.

How did I, a 71-year old almost-virgin blogger, get to that site? Well, I found it because I needed help. I had been laid off a job after 25 years as a senior editor for a publishing company, and I didn’t know how to go about getting remote or part-time writing work. I assumed that getting a full-time job would be a challenge at my age, and I didn’t really want one anyways. I had always written whatever content my employers needed, and hadn’t written anything for publication about myself ever.

Then I started to write about my life and experiences, and I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know where to go from there. And so I had tracked down several travel sites for women travelers to ask for help. The worst that could happen, I thought, is that I would be ignored, and I was too old to care about that. I wrote my first post: 

I’m a 71-year-old who started solo traveling 50 years ago. Got laid off from an editing/writing job after 20 years and started my first blog (after finding the freelance market wary about my age). The blog is about older women starting new lives. Any advice on developing it appreciated. Meanwhile, I’m finding constant inspiration about older travel/life. My latest post is about having a daughter who is a female nomad. My advice to young travelers——keep and take notes/journals/photos so that you can remember what happened in your life in 50 years.

That opened the floodgates: I was called “a pioneer” by a 23-year-old, was told by women in their 30s and 40s that they dreamed of traveling solo as they aged and that they wanted to do what I did. Someone wrote that she was concerned that her mother would worry too much about her traveling alone and asked for advice about how to approach her. I signed up for a group of other similar sites and blogs. One site was for not-so-young bloggers (a fit for me), travelers over 30 (I am), another for travelers over 40 (yes, also), and another for just women who love to travel. 

Being the kind of person who has never felt the need for a community—and who has often been described as pretty sarcastic, the responses of the women on these sites amazed me. One woman posted that she was going to be in Norway on a certain date and was wondering if anyone else would be there so they could meet for dinner. Others were giving each other advice about starting businesses or about the best hostels in Spain or the places to take their 80-year-old grandmother for a vacation. I’m sure that some of these young folks would love to get work out of these sites or free advice or even an actual job, but it is all very low key. In the beginning, I was warned not to use any of these sites to push my own work, and once I knew the rules, I was fine with it. I even DM’d several of the women to ask specific questions about building my blog and received helpful and immediate and pleasant advice.

So this experience has expanded my attitudes about community, social media, millennials and even generation Z, and perhaps even the human need for contact. Of course, a basic reason for all of this is that we can now communicate at any time, from any place in the world. In my day (creak creak) this was just never possible. You just had to suck disasters up and get on with your trip. Today I read a blog from a woman in the Himalayas who hurt her foot; it was swelling and turning red and she wanted to know where she could go. So, does this kind of communication make travel too easy? Does seeing selfies in isolated places makes it less special when you get there? I don’t think so. Our friend in the Himalayas still has to limp to a place to patch up her leg, and actually being on the Amalfi coast feels different than seeing pictures of it.

I know that these people are not my friends or family, and I know that some think of me as a relic from before the wars (Korea? Vietnam?), but I also am aware that there is a chunk of what they care about and how they see the world that fits comfortably with chunks of my own brain and heart. I will never meet them. Right now I love them.

Photo: Non-Stalker Barbara with Zhang Huan Buddha head at Storm King Art Center, near Cornwall, N.Y.

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