This weekend, my husband and I were given last-minute Field Level seats to watch the Dodgers play the Yankees. Born and raised Los Angeles, he’s a born and raised fan of the Boys in Blue, and after ten years together, I’ve become a not-too-shabby fan myself. So when the game was offered, we stuffed jerseys into a bag and off we went. The seats were awesome, right behind the visitor dugout, where Aaron Judge towered over everyone. And for the first part of the game, they were also right in the midday Southern California sun.
I’m a vampire. I don’t belong in the sun.
So we watched the first part of the game from the suite-level Stadium Club. It was all very special and appreciated and just a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon that we do not take for granted. Added bonus for this vampire: we were undercover, so in addition to the game on the field, there was a screen of any other sport that was being played, including the NHL playoffs. The ticker under the screen showed hockey stats and facts. Including one about the Czech player Jaromír Jágr. For context, Jaromír Jágr is now 53 years old and still playing professional hockey. John’s comment: “that guy was 17 when he was drafted into the NHL, and I distinctly remember thinking - I’m a teenager, and I’m just trying to figure out how to skip history tomorrow to go to the baseball card shop…how did he already get drafted to the NHL?!”
My response: “Oh yeah, he’s my Brittney Spears.”
Huh?
I’ll explain.
In 1998, I was a junior at Miami University. In Oxford, Ohio (it was a school before Florida was a state). Sitting on the floor of my tiny off-campus apartment bedroom, putting together a poster board for some class or a club, the DJ came through my stereo speakers: “That was …Baby One More Time, by sixteen-year-old Brittany Spears, already at number one on the Billboard chart.”
And there we had it. The Brittany Spears Moment. A core memory.
It was the first time I clocked age as a meaningful part of context. And in that moment, I was definitely creating comparisons.
Sixteen?! At sixteen, Brittany Spears had found herself in a situation to record, produce and then launch a song to the entire world, and then quickly crawled up the charts to become number one. And not just #1…two decades later, Rolling Stone would call …Baby One More Time the greatest debut single of all time.
At sixteen! It wasn’t so much about her age, but more of a logistics and operational question. How did she fit “stardom” into algebra, driving, and other such teenage tests? It shattered my assumption that everyone was on the traditional and (what I now know as) privileged American childhood track. It defied time management.
For the first time, age was part of context. As a kid, the context is grade, and everyone in your grade is in the same relative context. I took French (you’d never know now) and Carrie took Spanish, so there were differences - but minor ones. The context of grade was relatively homogenous. I had assumed everyone my grade, and consequently my age, had followed the same track.
Then Brittany Spears braided her hair and tapped her pencil on that textbook, and that incorrect, biased assumption was shattered. There I was in Oxford, OH, trying not to spill rubber cement on the carpet (I’m sure there was something academically significant on that poster), and she was prepping for the VMAs.
Like with many lightbulb moments or core memories, it significantly readjusted my lens of the world. And I quickly realized that the context of age was alive and well in journalism, from magazines to newspapers to the then-growing medium of the World Wide Web. Yes, age is a continued conversation in American politics, I’m not talking about that here. It’s how prevalent age is used when creating context. Particularly for women. In one People magazine article from today (because you know I’ll always back it up with science), the headline reads Yolanda Hadid Ends Engagement to Joseph Jingoli After 6 Years Together. The article then starts: Hadid, 61, and her longtime boyfriend Joseph Jingoli have quietly ended their engagement…
There is no mention of Joseph Jingoli’s age in the article. Interesting.
I do think there are alternative ways of creating storytelling context that don’t have to include age, but that’s also not what this is about. I’m not writing this for the authors.
I’m writing this for the readers, consumers, leaders, teenagers, adults, all of us. It’s about what we can do and what mindset we can have.
Acknowledge the context, before it turns into comparison. Comparison (that quickly becomes self-judgment) to someone else’s story is a Waste. Of. Time.
Acknowledge the role models who may inspire you, but stop short of judging what they’ve done in a given period of time versus what you’ve done in more - or less - of that time.
Acknowledge the language that could open the door for comparison or judgment. Want an example? I just re-read the sentence that I wrote about Jaromír Jágr: [he’s] now 53 years old and still playing professional hockey. Why did I need to say “still”? What authority or expertise do I bring to qualify who is “still” doing anything relative to their age?
Acknowledge when you are inspired by someone else’s age-bound story…and go back to your own …yet.
I didn’t want to be Brittany Spears. She did make me aware of age as a context in a way that I never had before. Now, almost thirty years later, I can layer on: let age just be a frame, versus a measure.
It’s context, not comparison.
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A note as I close the fifth week of my commitment to writing and hitting “publish”…
I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I know I am finding what I’m doing along the way. Writing (and publishing, which makes the commitment more real) to uncover and refine my point of view. Maybe there is something around age and experience, or possibility and preference, I don’t know. But for anyone willing to listen, read, and especially for those who have written with notes of “yes! And me!” - thank you. Till next week.
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