Good evening, everybody. How you all doing? Welcome to the show. We're going to try to spend the night

depathologizing and normalizing. That's what we try to do every night. DMs always open.

We've got a DM for us, dropping the DMs on our Lovelin IG page. I wanted to open the show talking about

aging and ageism, essentially ways to kind of combat some of those stereotypes. But let's start

first with ourselves. Gosh, as I get older, I start to really see ageism. But some of the most

insidious forms of it are ones that I kind of weaponize and use against myself. Right? It's not just, it's not just that we utilize

it against others and, and, and, and, and keep these things in place that harm others. We also

sometimes do it against ourselves. So we want to start by kind of listening to ourselves. What is it

we, we say around our age and aging? Because I think some of the limits are ones that we impose.

And I start to hear that little voice in my own head saying, ah, you're too old for that.

Or at your age, you should dot, dot, dot.

None of those things are real.

You know, we have stages of development.

And that's supposed to be a loose framework that helps us understand what to expect or what traditionally happens, but that doesn't mean it's the correct, healthy or right way.

It's okay to age at your pace.

Before I get into the specifics of ageism, right, that we put on others or ourselves. Let me start by just talking

about the fact that not, not everyone is given the same opportunities, right? And not everyone's

able to go through developmental stages at the same rate or accomplish them like others are.

Think about it. If someone is raised, if someone is gay or trans or non-binary, anything outside of the hetero sphere, they are going to have

somewhat delayed social, relational.

You know, the ability to accomplish developmental stages is something that culture allows, right?

If the world is centered around, again, my example is heterocentricity,

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