First, they will say: you need to dress differently

Then they will say that you need to lose weight. Then – that you need to move more energetically and look more fun! Optimistically. And don’t complain. It is necessary to change a hairdresser. Read a fashion book and watch movies for self-development. And when you lose weight, change your hair, wear other things and start smiling optimistically, they will say that you are too old. And then what to do?

One man told his wife, with whom he had lived for twenty-five years. When she walked in a fashionable suit with him on a difficult hike with a heavy backpack behind her. All her life she lost weight, worked hard in the gym, rocked the press, and did haircuts; as the man liked. And watched movies that he liked. And read the books he recommended. And on vacation, I rafted on rivers and crawled on mountains. And in the evenings by the fire, waving away mosquitoes, she sang bard songs on the guitar.
The man loved to spend his vacation in this way. Here the wife did everything as he liked. Listened to criticism. Tried. And then he got angry that she was walking slowly with her backpack. And he said You are too old!
And what to do with such criticism? This is not a weight or a hairstyle. Not a new space movie to watch. You can’t go anywhere for fifty-five years. And it becomes difficult to pull a backpack and walk through the thicket, singing songs… For a quarter of a century, a person did everything the other person wanted – to save the marriage. To be loved. That there was understanding! And then the man went far forward with wide fast steps. And she was sitting on her backpack and crying – she was very tired. Like a little gray dwarf, she sat in the woods and cried.

Without any optimism. Because she didn’t live the way she wanted to: starving herself, sweating in gyms, wandering the taiga, and crawling in the mountains on vacation. And I wanted something completely different: quiet evenings at sea, baking cakes, sometimes going to the movies on melodramas, wearing long hair, lying on the couch sometimes with a book, going to the theater in a beautiful dress…

She did not live her life. She did as her husband liked. She didn’t want to lose him! And he called her old and left her in the woods – why is she stretching so slowly?

She reached the train; threw a heavy backpack in the woods. The ticket was enough, and that’s good. I was driving, looking in the cloudy glass at the gloomy forest, from which I miraculously got out…

She got out. And someone is not. And still, lose weight, get a haircut, rest, and eat not the way you want; and as others should. And in vain. Because then they can still throw in the woods; because we are too old and slowly pulling the backpack…