Me in the Golden Years

Looking to the future with a positive mindset

I woke up on a fine sunny day in October and realized I was 55 years old. Where did my life go? I know I spent most of my life dealing with the fallout of a severe mental illness, but I thought when I finally got my shit together and started living life like it was meant to be, that I would have time to enjoy it. As it is, my legs don’t work like they used to, I cannot walk or stand for more than 10 minutes without them getting numb. I had a heart attack in 2022, and even though I didn’t take seriously the diet that was supposed to help me lose weight, I have been managing my health better – watching my sugar, cholesterol, and SGTP. I haven’t lost weight, because the medication is keeping me fat. I have tried to lose weight while still enjoying food and the scale will not budge. I am stuck at 270 and it won’t go down or up.

I don’t feel healthy, I feel old. I can’t walk far and my body pops like a bag of popcorn when I get in and out of the car. Yes, I am still going to work. Next year, a University in China hired me to teach English. The family is staying here in the Philippines while I go and work. I’d like to spend my off-time writing, but I need to be doing something to help build a future for my family. Waiting around for something to happen will never work.

My mind is sharp, and I feel like I have so much to offer to students, so this will be like a dream - being able to do something I love while getting paid for it. Maybe when I don’t have the daily stress I have now, and I can relax a bit, I could do yoga or Tae Chi. Something to get my body moving, get my circulation going, and help me get back on my feet again.

There are no jobs for me here in the Philippines and I refuse to go back to the USA right now to an environment that caused most of the problems I had when I was younger. Yes, I plan to go back next year and see my kids and my parents, but I don’t want to go back to my home in the U.S. until I have money, and job prospects, and am ready again for that environment.

Yes, Flora and I have been talking about spending time in other countries. After she finishes college and I get my graduate degree, we want to see other places – New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Denmark, Germany – but we have to decide where it is that we want to spend the rest of our lives. The Philippines is great, but it is getting far too expensive to live here.

If my health is willing, I want to see all of China, Japan, Estonia, and Norway (I have family there), so the next 10 years will see me going solo to a few places. Flora has a degree to finish, which is our focus next year, and I see myself in the middle of either an MFA or an ME in Creative Nonfiction, as long as I don’t have to take out any more loans. Grants, scholarships, or having an employer pay will be the way to go, and I plan to keep getting degrees as long as I can. I love college and feel like it is a place I could spend the rest of my short life doing things I only dreamed of as a punk kid, lying in bed under the covers, trying to keep the demons away by dreaming of travel and writing my way around the planet. I feel like I can travel, work, write, and keep getting degrees as long as my mind stays sharp, and my legs will support me. I want my tombstone to say, “Dr. Jason James Weiland” and before I die, I want to see that be a reality. Is that too much to ask?

After the life I’ve lived, I don’t think I am asking for too much to keep my mind young and my body healthy enough to walk the Great Wall of China and stand on the battlements of some castle while a driving blizzard freezes my face. I want to walk in Tallinn at Christmas and hike the mountains of Switzerland. I want to meet the Veland’s of Norway and talk about what kind of man my great-grandfather was before he went to find his fortune in America.

I figure I have 30 years left if I am lucky and the stent in my artery holds. I figure I still have a few years before a clot gets me or my back and legs finally give out and I am forced into a chair sitting on the porch, dreaming of the life I lived. The next 10 to 30 years will be the reason I look back at my life with either regret or fondness, so I want to make sure I make every step of the next 30 years count as much as I can make it.