The hardest permission to give yourself after seventy isn't permission to rest or to say no or to stop being useful — it's permission to be ordinary, to have lived an ordinary life, and to stop believing that somewhere along the way you were supposed to have become someone more remarkable than a person who showed up every day and held things together

Last week, I stood in my kitchen at 2 a.m., unable to sleep, making a list of all the things I hadn't become.

Not the Nobel laureate, not the bestselling author, not the person whose obituary would start with "renowned" or "celebrated" or even "notable." Just a retired English teacher who makes decent lasagna and remembers to call her friends on their birthdays.

The list grew longer as the night wore on, each line another proof that I had somehow failed at the grand project of becoming extraordinary.

This is the reckoning that comes in your seventies, though nobody warns you about it. We spend so much time preparing for the physical changes, the retirement finances, the empty nest.

But nobody tells you about this particular ghost that visits in the quiet hours: the specter of your unremarkable life, holding up a mirror to show you exactly who you became versus who you thought you'd be.

The myth of the exceptional life

Where did we get this idea that an ordinary life equals a failed life? I think about my father, who delivered mail in our small town for forty years. He knew everyone by name, remembered which houses had new babies, which families were struggling.

When he died, the church was packed, not because he was famous but because he had touched so many lives in small, daily ways. Yet even he, near the end, wondered aloud if he should have done something "bigger" with his life.

We live in a culture obsessed with extraordinary stories. Every graduation speech tells young people to change the world. Every self-help book promises to unlock your hidden potential for greatness. Social media shows us seventy-year-olds running marathons, starting companies, becoming viral sensations.

And here most of us sit, having lived lives of showing up, paying bills, raising children, caring for aging parents, working jobs that kept the lights on but didn't light up the world.

I spent thirty-two years in a high school classroom, and twice they gave me a plaque that said "Teacher of the Year." But you know what I remember most? The Thursday afternoon when Michael, who struggled with every book I'd assigned, stayed after class to tell me he'd finished "To Kill a Mockingbird" and actually liked it.

That wasn't extraordinary. It was just a Thursday. Just a kid. Just a book. Just a teacher doing her job.

Why ordinary feels like failure

Have you noticed how we can't even age without pressure to be exceptional at it? We're supposed to age gracefully, actively, productively. Seventy is the new fifty, they say, as if the actual seventy isn't good enough. We should be taking up salsa dancing, learning Mandarin, volunteering in three different places while maintaining the energy of someone half our age.

I started teaching as a substitute while finishing my degree, a single mother just trying to keep everything from falling apart. There was nothing exceptional about those mornings when I'd drop my daughter at daycare and drive to whichever school needed me that day.

I was just showing up, doing what needed to be done. But somewhere along the way, I absorbed the message that this wasn't enough. That survival and steadiness were somehow lesser achievements than brilliance and recognition.

The comparison trap doesn't end with age; it intensifies. Because now we're comparing our whole lives, not just our present moments. We see contemporaries who became judges, CEOs, published authors, and we stack our ordinary lives against their highlight reels. We forget that most of life, even exceptional life, happens in ordinary moments. Even Marie Curie had to do laundry. Even Maya Angelou had to buy groceries.

The courage to claim your ordinary life

Here's what I'm learning at seventy-one: it takes tremendous courage to look at your life and say, "This was enough. I was enough." Not in resignation, but in recognition of what ordinary life actually requires.

Think about what "just showing up" really means. It means getting out of bed on the days when grief sits heavy on your chest. It means making dinner when you're bone tired. It means sitting through another budget meeting, another parent conference, another family crisis, and finding the strength to be present and kind.

It means holding things together when everything wants to fall apart, and doing it so consistently that it looks easy, looks ordinary.

My family didn't have much money growing up, but every Sunday, no matter what else was happening, we sat down to dinner together. My mother made it happen week after week, year after year. She never won an award for those dinners.

No one wrote articles about her pot roast. But those meals, that consistency, that ordinary ritual - it held us together, taught us we mattered, gave us something to count on in an uncertain world.

The gift in being unremarkable

Virginia Woolf once wrote, "The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder." I think the beauty of an ordinary life has similar edges. There's an anguish in accepting that you won't be remembered by history.

But there's also a strange freedom in it, a lightness that comes when you stop trying to be remarkable and start recognizing the remarkable in what you've already done.

In one of my previous posts about finding purpose after retirement, I mentioned how we often confuse purpose with importance. But purpose can be as simple as being the person who always has extra tissues in their purse, who remembers birthdays, who shows up to help with the mundane crises that make up real life.

When I finally give myself permission to have lived an ordinary life, I can see it more clearly. I see the thousands of essays I graded with care, even when my eyes were tired. I see the Sunday dinners I hosted, trying to recreate what my mother gave us. I see the friends I've kept for forty years, the daily phone calls to check on neighbors, the thousand small kindnesses that make up a life lived among others.

Final thoughts

That night in my kitchen, I finally tore up the list of things I hadn't become.

Instead, I made coffee and watched the sunrise, thinking about all the mornings I'd gotten up and done what needed doing. There's a holiness in that kind of ordinary dedication, a beauty in being someone who could be counted on, even if history won't count you at all.

At seventy, the hardest permission to give yourself isn't to rest - it's to recognize that holding things together, showing up day after day, being steadfastly ordinary in a world that demands extraordinary, might be the most remarkable thing of all.