Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535880
84 M PS E . O R G BY VICKIE SAMPSON MPSE Aging in an Industry of Youth your work may be). If you're good, you are sought after for your work, you're getting more credit. If you're a mother or father, there's that part of your life too. Between career and family, it's a busy time! Your 40s are full of taking stock of your life so far—midlife, if you will. You might decide your career needs a different path or at least a more challenging path. Maybe you divorce or get married. Maybe your kids are teenagers now. You still see life as ahead of you with many more goals to reach. In your 50s, you may start thinking about the next chapters of your life. You're now becoming the "older" person at meetings and functions. Your parents are getting older and possibly dying or dead. You may become the caretaker of your parents just as your own children are leaving the nest. You start to see the younger generations of editors filtering into the industry. Maybe you become a mentor or teacher, wanting to pass along the knowledge and experience you've gained. In your 60s, you still think of yourself as a vital, valuable, and valued, as an important and experienced editor (or whatever you've dedicated your career to) but the signs are beginning to appear—signs like technology and new editing platforms that require learning new things, changing your way of doing things, testing your mind's capabilities. "The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down." —George Eliot In your 50s & 60s, you may start thinking of retirement. Maybe young people today are more savvy than I was and think about saving money for a rainy day, but I just didn't. Thank goodness the union did that for me (and the producers of all the union shows I worked on). "Age is something that doesn't matter unless you are a cheese." —Luis Buñuel Becoming and being a Dialogue Detective has taken all my life since I was 20, when I got into the union as an apprentice editor, back in 1973, on the Mark Rydell-directed film, Cinderella Liberty. When you're young, you see time as something always out there—in the future, day after day, year after year. You're eager, you're hungry for experience and knowledge. You'd do anything to do the thing you're hungering for—whether it's being an editor, a director, a writer, or whatever! I look at my 20s as learning about life, love, and career. When you're 20, you really don't think you will ever get old! You can't imagine that you would get old and retire someday. (At least, I didn't.) In your 30s is when you come more into your own as far as your knowledge of your craft (whatever