Getting Older and Wiser
I'm really sorry to inform you that I am am aging and haven't found a antidote to it.
At run club last week, after our last brutal hill rep, I thanked the runner whose heels I had been clinging onto for keeping such a heavy pace. I never run that hard without a training partner to push me (my heart rate went to 190, my goodness). I complimented him on his speed and running form, hopefully not in a weird way. Being Scottish, he had to of course skirt the compliment. “Oh, sadly I’m much slower every year”. I told him that I hadn’t had that experience yet, having been a very non-athletic youth, so I think I’m still slowly improving or, at least, staying on my little plateau. It’s certainly been an advantage of so recently discovering that not under-fuelling is worth the hype, that I’m not succumbing to any age-related declines yet. I know it’s coming, but I’m not going down willingly just yet.
I decided to pretty much celebrate my birthday this year. In the morning, while I was on a mountainside in Saas-Fee at 3200m working on a shoot with Sidetracked, I took a nice photo and decided to add it to my IG story with the caption that it was, indeed, my birthday. This is the first time I’ve ever admitted on social media to having a birthday or being a fallible human who ages every year.
Yes, I mostly just don’t like the fuss. The thought of those family restaurant chains that put a hat on someone and all the staff have to come out stomping and clapping and singing a birthday song for someone just make me want to crawl into a hole on behalf of the celebrated individual, let alone the hell if that person is me. I dont like attention. But, it’s not just that. It’s the shame of publicly getting older.
Growing up, I remember my parents, aunts and uncles all turning 40. The only birthday card option for such an age was along the track of “over the hill”. It was a joke, a public humiliation, to reach that age. After The Hill, you were wasted. Old. Useless. Time to put you on an ice floe and send you out on your way, you expired shrivel. But, on top of that, there was the public discourse on ageing women. Not only is old funny and awful, but for a woman, its disgusting and illegal.
Did you know that kids have anti-aging products advertised to them now? That’s how early they indoctrinate into our minds that it is absolutely essential that we never appear to have aged.
So, forgive me for always thinking it was gross to be older and I should absolutely hide the reality of it. I never promoted my birthday because deep down, I felt a deep shame that I kept on experiencing them (and, again, the attention-avoiding thing). Surely a better woman would have figured out how to prevent that by now.
But, I don’t feel that way about other aging women. I look up to older women. I cheer for the younger and hope that everything works out for them, but if I want advice or guidance or a source I can trust, I am only ever looking to the generation ahead of me who have already experienced so much more than me. I love them, I need them, and no single tiny part of me needs them to appear wrinkle-free and perfectly dark haired or whatever colour they started out with. I don’t care of their boobs have lost their bounce or their knuckles are looking a little gnarled. Why on earth would I?
I know why we’re disgusted with older women. We live in the patriarchy, where a woman’s worth is tied exclusively to her ability to sexually excite the male gaze. And the younger a woman is, the more virginal, the more exciting. There is a theory that men prefer women without pubic hairs because that makes them look so young that they are likely virgins and therefore any male who, uhhh, gets with them, could be guaranteed his paternity, and so the deep recesses of a modern man’s brain just prefers that. It’s called the Paternity Certainty Theory.
I mean…. Ew. Seriously, seriously, ew. I never waxed myself again after I learned that tidbit.
Anywho, let’s move on (*shudders*).
And now I’ve reached a crucial age in my body where I have to decide how I want this to go. The first few greys have appeared - my hairdresser kindly referred to them as “a few sprinkles” - and the laugh lines around my eyes are getting slightly more permanent. I’ve spent most of my life outside and it now shows in the quality of my skin. My knees crack and I say ooft when I heft myself out of a comfortable chair. But I’m still below that Hill, so I could decide with cosmetic intervention to cover it all up. I could inject my face to plump it up and dye my hair and pick some bras that would yeet my boobs back up towards my chin.
Or, I could let it slide. Let nature take its course. Be the woman that the generation beneath me are quietly hoping I will be. Because if I am, it gives them permission to do the same. If we collectively choose it, we could kill the botox industry and shift the standards. Hell, if we really rallied, we could kill plastic surgery and even, if we all wanted it, underwires.
The truth is that I haven’t decided yet. I love grey hair, but I don’t love the few sprinkles I have as they just currently look like a small handful of flaws in my mane. Women more than ten years younger than me are getting botox and it makes me feel like a troll that I haven’t yet. In my job I spend a bit of time on camera and so it’s hard not to notice and care about these things sometimes.
There’s still time to decide and I don’t really believe there is a right or wrong answer. There is a hypocritical chorus in the patriarchy to exclaim that natural women are preferred, but the truth is that they are only preferred when they are also naturally beautiful. It’s the illusion of natural beauty that is preferred. If anyone wants to change their appearance, I have zero umbrage with that. It’s only on the grand collective level that I resent our societal demand for natural-but-beautiful, youthful women. Maybe I’ll decide that I just simply feel better with dyed hair, or maybe I’ll decide its too much faff and money and I don’t care enough. I don’t know yet. All that I do know, for now, is that I don’t want to feel any shame either way.
I have reached the stage of noticing the deeper lines around my mouth and that it now turns down slightly at the corners rather than up. There's days I find it really tough and my fingers hover over the keyboard to search for "aesthetic clinics near me", but then the thought that you wrote, and someone else has quoted in the comments, stops me.
To "Be the woman that the generation beneath me are quietly hoping I will be. Because if I am, it gives them permission to do the same".
I would never, ever judge an individual for what they choose to do to their face or body, especially considering the relentless messaging and pressure that we experience. But my stubborn self, who is so grateful to see women in all their complex, varied beauty - who, like you, has never looked at someone older than me and seen what I see in my face as flaws on them in the same way - knows that it is not me, Els, who wants to change the way I look. It's the patriarchy and capitalism, because literally only they profit from me spending money and time and energy thinking about my appearance in that way.
Sometimes body positivity is impossible, so I try to aim for body neutrality. To be grateful for what it does and who it lets me exist as, and avoid the mirror as much as possible. Thank you for sharing this piece - it's such an importance conversation.
I love your approach here. Feminism has always been about choice: choice to work vs stay at home, choice to have kids or not, take your husbands name or not. It extends to choice to modify your body and your appearance or not. But a choice isn't a choice if it is coerced and that's the problem! If I don't want grey hair, is it because I don't want it or because I've been trained to not want it for 35 years?
Also: "yeet my boobs back up towards my chin" is the best line I've heard in a long time 🤣