Aging shame

Your body is not the problem, fighting it is not the solution.

I look closely in the mirror and see my fifty-one year old face relaxing. My jawline is wavy, eyelids are crumpling and there are creases in the skin around my mouth. My face looks gently disrupted, like a neatly-made bed that has been napped on. I feel a creeping sense of anxiety, disappointment, loss and failure.

I try not to take too much notice. I know these feelings are not to be trusted, because they are not coming from my heart. My heart is smiling at my reflection with love. And I’m happy to report that despite my age, my smile still works perfectly, so it smiles back. Silver strands in my hair catch the light and I like how they sparkle; a wink of liberation.

Aging simply means getting older: the act of maturing, ripening, seasoning, softening. Anti-aging as a concept makes no sense to me. To be against aging seems futile at best. At worst, a fight against the passing of time is a fight against living, a distraction from where the gold dust of life is actually falling on us, in the here and now. I fight for living.

So why my knee-jerk shot of fear when I see my own aging?

It’s not the aging itself that causes my discomfort, but the shame I feel for what have collectively become known as the visible signs of this natural and inevitable process. Body shame is in our air supply — the sources of this are a whole different post — and we’ve been breathing it in since we were children. Large parts of the beauty and wellness industry perpetuate, exploit and profit from this shame. We are surrounded by brands, influencers and media that relentlessly create new ways to make us feel uncomfortable in our own bodies, before selling us solutions to the discomfort they have created.

Pushing back against these forces is hard, but swimming against the tide of time is harder. Trying to get back to when we were younger, or to an idealised version of ourselves that maybe never existed in the first place, is going to require a lot of energy. This is why no-one, to my knowledge, has yet completed and won the fight against aging. We will literally die trying.

I’m not saying that a tweakment isn’t tempting. Yes, I’ve pulled the skin around my eyes back to see how fresh faced I could look. And if I’m truthful, I’m just a teeny bit needled by a woman my own age with line-free skin. Even though I have researched and reasoned carefully to reach my anti-anti-aging position, the fact remains that I ride my high-horse within a kingdom that values women’s youth and beauty over age and wisdom, so it still makes me feel jealous, then unsisterly, then shitty. But — on balance — not quite shitty enough to make me want to tackle those supposedly shameful visible signs. I would still rather fight the sources of shame than my own body.

My body and I are a team. We have been through a lot of physical challenges together to get to this point, including pregnancy, miscarriage, birth, breastfeeding, staying awake at 3pm every day, and most dramatic of all, a liver transplant. At times my body has felt valuable, powerful, strong; at others invaded, unrecognisable and broken. But when your contractions deliver your baby safely, or your heart keeps beating even though a vital organ has been removed from your abdomen, it teaches you new ways to appreciate your body. How my body works is more beautiful to me than a fresh set of highlights or plumper lips could ever be. I care how I look, but not in a way that compels me to part with large amounts of time and money to fix non-problems fabricated in a boardroom at L’Oreal.

Everything changed for me when I stopped thinking about my body as an object to be viewed from the outside, and began treating it as my partner for life. There is value in my body as it is right now, because it is my vehicle for living life right now. That life is different to the one I was living a decade ago, and the one, all being well, I will be living in a decade’s time. It is such a relief to learn that I can loosen the grip on what I look like and still be OK. Still be loved, be interesting, be happy. I’ve accepted that my body and face will always be changing. It’s one less thing to worry about. Aging is like a fruit machine, we pull the handle and watch our genes, social status, lifestyle choices, health and luck affect our payout. But if you get to play, you’ve already won.