The first time I realized I was losing my face I was at the gym. I had finished my strenuous (to me) step class and was very sweaty. I left the area blocked off for classes and took a spot on the stretch mats next to a wall of mirrors. I was doing my regular sequence of hamstring stretches, my legs wide and my head down towards my knees, thinking about what I was going to have for lunch, when I looked up through my legs and caught my image in the mirror. My upside down face was literally falling off the bone. I stared at myself for several seconds. I was momentarily distracted with thoughts of the structure of my skeleton; how the cheekbones and nose bone and eye sockets sat underneath my face, but then I went back to taking in just how much loose skin there was. Where did all the extra skin come from? Just last year, I swear, I had just the right amount of skin. I was sure that if I had hung upside down last year my face would have stayed on my face.
After that, things started to change fast. I felt a whisker growing out of my chin. I plucked it out. Two weeks later I felt it again. I could see the skin on my eyelids was starting to droop and that it would one day cover my actual eyes. There were lines drawn along the side of my mouth, making me look like I was sad when I was only relaxed. My nearly grown children would ask, “Are you mad?”. The little frown line between my eyebrows would only go away when I kept my eyebrows raised, which wasn’t sustainable. Then when I had my hair colored at the salon, after two or three weeks there was a halo of silver all around my face and a skunk stripe down the center of my head.
I was completely unprepared for these changes. It was like I had been able to fool myself with makeup and beauty treatments and spa days and hair appointments for years and then BAM. I was old.
The problem was, I had never considered that I would one day not be young, not look the way I had always looked.
And what kind of old lady was I going to be? When I was young I imagined myself at 25 or 30 years old, grown up, working in an office or pushing my adorable kids on a swing. Things got fuzzy after that. Who can imagine being 40? Or 60? Anything past 35 was just an ephemeral dream with soft edges that disappeared when I tried to focus on it.
I could find women and girls up to around 30 years old in the movies, on billboards, all over Instagram. But it was as if women went from their twenties and thirties, to their eighties. It stood to reason that a lot of the women I saw must be older than they appeared. Was it Botox? Cosmetic surgery? Airbrushing? I saw lots of images of middle aged men who projected gray haired (or no haired) sophistication and wealth, even sex appeal. So how could the other half of the population of the world just skip three decades of life, going from ingénue, to child bearing, then straight to crone? Where were all the silver vixens?
It wasn’t fair. I was 52 and I still wanted to be cool. Cool and old. Was that even a thing?
Even as I struggled to get my mind around this conundrum, I felt a shifting of perspective.
Trained by a lifetime of being a girl, I was at all times hyper aware of how I was being received by others. I even spent quite a bit of time manipulating how I would be received by dressing a certain way, moving a certain way, talking (and not talking) a certain way. It was liberating to change the point of view from “what will they think of me” to “what will I think of them”. No longer turning heads like I maybe once did, I was able to focus more on what was going on outside of myself. I had new bandwidth to pay attention to what people were saying to me, what their energy was, how they made me feel. How I felt in my body instead of how my body looked or felt to others.
I could choose clothes because they were soft and warm and felt good; things that seemed reasonable, and qualities that I suspected men have always considered when dressing themselves. This was a novelty to me. After years and years of pinching waistbands and stabby bra straps, punishing high heels and freezing little outfits, I reveled in hoodies and wide leg jeans. I started to wear bright colors just because they made me happy. I wore Converse sneakers because they reminded me of who I was in high school, and they were comfy.
It didn’t seem to matter so much anymore if people thought I was weird. I suspected no one was thinking of me at all, and it turned out that was glorious. I liked the person I had become and I was starting to be able to exist in the world as a soul who was just meant to experience things; see, taste, smell, hear. I was learning to enjoy myself. I no longer felt I had anything to prove, especially to the people around me who were mostly decades younger and still working under the impression that their lives and bodies weren’t changing. The young women in bikinis, still sucking in their stomachs, hadn’t yet felt the gentle undertow of time pulling at their feet. I wished I could send them a message somehow that freedom and joy was waiting on the other shore, like a lighthouse guiding them to the future. But although I could shine my hardest, my beam of contentment seemed to miss its target, just as I had failed to interpret the messages I had been receiving (and still receive) from women ahead of me.
I could only stand on the other shore, watching them labor through the waves toward me. I hoped I could greet them as they emerged from the water, body a little heavier, skin a little looser, but with recognition and relief in their eyes.