I have always been young.
I am the youngest of three children and my two siblings are the better part of a decade older.
I was the youngest person in my graduating class, meaning that by the time I finally got my driver’s license—as a junior—no one needed a ride.
I taught my first college course at the age of 25, and most of the students in those night classes were significantly older than me.
And—try not to overanalyze this after what I just enumerated—I married a man more than a decade my senior.
Point is, being young—or at least significantly younger than everyone around me—was a part of my story I didn’t fully acknowledge until the narrative started to change.
Like sand through the goddamn hourglass.
At a certain point, my sister and I seemed to level out in age—for decades now we’ve just both been working moms trying to figure out what to make for dinner.
My friends in adulthood spanned a near twenty-year age range.
Once in class, while referencing the attacks on September 11th, a student shrugged and said, “That happened four years before I was born.”
And recently, when mentioning the age difference between my husband and me, the person I was speaking with said, “Oh, I didn’t realize there was an age difference.”
I woke up one day, and I was middle-aged.
I looked in the mirror and saw the freckles fading and the once plump cheeks lowering. I couldn’t remember the last time I had gone to a baby shower or a wedding. My hip was screaming at me because I had slept on the wrong side the night before. And on the bathroom counter sat my preferred brand of antacid.
But more than that, I noticed that I was constantly joking about my age.
“Your mother is losing her mind as she gets older!” I’d laugh to my daughters, while looking fruitlessly for my keys.
Rolling my eyes when anyone in their 20s would mention staying out late.
And, most notably, when a student recently referred to me as an “elder Millennial” and I threatened to have him written up with the academic integrity office.
Later that evening I reflected on my reaction. It was just a joke. Any reference to my age was always just a joke. I had simply made a sarcastic fuss and piled onto the student when his classmates’ jaws dropped in surprise at his reference to my age.
But what I couldn’t figure out is why I had done that.
If every joke contains a little bit of truth, what about my age being called out bothered me?
The student wasn’t wrong. I am an elder Millennial. I am in my 40s. I was a college freshman when 9/11 happened. My first cell phone was a Nokia with a snap-on lime green cover and a huge battery back that fell off if it was lightly touched. I had a Tamagotchi and wore Doc Martens (their first go around) and I’d fight anyone who didn’t appreciate Eminem.
The student was just stating facts. So why did I joke?
Being upset about getting older is the story our parents, and their parents, and their parents have told us for centuries. Everyone before us was squirmy about getting older and just like most things passed down from our parents—skin color, medical histories, trauma—the story of being upset by, and ashamed of, aging never skips a generation.
And here I was in class, letting the cycle of this story roll through me unquestioned and out my mouth and into the ears of the generation under me: aging is bad. A narrative perpetuated by our ancestors, the beauty industry, the patriarchy, and Paul Rudd (don’t fool yourself, he’s had work).
So, after this class, when I realized I was steering into a trope I don’t even like, agree with, or relate to, I sat with my own feelings about aging. And wondered what part of it, if any, bothered me.
Here’s what I came up with:
Being invisible.
Especially as a woman. And what that really means is being irrelevant.
In my youth, every product was marketed to me. They wanted my young blood and fresh money. They knew I was eager to have the latest of everything, from clothes to makeup to albums, because in youth, it’s all about fitting in. And fitting in is all about conformity.
As you age, you feel a shift from the market caring about you. You are no longer the apple of capitalism’s eye.
Therefore, you aren’t as aware of the current music, or rise of jeans, or trending hairstyles. And because you don’t know, you feel yourself fighting to be heard and seen by others. The more you fuss about not knowing, the older you sound, and the older you sound, the more irrelevant you seem.
Aging is just swimming, but everyone treats you like you’re drowning.
But the true freedom in aging is being irrelevant to those who are not relevant to me. Not being the center of any marketer’s attention. No longer worried about conformity and instead focused solely on identity.
Hear me out.
My formative years were in the late 90s and early 2000s. Any woman who survived that era deserves financial compensation. Lindsey Lohan, Jessica Simpson, and Nicole Richie were on the cover of every magazine being called fat and somehow Hollywood convinced us that Bridget Jones was unworthy of love at 134 pounds. The zipper in my jeans was shorter than my thumbnail, and the Victoria’s Secret Angels hawked both an impossible beauty standard and truly uncomfortable bras.
At that age I would have given anything not to be asked to conform to those standards. To not misspend my youth questioning my own thigh gap or pubic hair color (remember Lindsey Lohan—a red head—was also called “Fire Crotch” in public and by adults) or be forced to walk into a f**king Abercrombie.
And now that I’m not being held to those standards—because frankly, at my age, the market largely ignores my existence—my weight and pubic hairs can be and do whatever they want!
Actually, that’s not entirely true.
I now get relentless Instagram ads for patches that help your cleavage wrinkles (a new worry unlocked!) and Pamela Anderson is getting raked over the coals for not wearing makeup on the red carpet at her disgusting age. How dare she be 57 in public! For her sake, and ours, I hope she chooses to quietly lie down and die before ever considering turning 60.
But in general, in the same way I feel I’m irrelevant in the eyes of the music, fashion, and beauty industries, I’m so deeply grateful that I am. Because in truth, the people and industries who aren’t paying attention to me are the very ones I wish would have left me alone in my youth.
And I will not squander this freedom.
Not looking like I feel.
A big issue with growing old is merely looking older. I used to think this was the patriarchy’s cruel taunt. And while that’s certainly part of it, another part is just the disconnect that comes from looking differently than you feel.
You see, we, as humans, were never meant to know what we looked like. Back in yore, we were only able to look at our reflection in a river. Women didn’t know their own faces like we do now. They knew what others looked like, and others knew what they looked like, but women had no real knowledge of their own face.
They couldn’t compare themselves to others. Unless, I suppose, they were washing clothes in the river at the same time. But honestly, if you’re in the middle of washing clothes on a rock in the river, you’ve probably got bigger problems than your looks. Bears for example! Bears love rivers—please hurry!
During the pandemic, my world shifted to Zoom calls and suddenly I was looking at myself all damn day. I was pulled from a life where I only saw my reflection in the morning and at night (still so much more than my ancestors and their river washing) to seeing my face for hours a day.
Imagine if all I ever saw was myself a few times a month in a river (which is forgivingly blurry, and the reflection graciously always rippled and wrinkled) rather than on a Zoom call four times a day, in selfies, on social media, and among the 8,000 pictures of me with my kids on my phone.
So, while I do believe we have insane and unrealistic expectations of beauty that are disproportionately harder on women, I think another big part of the issue of aging is just that we see ourselves more often than we used to. And in this, I’d wager we spend much more time focused on what we look like rather than what we feel like.
That exacerbates the disconnect of looking differently than you feel. The cruelest part of aging.
This is actually referred to as the Caputo-effect (2003), named after the researcher who discovered that if you look in the mirror for long enough you will actually hallucinate and see yourself as deeply disfigured.
So that’s what I’ve determined is happening anytime I don’t think I look on the outside as I feel on the inside. Because if I ever look long enough in the mirror to think I’m anything other than fabulous, there’s only one reason:
I’m hallucinating.
Regret and remorse.
When the photos app on my phone shows an “On this day” and it is inevitably my kids as babies or toddlers, there is a painful clenching in my chest. For a while, I thought the feeling was regret. For not doing something differently at the time. Not savoring it enough, not being more present, not knowing it was all going to go by as fast as it did. And that feeling in my chest was so painful that I would shut the app down just so I didn’t have to feel those feelings.
But then, one day, I forced myself to stare at the photo—this time a picture of my oldest when she was perhaps three weeks old—and to remember that moment for what it was.
And in this case, I had to look past the chubby cheeks, the sleepy smile, the tiny dimples on her knuckles and remember what was happening that day. And in that, I could recall the overwhelm, the exhaustion, the depression. How foreign my body seemed, how difficult it was for me to focus, how isolated I felt with those new feelings I was experiencing. The fog of postpartum in all its many thicknesses.
Yet when the picture appeared on my app that morning, I felt nothing but longing to be back there.
This, of course, makes no sense. You couldn’t pay me to go back to diapers and late-night feedings. I have no interest in pulling all-nighters in college again. I don’t want to plan another wedding. Or endure another episiotomy. So then why, why do I mistake the clenching in my chest as regret for how I felt at the time, or remorse for it no longer being that time?
Which is when it hit me: current me wasn’t longing for past me in that photo; past me was longing for present-day me.
Because in reality, the clenching feeling is simply recognition that the picture is only a part of the story. Sometimes it’s a part of the story we wish stood out stronger at the time, but to wish for that is to dismiss the other very real realities of what was happening off camera. Which is to say, it is only in hindsight we can see--and feel--the full picture.
The clenching in my chest is every feeling, and finally being able to feel them all at once.
After contemplating all my feelings about aging, I went back to class with a renewed promise to myself—one I wanted to say aloud to the students: I want to be a good model for aging.
And I didn’t mean I promised to age naturally (Which isn’t a thing, BTW; “natural beauty” is a phrase coined by men, and to achieve it takes more work and chemicals than is safe for humans. Further, the more “effortless” a woman looks, the earlier she had to get up that morning). And I didn’t mean I promised to age "gracefully" (Again, men put a goal on women to be graceful; our real goal is to be forceful).
But I did want to stop the jokes about my age, the self-deprecation, the wrist flicking, any and everything that was meant to make others either not notice I was aging, or make them think I have a problem with the fact that I am.
I’m under no belief that my students look to me as a great model of anything. But standing in front of a group of people—all now younger than me—it felt good to hear myself say that I want to be a good model of aging. Because the minute I said it aloud in class, I felt my mind shift to fit the words.
And different truths surfaced:
I’m happier than I’ve ever been.
Healthier.
More fulfilled.
Wiser.
Funnier.
Wealthier.
Am I worried I’ll get more and more invisible and irrelevant? Am I worried about my neck? Am I worried that getting Botox perpetuates the patriarchy? Am I worried that the best days are actually behind me and every picture is proof of that?
Meh. Not really.
I’m old enough to know better.
And besides, worrying causes wrinkles.
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