Dear ones,
I started practicing thinking of myself as 38 before Tuesday, which is technically when I became it. I wanted to ease into it, try it on. For the past couple years, I’ve been feeling the things the culture teaches us: feeling the burden of becoming an aging woman-read person, feeling the increased invisibility, feeling my low back. I don’t want to write you a boring letter about all these cliches but I find myself here anyway, needing to put words to them, or at least put words to the particular iteration of contradiction I find myself in relation to these cliches. Because in some ways, culture is right, but in other ways, we’re culture and we get to say what all of this means.
The truth is, I am struggling with getting older. I wrote a few months ago about how my decision to get needles plunged into my face to stimulate collagen probably wouldn’t be something I’d spend money on if I hadn’t at least a little bit internalized the patriarchy. I am afraid of sagging skin and wrinkles, I am afraid of what it means about my worth, I am afraid of the increasing feeling of invisibility. I know intellectually how these thoughts are shaped by colonialism and white supremacy and how gross it is for me to have them, or at least believe them, but still I have them and still, sometimes, I believe them.
But there is another side to this; on a recent Instagram “Ask Me Anything” a friend and fellow aging femme asked me to name some of my favorite things about getting older. I made a short list on top of an unfiltered picture of me in my pjs on the couch, which I meant to be meta, because one of the things I love about getting older is not being quite so concerned with other people’s opinions of me. I say that and recognize it contradicts my getting needles plunged into my face. But this is the truth of aging; it’s all of it, all at once. I post more unfiltered pictures, but I still also post filtered pictures. I care so much less about other people’s opinions of me than I did in my 20s, and yet there are a handful of writers/activists/academics whose opinion of me I can get near obsessively curious about. I love the comfort I have in who I am, though I sometimes get confused about what I want, and aging makes much higher the stakes of the end results of wanting.
I liked how my friend phrased the question without any hedging, though. Not “Getting older sucks, but if you had to find some good things, what would they be?” It was much more “Getting older rules, for probably too many reasons to fit on this Instagram square, but share a few?!” I like the spirit of that. So here’s a list of some more, without hedging, without contradiction, without apology. Which isn’t to say the contradiction isn’t there, because it is, all entangled, but even with that in the background, this stuff (most of which is very specific to me, but likely relatable to many of you) kind of rules:
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