catelin

My face is getting old. I have wrinkles and spots that mark every day I ever spent in the sun, every time I furrowed my brow at a problem, every time I laughed out loud and squinted my eyes with a giggle. I heard Nora Ephron hawking her new book about women and aging on some talk show or another and realized that my worry was not unique. It's all too common of a preoccupation of women of a certain age. She's in her sixties. I cannot imagine worrying about my looks as much as I do now in twenty years. I hope that I will come to accept the changes carved into my flesh by time as some sort of graceful patina, something that makes me different but still physically beautiful in some way. A friend of mine suggested botox the other day and I was horrified. I can't imagine doing something like that. I can't imagine cutting, peeling, pasting myself to look like something I am not. It's a nice idea, of course, losing a few years here and there; but where would I stop? Where would I decide that it was enough? I never realized how much I relied on the currency of my looks until they started to fade a bit, until I started comparing myself to my younger self and the younger selves around me. I always feel ashamed to even admit that it is something that bothers me at all...since it is really so completely trivial in relation to what sort of person I am and what I do with my life. I suspect that the next decade will be one of making peace with this new physical landscape and of finding a way to define myself that brings the internal to the surface of my skin so that it can communicate who I am in ways that are still valued by those (including myself) who sometimes have trouble seeing beyond the superficial.