A Great Leveler
I recently turned 65. Aging has seemed a very strange process for me, as I imagine it does for most people. Common to all of us who get this far, I would guess, is this: aging is like dying in that, although we understand cognitively that it happens to everyone who lives long enough and that we ourselves are therefore subject to it, our innermost selves believe we’re exempt until its already happening, when its processes and effects start piling up.
When I was younger, I felt absurdly lucky to have escaped the fate of so many of my sisters, whose bodies embarrassed them and kept the billion-dollar women’s-improvement industry titans in business. Bras that lift and separate? Did anyone really need that? (Turns out the answer is yes. If need is the right word.) How fortunate I was, I thought, that the barrage of ads targeted women other than me. I was mostly aware that very little of my own doing was involved (thanks, Mom and Dad, for the reasonably good genes), and I was appropriately grateful, but I was also more than a little arrogant.
Well, I’ve been busily trimming my sails for awhile now. Oddly, It hadn’t registered in my youth that what separated my physical state from that of my importunate sisters was primarily that they weren’t my sisters but my aunts. And while I still don’t contribute much to the cosmetics/weight loss/skin rejuvenation industrial complex, there are doubtlessly some folks who think I should.
In this culture, especially for those of us who are women, our physical presentations determine an inordinate measure of our self-confidence and even self-respect. That’s unfortunate, and unfair, and yet there it is. Aging began to take its long-arcing toll on me, and I felt less than. The small prettinesses that I had taken for granted since late adolescence began to shift so gradually that at first I wasn’t quite aware of them. But I’m undeniably showing the wear and tear. My boat was always going to get leaky and splinter, unless it sunk first. And at times, it did feel like sinking.
But over time I’ve learned to seek my self-confidence and self-respect elsewhere. I’ve discovered, in fact, that the sources I’m finding have more intrinsic value than my appearance ever did. I know enough now to keep seeking. Extrapolating from experience so far, I know that, over the next years or decades, I will undergo the erosion and debility I see in most of my elders now, provided I live as long. While I don’t yet know the particulars, at least this time the process won’t surprise me (much). And if I later lose some of the qualities that make me feel worthwhile now, I’ll likely be able to find still others.
Decades ago, I told my dad that when I die, I want to be the healthiest corpse on the mortician’s table. I’m already destined to miss that goal, as I’ve gotten a bit banged up since then (and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity), and I’m likely to accumulate more damage before it’s over. But I have other goals now. And however my life changes as I go along, it’s okay. It’s a gas, just getting to be here.