Aging Gracefully is Bullsh*t
My colleague Chitra Eder, an Ayurveda practitioner, recently declared: “Aging gracefully isn’t a thing.”
For some reason, that day it floored me. Have I been trying to “age gracefully?” Maybe. Do I really believe it can be done? No.
I’ve always hated the way this sounds, for one thing. It makes me think of a matronly old woman with huge diamond rings sipping tea delicately out of a teacup that is part of a fine china set. It also makes me think of something I heard my dad say when I was younger, about women he was dating (then in his early 60s): “I don’t want to go out with a woman who has let herself go.”
According to the Oxford dictionary, the word “gracefully” means “an attractive, elegant way,” or in a “respectful, dignified way.”
So can you age “gracefully?”
If anything, getting older is a messy ordeal. There is no controlling it. No matter how much you dye your hair, Botox your wrinkles, inject fillers, work out to stay strong, take herbs and supplements to bolster your skin and hair, or diet to stay thin, you will never look or feel like you did in your 20s again. And do we really want to do all that? Isn’t part of getting older actually getting to “let ourselves go?”
Hanging out in Breckenridge, CO. Photo by Ron Michael Photography
I’m very, very tired of seeing women in their 40s and 50s on screen depicted without comment like we’re supposed to look like that— zero movement in the forehead, stretched out eyes, ultra skinny (no bellies!) and with perfect style (oh, and still wearing high heels, that’s HILARIOUS). As much as body positivity may have gotten traction in the last couple decades, I still don’t see it with age/ageism much at all.
We see a man like Harrison Ford in his 80s with his thinned out gray hair, fully wrinkled face, and poochy belly and say he’s gotten “distinguished.” We see Martha Steward in her 80s on the cover of a magazine airbrushed within an inch of a recognizable image and say “She looks better than ever at 80!”
Our bodies are deteriorating. We have to accept this fact. We can and should take care of our bodies— you all know I very much believe this— but we also have to embrace the impermanence of what is here. This is part of our challenge in midlife.
Hiking in Big Bear, CA. Photo by Sara Bellotti.
So how can we shift our mindset? What do we need to do?
These are questions I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.
For me, my subversive things are this: I will go around telling people how old I am with pride. I will not, I refuse, to inject chemicals into my face (I’ll be honest, I have to practice compassion when I see women doing this to themselves and remind myself of the WHYS, all of the above). I like seeing the wrinkles on the faces of my friends. It reminds me of all the ups and downs of life.
I don’t plan to be invisible unless I want to be. And yes, I’m no longer “attractive” in the sense of the male gaze (when I do see that, it weirds me out– it’s always men much older than me that do the objectifying thing I used to get a lot when I was younger). I want to instead feel more ME, feel my own beauty that isn’t reliant on the standards set out in our youth-obsessed society. At the end of the day, the youth obsession is about our denial of death and what’s coming for all of us.
We all have that divine spark inside of us that gives us a soul-beauty, no matter what age we are. When we take care of ourselves, not to please society and not to think we will escape the body’s deterioration and death but to feel good today (which is an accumulation of what we did years ago, not just an instant gratification thing), we tap into something much deeper.
My gorgeous soul-glowing midlife ladies becoming wise crones: you have so much to offer the world by showing up in all of your mess. Remember that we have the power to shift and recreate our reality around “aging gracefully”-- how about instead, we age authentically.