“Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally — and sometimes maddeningly — who we are.”
— Meghan Daum
Three years ago to this very day, I walked out into the bright sunlight of a cold winter day and took this photo of myself with my phone. I clicked the vivid mode on the color section and gave it more light so it would warm up the gray in my hair. I am gray-headed with little threads of browns and blondes, just as I have been for most of my adult life, only now I am more gray than dishwater blonde. I am a gray ghost. The flesh on my body is thinning and fragile, my hair is thinning, too, and when I am ill, I do not recover like I did as a young girl. My bones ache after a long walk and I love long walks and often take them, then come home and pop an aspirin because I know I am going to hurt. But it is a privilege to grow old. To get old. To die old.
I have no selfies to post. No new ones. I am not sure I would if I had one. They are always deceptive in some way. We never want to post a bad photo, do we? I have posted some pretty weird photos on this blog.
I grew up in a society that worships youth and beauty. I suppose all cultures have their own idea of what beauty is, but whatever it is, it is always young and never old. Just look at the young—aren't they all beautiful! When you get old, everyone young looks beautiful, believe me. When women get old, they turn into ghosts very quickly. This transformation starts around fifty. You start to disappear, year by year until one day you walk down a street and no one even notices you are there. Because you are gray and fragile looking, even when you smile. The only color is the blue in the veins on your wrinkled hands. Hands never lie.
Most women will dye their hair, get a few lines stretched out around their eyes and mouths, invest in expensive creams with retinol. Even Google says young women in their thirties should use retinol. Why not? No one wants to look old. No one wants to fade away. Especially a woman. Beauty is everything, is it not?
I never really thought of myself as movie star beautiful even when I was young and beautiful. I never could define what beauty was. Most of the time, what I thought was beautiful was not always even pretty. I was an outlier to begin with, even as young as four years of age. I collected bugs and made pets of frogs and when the frogs died, I dissected them so I could see how their bodies worked. It grossed out half my friends and the other half took pictures or collected money from others to watch me do these bizarre little experiments. I watched my Daddy clean his game and skin catfish with a pair of pliers, sometimes taking notes, always with interest. I loved fishing and spending time on lakes and rivers and bayous. I stole abandoned bird nests out of my neighbors' trees. I don't think I even looked in a mirror unless forced. I became an artist, lived in books. I knew I would never dye my hair, never go to a beauty shop, though I did indulge my aunt who owned one. On several occasions, I let her wash and style my hair. Once she even colored it. The next day I went swimming in a local pool and it turned green. That's how I started the ninth grade, with green hair.
This does not make me saintly or wise. I was smart, but wisdom comes with life and making mistakes. I am no saint or role model. By fifteen, nearly sixteen, I wanted to be beautiful when I fell in love for the first time. I was so desperate that I would have sold my soul to be perfectly beautiful to gain his love. He never loved me. And I pined for more years than I care to admit for this beautiful blue eyed boy. To this day, I still have a photo of him and remember how he crushed me emotionally. After his rejection, I was cautious and selfish. That was the lesson I had learned, and it was not a good lesson. The better lesson would have been to let go of the idea that if only I had been beautiful enough, he would have loved me. I was so stupid because let's face it, youth is really wasted on the young as the old saying goes. Age and experience can only bring wisdom.
But beautiful girls were everywhere and I was awkward and bookish. Soon, I learned what power was. I can't say that being so-called beautiful and powerful pleased me. But it taught me better lessons, some even more brutal than lost love. What I really learned was that I was "fundamentally" the same girl I was when very young, you know, the girl who collected frogs and like to go fishing, the one who read books all the time, the awkward outlier. This was a privilege that I did not fully understand because so many of my friends did not know who they were at all. Some of them died not knowing. Some still live now, not knowing, and they are ghostly just like me, with their dyed hair.
At nineteen, I had a very good idea of who I was. My mother said I knew it at four years, and maybe she was right with her little joke. I was very serious then as now. I never did dye my hair or worry over my wrinkles. But I knew that others would look at my gray hair and talk and judge me. So at a very young age, I decided how to live my life the best I could without worrying over too many judgments. It cost me. It was not easy. It was full of losses. But how can we be anything more than what we truly are. To live a lie is painful and very bad psychology. But the young do not appreciate my age. Certainly not in our present culture. The old and the gray are belittled as traitors and even monsters today. It's so amusing yet disheartening to see this. Irony.
So, beauty remains. It's powerful. We worship it, we long for it. As we age, we feel the loss of it as fiercely as the loss of time. And even I must admit that how I look certainly represents a part of who I am. I often look in the mirror now and wonder at myself, what I have done, whom I have loved, what I have lost, what I desire, and yes, if death is shadowing me. I am, to a degree, this old body.
And my body is growing older, day by day.
And death is shadowing me.
And yet, I know that I am still that young girl at heart. I am not lost. I am not unhappy. I still have my mind. I still fall in love with people and places and things, even ideas. I still desire and to feel desire is everything. And age has given me privilege and wisdom and freedom, and perhaps, even opportunity.
I am not dead, yet.
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