Trading for Twilight

Finding better eyes to look at age.

I’ve talked before on this blog about the eyes we use, and how we as people—particularly women—tend to look at ourselves through the broken eyes that society has prescribed us. Critical, degrading, demanding, uncharitable. We fail to see our own beauty, and nowhere is this more rampant and evident than as we age. I’ve watched the women around me gain in years, experience, wisdom, grace, knowledge, and empathy, with no less outward beauty in my eyes, and yet hear them decry how their age has lessened them.

It’s not surprising, given the society we inhabit, the one we’ve constructed and allowed to persist. I hear men decrying women as old, ugly, and “used up” far younger and far lovelier than women begin to decry themselves. I’ve been hit on by men my father’s and grandfather’s ages more times than I care to count. When I was 26, a man I was dating, eight years my senior, told me that now was the most beautiful I would ever be, that I was already deteriorating in desirability, that all men, regardless of age, naturally desire 25-year-old women, and every year I would grow more distasteful, so it was important to settle down now. According to Friends (2004), How I Met Your Mother (2014), and countless other sitcoms, comedies, movies, podcasts, conversations, etc., thirty is the beginning of the end of your life and the absolute most disgusting thing a woman could be. Two days ago, a woman had the audacity to include an image of herself on the internet when posting a question, and an old man—who could clearly be the age of her father—with his children in his cover photo, commented unsolicited and unrelated about how hot he found her. When I called him out on it (because we build the world we want to see, folks), he proceeded to call me a series of slurs and insane “insults” that had nothing to do with me correcting him on being inappropriate with a young woman, concentrated chiefly on me not being attractive to him (ah, the abject horror).

Hang in there, Dennis. Go to therapy. You’ll be okay, buddy.

I often joke with my friends about how I look forward to developing into a swamp witch. Occasionally, I mix it up with different flavors—forest witch, bog hag, sweet, plump old crone with mysterious knowledge, creepy neighborhood witch. These are intentionally meant to paint a picture of a all meant to communicate a dream, my aspiration, to be proud of my old age, to revel in it, to take it wholeheartedly in both my hands and shake out of it all the joy it has to offer. I’d like to look at my wrinkled, sagging, possibly plump face and see not the deterioration of a better person who once was, but the culmination of all I have been, all I have done, all I have worked and striven to learn and be.

I want to say: I enjoyed these laughter lines. I earned these furrows of grief and rage. I ate well and often. I went out beneath the sun. I gave to life all the energy I have to hold, and siphoned it even from my hair, leaving me moon-silver. I don’t decry or fear the twilight. Aching pains and cold and all, I will not bemoan if I am soft to hug, and warm to hear. Or perhaps I will be hard and fierce beneath my wrinkles—perhaps, after all this time, I will not have learned to be soft yet, perhaps that is not what the world will need. And I will be steel under downy, a contradiction of terms, frail and indestructible. I will wear bright colors and dye my white hair blue and see if it holds. I hope I will take my aged face in my hands and cradle it like a treasure and say, “How much you have lived, how long you have fought, how good you have become in all your striving. How beautiful, how beautiful you are.”

“I’d like to look at my wrinkled, sagging, possibly plump face and see not the deterioration of a better person who once was, but the culmination of all I have been, all I have done, all I have worked and striven to learn and be.”

- Shigé Clark

God above, I wish we did not ascribe goodness to youth.

Of course it isn’t wrong to grieve—to grieve the easy movement of our limbs through the warm air and over rocks and wild paths, to grieve the sunlight in our veins that made it so easy to rise, and run, and push. Loss is loss, but time has never stolen from me—only traded. It has never taken without offering something in return. And I would not trade my wisdom for easy steps. I would not trade back my friendships for strength. I would not give back all that time has given for the foolishness of my youth. I strive—I intend—to live in such a way that I will still say that at eighty, as much as thirty-four. By all that is good, you could not have all I have learned in exchange for rosy cheeks and tight skin.

Perhaps I speak in ignorance. I’ve never been over average in looks or physical ability, so perhaps I have, and have had, less to lose, and thus it hurts me less to lose it. But I’ve fully felt the joy of strength, and I too have had eyes look on me and call me beautiful, brand me worthy of longing, and I know that a time will come—has to an extent already come, and will continue—where that is no longer the case. Where eyes do and will glaze over me, pass me by, call me uninteresting and unimportant. But dear lord, find better eyes! What uninteresting, uninspired viewers, what stupid, shallow children in their sight! Get better eyes, watch better shows, read better books, live better lives. Are these who we want to impress and allure anyway?

When I look at my grandmother’s smile, and my heart swells with joy and wonder, and I say, “You’re beautiful,” there aren’t addendums. I don’t mean—as the older women in my life seem to hear—“You’re beautiful. But like, inside, you know? Internally. Not physically of course. For your age.” I mean it completely. I look at her and I see beauty. It’s not hard, and it’s not a sweet lie, because it. Is. There. Youth is beautiful, but so is age, internal and external. I’m tired of pretending—and convincing ourselves, and allowing ourselves to be convinced—that it’s not.