May I Grow Old?
Perspectives on aging physically and mentally, as shaped by my grandmothers and Instagram.
My mom’s mom was named Mary, and she was the sun. Her life was filled with immense hardships, many of which I will die never knowing about, and yet she had an insatiable appetite for joy. Her smile took up half her face, and it did often. She would swim with you in the deep end, she would sew your Halloween costume from scratch, and she would ride the mechanical bull at the honky tonk bar. She loved, and she was kind and generous.
She was my grandmother. When we think of grandmothers, we have a stereotypical understanding of what that means, what that looks like. It’s silver hair, maybe glasses. A softer body, maybe a slow loss of mobility. Sensible shoes, florals, muted colors, pet cats. These are things that have never been explicitly imposed on any older women, but it is a common enough endpoint that these are all things we associate with grandmothers and senior women.
My grandma wore her hair in a graying pixie in her early fifties, and then grew it back out to shoulder length and dyed it bottle blonde in her late fifties. She wore bootcut jeans and halter tops when going out with her sister. She danced every chance she could, often grabbing my hands and waving me around the kitchen, even as I grew more stiff and embarrassed of myself as a teenager. She was never, ever too cool to hit the bee’s knees. She was a young grandma in literal age, but more importantly she was always youthful in spirit, limber in her disposition in a way that I rarely saw in my other grandparents or other older people I knew.
What does it mean to stay young at heart? That you’re only as old as you feel? Must we look young to feel young? These questions have been rattling around in my mind as I grow older.
One thing that never once crossed my mind as a child or even now as an adult, is what my grandma thought about her own appearance. She played tag with us without mentioning the size of her body. She peered into the mirror on her dining room wall with us without pointing out her deepening wrinkles. She never commented on her body, her face, or the changes both naturally went through in the 14 years I knew and loved her. It’s only in hindsight that I’m able to appreciate this gift. You never realize the absence of an issue in your own life until you’re miles down the line and hear about the ramifications for others who grew up differently.
That doesn’t mean I’m immune to other messaging.
I had a bit of a breakdown last year. Not one that completely stops you from everyday functioning, but one that plagues your internal monologue, one that brings your trivialities and anxieties with you into the grocery store and the DMV.
In a nutshell, I fell victim (as I do more than I care to admit) to the pressures of beauty and self-maintenance that have reached an asinine crescendo thanks to the ubiquity of Instagram Face, as our patron saint Jia Tolentino so intelligently coined. In other words, I thought I needed Botox. Really, sincerely, deeply, truly — I thought I, a 24 year old who is relatively healthy and takes care of her skin, needed to freeze and smooth the nonexistent lines in my face.
It was genuinely distressing to me! Those who are much more mentally healthy than I am must be confused, but if you too suffer from the damning difficulty of hearing from your inner self as a young adult, you might understand. I was seeing innumerable videos from influencers that I followed that were around my same age getting “baby Botox,” “preventative Botox,” “proactive Botox.” We’re talking 20 to 25 year old women who were trying to stop aging before a first sign could even appear. My For You page was peppered with these videos for months. Clearly there was something I was missing here. I was also a young adult who cared about getting things right. I wore sunscreen and reapplied doggedly! I ate my vegetables and drank my copious amounts of water! Was getting Botox the “right thing” to do?
My brain couldn’t shake the black and white thinking of it; it often struggles to. Was it my responsibility to consider Botox as a genuine measure of self-maintenance? Was this the guiding hand of the patriarchy? (I mean it is, but was it something I wanted to do both in light of and in spite of that, akin to how I still shave my legs). Would I fall behind if I didn’t try this out? God forbid I miss any opportunity to optimize. Would I regret it if I didn’t get Botox? Would I see other women my age that got Botox and be happy I didn’t?
I ruminated like I hadn’t in a long time. I examined myself in the mirror. I smiled and I frowned, testing to see folds lines the expressions created in my skin. I relaxed my face and inched closer, eyes darting to see what lines remained. A line high on my forehead, smile lines forming like angle brackets around my mouth. Did my nose always scrunch up like that in between my eyebrows?
I pondered what others thought of me when I passed strangers in public. I wondered how old I looked to the children I coached at the pool (I’ve heard everything from 13 to 45). If I fixated on how I appeared to others, maybe I could stop myself from turning a corner without realizing it. My brain was a cesspool of self-absorbed musings, all tied to my age, appearance and the perceived value of the two.
If you were in a group chat with me during this period, I apologize, because I know I earnestly asked you if all of our peers were getting Botox and if you would too. Everyone smartly brushed me off, inquiring who I thought “all of our peers” were, because they certainly didn’t know anyone in real life getting Botox. I snapped back to reality with that one point towards lived reality.
I realized the internet pictures that seemed to completely ensnare me were of strangers, people who I allowed to inform my ideas of what everyday life should look like simply because they make interesting or aspirational short form videos. I allowed them to dictate my conception of what I should look like, probably with the end goal of remaining as Instagram perfect as I could for as long as I could. I realized I didn’t want the people in my little pocket computer to influence how I felt about myself.
Despite feeling at home in myself and my body more than I ever have before, it almost feels futile to definitively draw a line in the facial injection sand — it’s easy to declare my allegiance when I’m currently the most youthful I will ever be again. I have no clue what I will feel and want decades down the road. I’m open to the possibilities and trust I can meet my future self with whatever compassion she needs.
However I also think it means something to take an ethical stand for my values and my desire to experience every stage of life fully, without kicking against the natural pull of time. I want to look older than my children, my future daughter who will be a child and teenager when I am middle aged, and middle aged herself when I am a senior. One day I want to be a grandmother who is remembered for her spirit and generosity, a grandmother whose personal habits and actions are so innocuously devoid of beauty culture’s toxins that they never draw a speck of attention from my grandchildren.
Maybe this is a false comparison — maybe my grandma Mary would have been interested in Botox if she were alive today and could afford it. Maybe! My heart says otherwise. I continue to get older as my grandma stays trapped in amber, forevermore the 64 year old she was when she died.
And things are only going to get weirder from here, folks. In recent months my Instagram Discover page has evolved from videos of strangers getting Botox to photo carousels of plastic surgeons parading their abilities to seamlessly perform full facelifts. Demi Moore has won a Golden Globe and will probably get the Oscar for her role in a film that explores the bodily and psychological horror of aging amidst modern Western beauty standards. This is all while being 62 and looking 15 years younger herself in that classic Hollywood way that points to her own relationship to the proverbial Substance. And last season’s female Love Island UK contestants were pilloried for adhering too strictly to their regimen of various fillers and injectables.
You can’t win. We know this. So I think the least we can do is accept our part in propping up a culture that benefits no one, and choose to act in accordance with our values. The journalist Jessica Defino’s newsletter The Review of Beauty covers this topic extensively. Beauty culture is a monolith that we are subjected to, but beauty culture is also something that we actively shape and participate in through our individual actions. If you’re someone who’s ever stressed the importance of voting or making more environmentally conscious choices, I feel like the logic of the importance of every individual will resonate with you.
I want to live a life that is as at peace with aging as possible, because I know our appearance isn’t even the half of it. We will continue to lose loved ones and friends throughout our lives. Our climate will keep changing. Our physical capabilities will decline over time. Aging is a privilege and an honor and a mindfuck and an acceptance. This is life. We are but mortals. But what do I know? I’m still in the first quarter. I know I don’t have all the answers, because I’m reminded in quiet and devastating ways when I least expect it.
My other grandmother is named Lea. She is a woman fiercely protective of her intelligence and her pride. She has outlasted all of my other grandparents; next month she will turn 82 years old.
One day a few years ago we spent a Sunday afternoon together in her townhouse, like we have thousands of times, chatting in her living room when I was fresh out of college.
At one point in our conversation she told me, unbidden, “I feel younger than I am. I still see my 21 year old self when I look in the mirror. When I see myself in pictures, I wonder who that 80 year old woman is, and then I realize it’s me. I haven’t looked like how I feel inside in a long time.”
A special thank you to my sister for helping to text me the old family photos <333
Beautiful! I deeply resonated with, "When I see myself in pictures, I wonder who that 80 year old woman is, and then I realize it’s me. I haven’t looked like how I feel inside in a long time.” Like you said growing older is a privilege, I cannot wait to continue to live life resonating with the person inside rather than the person I see in the mirror.
This is so well written Megan!