Let's Get Old

 Ageing is, as you know, a singular obsession that we foolish living beings cannot for the life of us seem to put down. Every TikTok featuring a woman over thirty invariably has a trickle of shocked bystanders commenting on how "good" she looks "for her age" or how chopped and insane she is for thinking she still looks twenty-nine, because sixteen-year-olds are online in hideous droves and lack the foresight to know that they, too, will become this woman.

Norma, 70 years old in 2010.

Women post about letting their grey hair grow out because they're tired of bothering with root correction, and a baying mob of twenty-somethings rapidly transforming into donkeys Pinocchio-style are clattering together in the comments saying "YOU LOOK OLD YOU LOOK TOO OLD LIKE THAT". It is one of our many curses, and despite my own enviable fortitude (well...), I cannot entirely avoid the effects of the wizard's spell.

I look at my face and I see little lines and spots and so on, and I know that I am no ethereal, ghostly spectre of youth, but a normal ageing woman. Now, I've long been into neutrality. There is no moral significance attached to the way my body looks, and there is no real negative to looking my age. Still, it's impossible to exit society, so the sheer commitment the population has to caring about this does creep into me. A little parasite.

Enjoying a Guinness.

But since my grandma died this May, I sometimes think of her when this topic comes up. She was eighty-five, and frequently responded to photos of herself with a kind of horror. Ewww, she would be thinking. That's an old ass woman. And as much as it is always a shock when a person reveals the exuberant, sexy photos of their grandparent at nineteen years of age, I'm struck by just how much I think fondly of her ELDERLY face and look at photos of her OLD now that she's gone. She still had a crazed laugh and sparkling, knowing eyes, and a penchant for warm, autumnal colours. Plum purple, warm pink, dark, rich red.

Texture is not the enemy of smooth, old is not the enemy of young. 

Me, just born, not excited about it.

But this is all easy for me to say. I looked at a picture of myself from ten years ago and I found that, strangely, it looked remarkably similar to the me of today. While I know that there have been some changes in my appearance, it really is relatively subtle. So perhaps this is a cop-out and I'll soon be shuddering in fear and loathing. But on the other hand, perhaps I'll be beautiful and normal and old all at the same time, forever.

Me, 2015.

Me, 2025.

Almost everything seems to be coloured by Norma's death for me, in some way or another. Life feels changed. She would tell me, occasionally, that I was beautiful. Maybe I'll believe her.

Norma (centre, aged 11 or 12) and family, 1951.