Buy clothing that you feel comfortable in.
Enjoy eating delicious foods.
Celebrate that you’re alive by embracing your wrinkles and gravity’s effect on your skin.
Be delighted in your beautiful lines that smile, laugh, and love with expression.
+ + +
Years ago I took a summer off posting on instagram. When I came back, I decided no more filters on my stories. Every time I opened the app to post a story about my laundry piles, or the latest book project I had managed, or some prayer thought, I was shocked by my face. Is that really what I look like? The lines rippling out from my eye sockets, sunken and a bit browned underneath. The lips perpetually chapped. The gray hairs sprouting wildly forth. Yes, that is my actual face. Early on, I would post a story despite my compunction about revealing the aging later 30s woman that I was, had become, was becoming. I’m unrecognizable to myself.
The cultural obsession in the 80s and 90s when I was growing up was, as is now, to be thin! Thin! Thin! Thin! As I entered college, law school, early married life, the focus I heard and saw continued to be, gain no body weight, but also, no wrinkles! no lines! no signs of movement in your face! Women I knew in their mid-twenties had botox for laugh lines. Women I knew in their mid-forties had botox for the crease between their brows. Other moms I met shared anxieties over their thinning hair, stretched-marked thighs, the signs of childbirth that wouldn’t leave. The signs of (gasp) aging that would only widen and deepen.
Each little instagram story with no filter, with no makeup, just as I was became a little movement in my heart of defiance for this societal idiocy. This penchant for remaining youthful as if the crone was to be immediately dismissed and discarded. I felt it, the pressure, the desire to look . . . less old which meant less beautiful which meant less worth taking up space online. But I felt more strongly that I simply wanted to be myself. Worrying about how I was perceived by others was . . . too exhausting. And life was too full with urgent and emergent needs and issues to waste any more time worrying if I looked beautiful to other people (ON THE INTERNET!!).
+ + +
It’s easy to utter the phrases that kick off my little reflection. So succinct and so simple. “Just be satisfied,” is the underlying message. Just shed years of societal and perhaps family culture expectations to look thin and young. Just move past diet culture and injections/meds to freeze your skin and mess with your cells. If I can speak the words, you can too!
Not really.
It’s just not that simple to extricate yourself from it all.
I’m years into embracing the lines, the wrinkles, the gravitational movement on alllll the body parts. I’d still consider it to be a practice. I’m practicing loving my signs of aging. I’m practicing observing those women older than me who appear to age with delight and joy. I’m practicing finding the most gorgeous women, and guess who they are? the ones who radiate love and often are the most wrinkled!
What would this practice of loving your actual body, the one today, not the one after a treatment or diet, look like for you? Therapy, healing friendships, working through food issues, surrounding yourself with images of women aging who aren’t obsessed with youth?
I’m looking for deep satisfaction in being loving at every opportunity, especially the hard ones. I’m looking for true joy by continually placing myself in the presence of the Divine. I’m looking for affirmation of my beauty in how I speak to myself, to others, and about others. What about you?
Love and see you next week,
Nell
ps. again with the late substack! I was traveling to speak this weekend and had sick kiddos so everything was extra upside-down!
I'm always inspired by how beautifully you speak to others. I think it's a gift you've been given!
Such a good challenge, Nell!