A few Saturday mornings ago, coffee cup in hand, I spent way too much time on awfulplasticsurgery.com, a site that features photo after photo evidence of our obsession with maintaining an exaggerated youthful and “perfect” appearance. I was both fascinated and appalled by the before and after pictures of actors, politicians, socialites and musicians we all see in the media, sometimes on a daily basis. I was also a bit ashamed that I was 10 pages in before I could look away.
As I poured over page after page of god-awful images with my mouth hanging open and my head spinning I couldn’t help but feel really sad and despite being far from the ideal, somewhat grateful for my reality. Trust me, there are a number of things I would like to change about me but most of those things are a combination of internal and natural external alterations that work together for my personal evolution rather than physical ones that reflect a youth no longer meant to be mine. What made me sad about the pictures on that site, especially pictures of women who fall into my age group, is that they lacked the grace of aging.
Aging has been an issue since before Cleopatra took all those milk baths and set about making bees wax potions to keep her skin youthful but with the strides continually being made in both the medical and pharmaceutical industries the idea of and ability to maintain a youthful appearance are more and more today’s reality. Unfortunately much of that reality in person is not as pleasant as we anticipate from the photo shopped images we are bombarded with on a daily basis. These images of women in their 40s, 50 and 60s with breasts that defy gravity and stares that look out at us from behind the masks of a 20-30something year old face are telling us not to age and life can only be worth experiencing if it is being done from behind a youthful appearance. They are also skewing what aging beauty is and distracting us from the natural process of time so that the arrival of wrinkles, age spots, thinning hair and changing bodies, once badges of a life lived, are both unacceptable and unexpected.
I can admit that I mind aging and that I will fight tooth and nail to age as gracefully as I can while still owning every line and wrinkle this wonderful experience called life has and will bestow upon me. Yes, if I had a choice I would remain as I looked in my mid 20s while continuing to gather all the experience as I go along, but that’s not going to happen. So, like most women, I will struggle with acceptance and try not to force back time in order to become a mere jarring facsimile of who I was in my youth. Luckily I come from good genes and I only have to look around at the women in my family to see that the path ahead isn’t so bad. It is my head that must wrap itself around the changes coming.
I know I am not alone in this struggle. Even the most confident secure women, women who flaunt masters degrees, speak 6 languages, own businesses and raise families with one hand while they do their life work with the other, get caught off guard by changes that occur with time and the message that we are receiving that they shouldn’t be accepted let alone embraced. Earth mother movements, which accept the loving and powerful crone image, itself is a stereo type of ideal aging, aside, the role models for women balancing and being the best they can be through healthy and natural diet, exercise and beauty routines that don’t require scalpels and injections or photo shop are far and few between. It is only with diligence that the reality of our true individual beauty can be held in focus and allowed to shine in its own manner so that we are as beautiful as we feel. And it is we that must demand that she reveal herself as she is and it is we that must find empathy when she does and not ridicule that which we need to see in order to look in our own mirrors and accept the reality of the women we are becoming.
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