I can’t stop looking at my wrists

Thoughts on vanity and aging "gracefully"

The other day, while I was getting ready to go to the office, I slipped on my watch and paused. My eyes focused in on a criss-cross of fine lines that wrapped around my left wrist like a delicate chain bracelet. Had they been there last week? I rubbed at them, wondering if, like the lines on my chest that have started to become a more regular occurrence in the morning, they would go away with some blood flow and a little bit of water. But as I write this newsletter, I can still see them there , growing ever-more permanent the more that I type and hold my hand in a certain way across my keyboard — a sign that my body is settling into itself in a way it hadn’t in my 20s, filling out in certain areas and puckering in others.

I really, really, really don’t want to be weird about aging. I never did. When I was a beauty editor in my early 20s, I’d admire older women who were able to age gracefully — who would let their gray hair come in without ever paying huge amounts of money to cover it up. The ones who would forgo makeup and lounge around in blousy, flowing, incredibly chic linen pants and (presumably, admittedly) not worry about what their bodies looked like. But now that I am here, at the inflection point where I can see the evidence of aging starting to set in, I am not as chill about it as I thought that I would be. In fact, I’m ashamed to admit that I am freaking out about it.

The fact that all of this is happening concurrently to the lead-up to my wedding feels like a particularly brutal bit of symmetry.

Over the past few weeks, I have spent hundreds of dollars on the way that I look in order to prepare for the spectacle of parading down an aisle in a white dress. (I love that we all still cosplay as virgin brides, don’t you?) There was the $337.50 I spent on fake, clip-in extensions to add volume to my hair that once was so thick and unruly I’d straighten it into submission. There was the $135 I spent on a dye job to match said extensions and cover up the wiry grays that have started cropping up along my part. I’m paying $60 (plus tip!) for monthly facials so that my still-acne-prone-even-in-my-mid-30s skin will look glowing and gorgeous for my nuptials. I am even getting a spray tan, like I am an 18-year-old going to prom, because I saw the way I looked in that white dress during a recent fitting and thought absolutely not.

None of this is necessary. I am aware of that, believe me. Yet the compulsion to do it feels so beyond me, like something I am just being dragged along to do. So why? What is it that’s causing me to Google things like “intermittent fasting for weight loss” and budgeting hundreds of dollars for silicone pads to wear while I sleep to avoid those chest wrinkles?

Part of me is embarrassed by the hugeness of the wedding Ben and I are having, especially given the fact that we are in our late- and mid-30s, respectively. (Although I think men of *any* age can get married in a big, stinkin’ wedding, honestly.) It feels like something reserved for younger, pluckier, bouncier women — which is why, I think, the siren call of a chic, city hall elopement has been louder than ever in the months leading up to our wedding.

But another part of me wants the spectacle, because, in a lot of ways, I am deeply aware of the fact that this might be the last event where the spotlight is on me — where I can be the center of attention, and put a ton of time and money into the way I look. The older I get, the more I am aware that the gaze will shift off of me and onto younger women — including the daughters I hope to be lucky enough to have.

In the show Better Things, written by Pamela Adlon, the main character Sam Fox (played by Adlon) talks at length about how, as a mother to three teenage girls, she’s witnessed that gaze shifting. I’m going to drop a big ‘ol chunk of one particular soliloquy she gives at the end of season four here:

To be a woman in the world is to be built up and then let down. They cut us or sell us or marry us off. You’re primed and you’re prepped and abused and adored and harassed and worshipped. And then it all stops. All of it. We even age out of the bad things, like being fetishized, or diminished, or talked down to. It’s even worse. You’re invisible, and you’re literally left hunched over and alone with Santa’s belly — and a beard to boot — walking around, shrinking, thinking, ‘what just happened?”

You retreat. You’re ashamed, you’re unseen. No one has prepared you for it and no one ever tells women this is going to happen. Our prize in the goody bag after everyone has had their fill of us is shingles, thin bones, whiskers, and bunions.

You’re not viable. But if you have daughters, you feel it even more because the world wants them now.

I never considered myself a vain person, but I’m desperately afraid of this. It doesn’t matter that I am marrying someone who finds me beautiful, who tells me all the time, who loves me as intensely when I am a bloating, sick, rumpled mess as when I am polished, and fuckable, and sweet-smelling. So much of my life was spent in pursuit of outward attention because that is where I was made to believe my worth sprang from. It’s hard to be in the lead-up to an event that is the culmination of that pursuit, the ceremonial completion of the “whore” side of my life before I downshift into “Madonna” before squeezing out a few kids and being ignored completely by society. And it’s all happening while my hair is graying, my tits are sagging, my thighs are puckering, and my wrists are wrinkling.

It’s probably why, when people ask me how I’m feeling now that the wedding is a mere three months away, my response is usually “tired” or “I’m ready for it to be over.” I don’t want the pressure anymore. I don’t want to think or worry about my body, or my face, or my hair anymore. I am scared of the gaze shifting, sure, but in some ways I also think it will be some kind of relief to no longer have those expectations placed on myself — to no longer feel like an assembly of parts to be admired or prodded or judged by. To let the gray hair grow in, to let my stomach be soft, to welcome the fine lines around my eyes. To realize what a privilege it is to grow old.

I’m not there quite yet, but that sense of relief is my new north star. Talk to me after June 28. Let’s see if I’ve gotten any closer to that.