You and I Are Too Old to Loathe Ourselves for Getting Old
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
Shame on us for aging? NO. Shame on us for hating ourselves for aging
Dear Reader: this is a long piece which tags several other excellent writers and other terrific people. This is a big topic. Perhaps best taken in bites.
With every single bit of respect for the deeply genuine feelings that
speaks to in her short piece here, I need to respond.Debbie speaks to how we sometimes feel about ourselves as we age. What caught my eye was her comment about loathing what she sees in the mirror.
This was deeply painful to read for several reasons. First, its bitter truth, that so very many of us feel precisely this way. It feels personal. I’ve felt loathing for this body my entire life, until recently.
I’ll bet many of us can relate, male and female and all pronouns alike.
Second, that there is absolutely no call to be so judgmental. The body reflects to us how we feel about it, the care we’ve taken of it, the commitment we’ve made to self-care.
Let’s clarify what I mean by self-care. Not whether or not we age like Helen Mirren or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but whether or not our bodies are healthy and strong and we are functionally fit. About 75% of how well we age is up to us, the rest is a mix of chance, luck, genetics, and whether or not the Universe is having a good day.
This is a terribly important dileneation.
Mother Nature is going to sculpt us as we age, move weight around, draw lines in our faces and wrinkle our bodies. Those are proof-positive of life. Barring serious surgery, if we are fortunate to make it that far, we get to have those hallmarks of a life lived in full.
When we fight the visual signs of aging and loathe ourselves for the one thing we cannot stop, not only do we hand over all our power to those who make money off our insecurities, but we hand over our lives with all the time we spend agonizing over our looks.
We conflate our bodies with ourselves. We are so deeply identified with the body that when it ages, as it must, we take it personally as though, as Weil challenges, somehow we’ve failed life because we have aged.
That sure sells a lot of creams, potions, lotions, procedures and worse. None of that changes the inevitable. So the true act of courage, as I deal daily with various proof that I am no longer fifty or sixty or even seventy, is to thoroughly enjoy what I am watching.
My body has become a source of comedy, in fact. If ever there were a way to strike back at the lie that to age is to fail, it’s to make fun of the vehicle as the wheels slowly wobble and sometimes go flat entirely.
You learn to carry Emotional WD-40 and Funny Bone Super Glue as various body parts fall off and roll down the hill, where it takes longer to retrieve the damned thing and even longer still to glue it back on.
At the gym yesterday, where I’ve been absent for three weeks due to the demands of a puppy, a rafting adventure and a pulled oblique painful enough to ground me, I took stock of my aging body.
These are the exercises I spend time doing these days. Balance, clumsy as it looks, so that I can play.
Because of the rough demands of the last several years full of difficult, painful surgeries, long recovery times and a lot of physical changes, I have lost the taut skin I once had. There are wrinkles on my elbows and sagging skin on my biceps. When I do yoga moves, I find that skin folds show up on my legs.
I’ve chosen to be curious about these things, instead of insulted.
My mother’s body was covered with cellulite from head to toe from sixty on. I inherited those genes, so when I gain a few pounds, guess what? Barring liposuction (which doesn’t really get rid of it anyway) I shrug and move on.
But here’s the real message. Beneath that skin I have fifty-one years’ worth of damned hard muscle. I’ve been a gym rat for that long. I’ve got endurance and good lungs and a good strong heart. I just got in from an hour’s hike with my neighbor, up some steep hills with our dogs. He’s barely half my age and it was easy to keep up.
You can’t bottle that. That ability to keep going, to push through the inevitable very rough times that aging places in our path, the stark reality that in great old age there will be limitations, that is what is worth having.
What little beauty I ever had has passed into memory. I have photos. Every so often I come across one, and the memory pleases me. I don’t miss what I had. Right now I have an aging face, wrinkles, and a road map which speaks to all the adventures I’ve lived these past twelve years.
I beat the drum a great deal about exercise and nutrition for a simple reason. When we make that commitment to ourselves, the gift of health will support us through what’s coming. What’s coming could be anything: a terrible diagnosis, a rough surgery, the loss of friends. Age brings great challenges.
A good health baseline gives us options. It gives us the stamina to cope with life’s vicissitudes, which increase as we age.
When I write about exercise and nutrition, it is far less about the body beautiful. Positive changes can have stunning results for some people (see this), but those aren’t typical. It’s about having options. The option to travel. The option to go for a hike. The option to learn ballroom dancing.
Options make life worth living.
Aging is going to take a great deal from us. Life, for one, eventually. Perhaps it’s a gift we just don’t understand at the time. When we stop obsessing about our waistlines and what gravity has done to our breasts or the fact that we’re male and Nature decided to give us breasts (really?) we can start focusing on what really matters: our health, our hearts, our friendships, quality of life issues which so often get set aside when we endlessly chase youth and beauty.
My mother, in her eighties, starved herself by eating nothing but saltines to try to lose weight for a boyfriend. She compromised her brain to the point where her facility found her wandering in the snow, completely disoriented.
To Debbie’s point, she loathed her body.
Mom wanted to be skinny.
She honestly believed that if she lost weight, her “boyfriend” would marry her.
It nearly killed her off. Happily she recovered, her diet improved. She lived another ten years with her full mental capacity. The object of her affection didn’t marry her, but they did spend every Friday on the phone reading dirty limericks to each other until the night she died.
Had my mother taken better care of her health, had she walked or hiked or biked or done something to maintain her mobility, the boyfriend would indeed have married her. However, Mom had stopped exercising years before. She was attached to an oxygen machine and required observation.
The boyfriend confided in me that he wanted to marry “some old broad who could hike with me.” He lived in the California hills, and he hiked daily. He was a mindful eater. He wasn’t in the market to be a caretaker. As much as he loved my mother, and he sincerely did, Ed wanted an active old lady.
He didn’t give a damn about the wrinkles. He had plenty of his own.
That story speaks precisely to my point.
My mother also loathed her face, especially her nose. When Mom was in her late 70s, Dad paid for her to get a face lift which changed her nose. A few years later, not only was she still complaining about her nose. She’d forgotten she’d had a facelift.
All that pain and cost for vanity, and nothing changed. The nose wasn’t the issue at all. Therein lies the challenge for us as we age. It’s not so much our appearance, it’s something deep inside us which so badly wants our attention, our love, our acknowledgement. Our fundamental human value, irrespective of our bloody looks, is what is worth attending.
This gorgeous essay by
is a tone poem about death, life, and all in-between. Dr. Connop asks important questions in this lovely piece:
I particularly love this paragraph where she is discussing birthdays:
Perhaps it’s the reminders of impermanence, mortality and the forwards march of time. Perhaps it’s the sense of reflection, life review, and analysis of my journey. The sense of not being where I thought I might be, of life not fulfilling the promises I’d been sold. The sense of lost dreams, lost youth, pangs of regret, and wonderings about paths untaken. Perhaps too it’s the reminder that everything that’s born must one day die. Every beginning has an ending. Every cycle must complete itself. (author bolded)
Those moments when we face such questions, I believe powerfully that those are the precise moments when we also get to ask, but what’s still available? What options do I still have? In fact, many.
Even if you and I are disabled, even if we have a debilitating illness or some other limitation, our spirit is malleable, and we can change our mind. That is the greatest adventure of all.
When we set aside those things which lose their importance as we enter our later years, we make plenty of space for what suddenly becomes available. I still love a beautiful blouse, I still love a nice pair of jeans, I still love a big chunky turquoise necklace.
In other words, I have plenty of Iris Apfel in me.
I used to write about fashion and know it well: I have my mother’s sense of style. After many years of having to keep all my nice things in storage, finally I’m taking them out and wearing them.
On a wrinkled, changing body. On a strong, healthy, wrinkled, changing body.
Let’s discuss healthy, can we? It’s all relative.
Like plenty of us I deal with things like kidney stones and other irritating health issues that I have to manage. But overall- and this is my point- overall I am functionally fit and then some. That is what allows me to dance with the devil what brung me, as my friend
likes to say.We all have our issues. Maybe it’s arthritis (got that too) or a bum hip (yep) or a partner who doesn’t like to eat well or exercise (been there). Recognizing that our aging body is going to give us various physical ailments to manage, the way I see it, the healthier we are, the less those issues sideline us from life.
, a reader of mine from Medium and who lives in Lakeland, Florida, right next to my home town, is in his seventies and is a serious gym rat. That commitment has helped him weather horrific cancer diagnoses and more than one life-threatening illness. He’s still punching weights and living his best life. He goes down and comes right back up fighting.
This coming Saturday I will be driving to Lewiston, Idaho for another rafting trip, this time on the Salmon River. I have options.
My reconstructed feet still hurt. They are still unpredictable. But I’m going anyway.
I have dietary considerations. I’m going anyway.
I will be in the sun (with sunscreen). I will squint, smile, laugh, shout, and further deepen the wrinkles of my face. I’m going anyway.
I may bang a knee, get a few bruises, come back covered in band-aids. I’m going anyway.
What I choose isn’t what most would choose. This is the option I want for as long as I can have it.
What I want for you is to be able to choose something wonderful which suits your dreams.
One more story.
A few years back,
, who had been following me on Medium, wrote that she was “tired of my banging the drum about fitness.”I was waiting for her to kick me to the kerb.
Instead, almost sheepishly yet with great pride, she announced that for the first time in her life, she was going to the gym. She’d hired a trainer and she was…wait for it…..
Loving it.
Over the course of years, she has lost weight, gained strength, gained a little back, lost it as do we all, but she has stayed committed. Why is this relevant? Penny was 74 when she started. A retired geologist and a spinner, she sat too much, was 85 lbs too heavy (precisely the amount I lost back in 1988).
She chose life. Now she has options.
Today, she is still at the gym, still working out. She does NOT look like Helen Mirren. She is, however, a stronger, more confident, more balanced, happier version of her previous self. She can hike stairs at a stadium to watch her grandkids, play with the dogs, do things that just a few years back seemed impossible.
She told me she is going to finish strong.
THIS.
I love Penny’s story because it underscores how we can start at any point. When we begin, the Universe aligns with us.
Self-care isn’t about twisting ourselves into pretzels and buying all kinds of pricey crap which is supposed to make us feel more relaxed as it empties our bank accounts.
Self-care is basic. Loving and respecting our aging bodies enough to feed them well, move them much, surround ourselves with good friends, give ourselves a reason to lace up every day (Penny wants to become a trainer!) and be willing to BE in life.
Debbie and Dr. Connop brought up the feelings that most if not all of us experience about life, loss, regrets, sadness, and the way society causes us to judge our looks as those looks succumb to gravity. These are terribly important moments, as long as we don’t choose to wallow.
I acknowledge, value and respect all that, for I have felt them too. My way of dealing with it was to leap into adventure travel. My face and body bear the scars, the wrinkles, the tales of high winds, high peaks, fast horses, high deserts, brutal storms, a thousand laughs in the face of danger and my fair share of near-death experiences, all after sixty.
I love my face. By God I love my aging face.
I’m willing to live this way so that I have the agency to invite people to put down the remote and go remote—-on their terms, in their way, whatever that means for them.
Youth, like Elvis, has left the building. Thanks for the memories and no thanks for all the angst.
The Goddess has entered my soul. She has other, much more important work for me to do. I have no time to waste worrying about the length of my lashes or the weight of my body.
My work is to lift the weight off my soul so that I can serve others. My work is to move people’s lives, to inspire them to give themselves options.
I didn’t truly begin this work until I was past sixty. That is, I believe, the gift of the Goddess, for each and every one of us, as we age.
Let’s play.
Thanks for hanging with me on this long journey. I hope you got value and I hope the other writers listed her gave you good food for thought. If so, please consider
If you know someone who is struggling with aging, as do we all, please also consider
Either way, please find a way to be fully in life.
Great article! Only disagreement is your statement what you have lost your beauty-I’d say you are more beautiful than ever, perhaps not by some standards but you are fit, you have great hair, lovely bone structure and wonderful teeth(yep know dentures but still look good). It’s a different beauty than what we had at 20,30,40…but still beautiful.
That part you wrote about your mother made me sad. Reminded me of my grandmother who drank Slimfast shakes in her 80s because she was self-conscious of her figure. If ANYONE had earned a right to look however she pleased, it was her. She raised 6 kids on her own.