Why I’m Romanticising Growing Old

If we are blessed enough, we will leave this life with laugh lines and wrinkles that encase our eyes. Our faces will tell stories from eras gone by, and memories will encapsulate our softening minds.

And yet, to age — to settle into our years — has been berated for millennia, but never so immensely as it has within the 21st century. Somewhere along the way, media outlets have pushed the idea that a large aspect of a woman’s desirability – her beauty – is directly connected to her youth, and to her ability to maintain it as the decades roll by. 

Pausing the clock

From the beginning of our lives, we are exposed to firming creams, wrinkle fillers, botox, facelifts and cosmetic surgeries. Beauticians speak of capitalising on your pre-wrinkle twenties by beginning our botox journeys sooner rather than later. While the suggestion is appreciated, I have to politely decline.

“Erase 10 years in 10 minutes”

“Reverse the effects of time”

I know it may be an obvious question to ask, but why are we so hell-bent on reversing the evidence that we’ve lived? Why would I want to erase the last 10 years of my life? Why would anyone?

To add salt to the wound, we are fed the idea that mystery should surround a woman’s age. I often wondered the reasoning behind this notion, are we to feel shame? And at what age should we begin tweaking the numbers? Where is the line between embracing your age and feeling disgrace?

I’ve never been able to understand the desire to pause the clock. What intrigues me is the difference in dialogue that we see unfold for men compared to women. How they differ in rhetoric. We label men as silver foxes as they grow out their greying strands and watch on as they age like fine wine, but we’re made to feel as though we need to run to our hair salons and adorn skincare aisles.

What I find exceptionally fascinating however, is how the rewind the clock campaign subconsciously aims to control one of the two guarantees of the human experience. Ageing. Why does society want women to chase the impossible? To run in such a futile race?

Perhaps, it comes down to the notion that happiness doesn’t sell – a result of capitalist greed? That my friends, might just be the most sorrowful of realities.

Restarting the clock

The truth is, we can only hope to grow old. To see the brilliance of our 30s, the magnificence of our 40s, the pure bliss of our 50s, the wisdom of our 60s and beyond — and if genetics are on your side, perhaps you’ll see the century. 

But how do we demolish a train of thought that is still being fed to us? We begin romanticising growing old. We begin seeing the beauty in the wisdom that is yet to grace us and redefine what it means to age. Because to be able to see our skin soften and wrinkles deepen is a privilege to hold.

There are so many souls who have left this Earth forever immortalised in their youth, robbed of the decades that should have held their name. Perhaps there will be a generation of women who will see the Fountain of Youth be reimagined. Remoulded and redefined, a homage to the spirit rather than the body.

With that, I leave you with a handful of hopes. That one day, when your eyes gaze upon your hands, you see the veins that sustained your heart, from which you loved. When you look to the creases that line your eyes, they transport you to memories etched with aching laughter. And when you linger over where firmness once resided, that you see skin that was lovingly kissed by the sun and embraced by those who meant it all.

READ MORE: A Letter To Her