Holy Shit

I've been trying to write about aging. Specifically the way looking older brings not only sadness, shame, and embarrassment, but a profound humiliation, the likes of which I haven't experienced since I had severe acne for years as a young adult, or when many years ago I made a decision to stop the disordered yo-yo dieting that made my life chaotic and my body too thin, and as a result, I became seriously obese.

Oh my~ I need to pause right here. Because I have never put those things together before now, and suddenly I can hardly breathe for the urge to cry. Sometimes writing literally takes my breath away, the way things can be uncovered, discovered, delivered, the way the veil can all of a sudden part, like a curtain in a strong breeze, the puzzle pieces floating perfectly into place. 

I just need a minute to regroup; to bow to the universe; to be with the understanding that is dawning, the deep compassion that has so unexpectedly drifted my way. Seeing these times not just as part of my story, but as painful years of shame, of marginalization, and isolation.

It started over two years ago the morning after I'd had cataract surgery in both eyes. As I removed the post surgery protective goggles and looked at myself in the mirror for the first time, my vision clearer than it had been in a very long time, I was shocked at the face that stared back at me. I leaned in, getting a closer look, then ran my fingertips over the lines and wrinkles and splotches, none of them visible to me before surgery. I broke down and wept uncontrollably.

It is a wall of shame that stops the writing process each time I've tried to write about the full-on aging "crisis" my new vision brought to me. Never mind the incredible upsides; that the world was once again brilliant and colorful, that I could once again drive safely, and I could read maps and my phone and best of all, precious books and, take decent photos again. Not to mention the narcissistic audacity to whine about such trivial things when facing such enormous crises in our country and around the world. When so many people in so many places are suffering, my great fortune was not lost on me even as tears ran in fat rivers down my cheeks. I'm alive! I'm well. I have people I love dearly. I have the freedom and the luxury to write and to make art. I have health insurance, and was able to get surgery for the condition that is the number one cause of blindness in developing nations. The number one cause of blindness~

Shaming myself for feeling ashamed.  

A few days after surgery I was looking for a parking space at the pharmacy and had to stop and wait for a woman who was limping slowly across the road. I park my car and when I walk toward the building, there was the same woman, not far from where I had seen her, leaning against the back of a car. Our eyes meet and I smile and she smiles back at me and it was the most radiant thing. Like the sun suddenly coming from behind a cloud, like my vision after my surgery, her entire being was lit. I could see, as I got closer to her, deep lines and fissures etched into her beautiful face. It wasn't, I realized profoundly, that she was beautiful in spite of the wrinkles, they were truly part of her pure and genuine loveliness; her luminous being.

That meeting shocked and inspired me. I reread parts of Naomi's Wolf's The Beauty Myth, and both embrace and reject her poetic words about aging women's faces: how every detail printed upon them—the precise calligraphy she calls it—are the recordings of her road traveled and of her own unique life and times: this line and that impression a relief of her thoughts, feelings, disappointments, curiosities; her joys and heartbreaks. I log onto Pinterest, search "aging gracefully" (by the way, a term that actually enrages me, as we are even told how we are supposed to age) and to my surprise up pop the most amazing images. Women at all stages of aging, short women, tall women, with gorgeous gray hair and white hair, long hair, and short, colorful clothing, fabulous jewelry and sans jewelry, looking straight into the camera, their amazing faces painted with the stunning detail of their very lives, having the audacity to show up in the world in all of their mind-blowing glory. 

Holy shit. 

Suddenly as I write epiphanies arrive like winged angels. Hit after hit, insights, truths, knowings, bombard me, more puzzle pieces snapping miraculously into place. I've long known the connection between our culture and the difficulty of women's lives, but I see now, with brilliant clear seeing, the bigger association: the results of how women are treated that are directly, profoundly related to the crises we are experiencing in our world and on our planet.

Holy shit. Again.

The room is now flooded with light. These two seemingly unrelated things are so connected, so unbelievably intertwined, so enmeshed, I don't know how it is I have not seen it. I also don't know where to even begin; it's huge and complex and utterly vital.  It's also simple. Women are born into and then live in a man's world; a world created by and for men. Their leaders are men, their deity is a man, their "savior" a man, as are most all people in power; those in power make the rules, and they enforce the rules. He/him/his are the universal (exclusionary) pronouns. Even if we are not religious, the "sin" of Eve, and how she caused the fall from grace, is in our marrow, in the air we breathe; we know well that it was Pandora who opened the proverbial box causing all hell to break loose. 

The beautiful heart and body and earth-centered yin energy of the feminine has been plundered. Its essential life-giving relational, restorative, collaborative, peacemaking, and compassionate soul forced underground. Women's stories have been muted, their beings, especially as they move past their reproductive stage, rendered useless, then invisible. How do you steal a woman's inborn power? You teach her from the cradle on, sometimes subtly, other times overtly, to hate herself, to hate her innate ways of being. You teach her that her emotional life is wrong and bad, her body inferior, but also an object, as long as it looks just so, her mind, how she communicates, subordinate. Her vision of power, which is power used collaboratively for change, for good, rather than power over, is not only flawed, but ridiculous. Her wisdom nonexistent. 

Aging is cultural as well as biological. There are cultures around the world, particularly in the east but also among native earth-based cultures, where people are honored and revered as they age. Their knowledge is esteemed, and they are seen to have much of value to contribute. Women are the wise teachers, the revered crones, silver hair a sign of their wisdom, and wrinkles, like an intricately beaded necklace, the beautiful artwork of their lives. 

One day out of the blue, I lean in. On Pinterest I pin photo after photo on a board I title The Beauty of Aging. It becomes my own testament, my own creed, filled with raw, wild, sedate, gorgeous, proud, wrinkled women, plus quotes like Note to Self: You are not too old and it is not too late, and my personal favorite, A wise woman once said "fuck this shit" and she lived happily ever after. The women, their words light the inner fire that stokes my life. I stop coloring my hair, a personal choice that is not an editorial on what any other woman should do, ever, this dicey aging thing being a very personal journey. Now, with the pandemic I am also growing the length of my hair, something I would never have had the courage to do though I have longed to be one of those women who wear their salt and pepper mane irreverently thrown into some undefinable messy up-do. Who says aging women cannot have long hair? On the other hand, I drag out the makeup I haven't used in years. I buy mascara and relearn how to apply it. I consider ordering designer glasses even though the only correction I now need, thanks to my surgery, is for reading; because it's true that glasses hide a lot more than just the dreaded bags under my eyes. I now fully understand why women get plastic surgery and I'm unbelievably relieved that I don't have the money to even consider that. Though I do try out a little microdermabrasion, and order a host of anti-aging products. 

The inner me, the one that never ages, the one that truly does not feel a day over thirty-five, just doesn't get it. She is dumbfounded every time we stand in front of a mirror, or we happen to catch a glimpse walking by one. Though in society I am disappearing more and more with every gray hair and each new wrinkle, never have I had more to say, or more of an urgency to say it. There is wisdom in me. I know it, but have a great deal of tremulousness embracing it; though I do see now that a quiet transformation has been taking place since that tear-filled morning. Courage, I can see, is suddenly overlying fear. Worthiness is replacing shame, and compassion is beginning to grow, if even just a little bit, in those beautiful fleeting moments, displacing the toxicity of self loathing. Clearly, I am not too old, and clearly it is never too late. 

With Love,

Debby