Recently, I went to Winners to look for a sports bra for my daughter. It was the Wednesday before the Easter long weekend and I was in a great mood—life just looks better right before an extra-long break from work.

Though I’m normally a thrift store junkie, I came across a cute pair of jeans I wanted to try on so I grabbed them and headed to the changerooms. I convinced myself, with ease, that it would be nice to wear a new pair of jeans for the return to my parents’ place, in my small hometown, for Easter.

As I changed, I suddenly became conscious that my pants were coming off and the new jeans were going on as though I was racing someone in the next changeroom. And my body was turned to the wall opposite the mirror. I paused and thought, Do I normally do this? Change quickly and avoid the mirror? Was it because I was in a hurry or because I didn’t want to touch my uplifted mood by actually looking at my naked body in the mirror? Oh dear.

After checking myself out in the new jeans, I pulled them off… along with everything else. Don’t get me wrong, I see myself naked a lot, but there is something unnerving about being buck naked in a store’s changeroom, a place that begs us to focus on physical appearance, while standing under horrible, bright lighting that penetrates skin like an x-ray.

“Don’t do it,” Shame whispers from her dark, dank home. “It’s better not to look.”

“Screw off,” I mumble under my breath.

“What, are you expecting to see a body like that of the woman modelling on the tag of those jeans?”

“I’m a big girl, I can take this.” I slowly turned to face the mirror.

Yup, there they were, impossible to ignore: the thighs that had grown since entering my forties. I put my hands on the outside of each thigh and pushed them inward to give the illusion that they were smaller, much like I sometimes pull the skin on my face upward to give the illusion of tighter skin; memories of my younger self flashed through my mind. Alrighty then, I get to grow older and have my metabolism slow down. Awesome.

My eyes then drew up to my breasts. Throughout my life, I had wondered what it would be like to have large, billowing breasts, but it never bothered me that mine were on the small side, I quite liked them. They were a part of my body where gravity just couldn’t have much effect because there wasn’t a lot there to pull down on. Yup, those were still pretty damn perky. (Though I think breasts are beautiful symbols of femininity, large, medium, or small, and I don’t think I’d care if I had large, low-hanging boobs, either. I guess I’ll never know.)

“See?” I told Shame. “I like my breasts!”

“Oh, but it’s easy not to feel shameful about parts of yourself that you accept,” she said. She had a point. But then it was Fear who smacked me in the face with a memory from my youth.

Era: 1980s, around age 12.

Setting: My grandmother’s tiny apartment-like room in a communal living complex.

My grandmother (rest her beautiful spirit), my now lifelong girlfriend (Dana), and I decided to get changed so as to head to the community pool down the road. Dana and I went into the washroom to get our bathing suits on and when we came out, a mid-sixty-year-old, pudgy naked body awaited us. We both gasped, though I not as much as Dana as I knew my grandmother’s tendency toward openness with bodies. My gasp, rather, came from the shock of seeing an aging body. (Wow, as I write this in my forties, I think that it’s not far down the road, but when I was younger, it seemed eons away and the image in my mind is of an eighty-year-old body.)

I recall seeing her small breasts, sagging a bit, tiny nipples still pointed outward. Her legs and rounded belly had the orange peel dimples and was her pubic hair… grey? If I hadn’t been so focused on the comparison between my young body and her older body, she would have actually looked cute, in an elfish kind of way.

As she yanked her bathing suit onto her body and snapped her swim cap over her short, white hair, she said, “Righty-oh, let’s go!” as though all she had done was grab her purse before heading out the door. I looked at Dana, both of us trying to muffle the giggles that were bubbling just below the surface.

Now, as I looked in the changeroom mirror, I realized I have similar breasts as my grandmother had, and that mine were apt to appear quite like hers in another two decades (and there were likely other similarities too, though my 5’10” frame dwarfed her once 5’2” frame). But rather than feel scared of my breasts heading in that direction, I smiled, knowing how much my grandmother always just embraced her body as it was.

“Take that, Fear. Not today,” I said, until my focus drew back onto my naked image in the mirror. Shit.

I realize that judgement and shaming doesn’t just occur toward ourselves; it’s often a lens we wear that comes from inward and goes outward. Those judgmental comments shared among friends or that we hear inside our heads emanate from shadowy places within.

In psychology, this is called projection: when we don’t acknowledge our unconscious desires or traits (usually because of shame) so we attach them to others. For example, if we have an unacknowledged fear of aging, we project it onto someone else, often in a blaming fashion, such as: Just look at the way she’s dressing like a nineteen-year-old, she can’t face that she’s getting older.

We’ve all experienced projection, but I believe part of our growth comes from being aware of when we do this and questioning its value (or lack thereof) for ourselves and others.

Whenever I’m kind to myself, I can be kinder to others; conversely, whenever I feel myself judging someone on aging and appearance, I know I’m feeling insecure about my own aging and appearance. When we’re doing the latter to ourselves and others, we’re breeding the idea that aging is bad, not to mention that we’re a capitalist’s dream: feel worse about our appearance, spend more.

(Note: I’m focusing on women as that’s my personal perspective, but I realize this applies to men as well, though sometimes men’s fears are associated more with loss of virility and resources.)

It’s a double-edged sword, however; we can’t win whether someone is 1. attempting to stave off the appearance of age by, for example, getting a procedure done or 2. accepting age by letting nature take its course. 1. “Omigod, look at her fake boobs, those are way too firm for a fifty-year-old” or 2. “I can’t believe she let her hair go completely grey, why wouldn’t she just dye it?”

If we walk the thin tightrope of trying, but not trying too hard, then perhaps less judgement will befall us. Seriously? Why can’t we just leave everyone alone and let them do whatever it is that feels right for them? 

We could stop shooting ourselves in the foot, but we’d first need to face some of our fears. In the first instance, we may feel threatened that someone looks, and possibly feels, better than us by “cheating the system”. In the second instance, we may feel threatened that someone feels brave enough to accept nature’s course (or possibly feels sexy regardless of an aging body) when we haven’t gotten there yet.

Sounds exhausting, right? I know it is for me. The great thing is that with age comes a letting go of what other people think. Marianne Williamson, in her book The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife, states:

“One of the gifts of age is that it finally becomes easier to ignore other people’s opinions. We’ve been through enough to know our own true feelings and we’re ready to live the lives we would have lived all along if we thought it was okay.”

Holding my breath in the changeroom, I turned my body so that my butt faced the mirror and I then cranked my head back to look, I mean really look, at my backside. The lighting shone down from the ceiling, emphasizing the dimples like an awning casting shade on a sidewalk. Had they multiplied since I looked last, were they having babies?

And then, turning around once more, I focused on my once toned, flat-as-a-board tummy—my pride and joy for years—and its extra layer. My belly button ring sat like a dusty, long-forgotten trophy sitting on a shelf. Okay, I can take that, it’s just an extra layer I comforted myself. But wait, were there some dimples starting to form there too? Jeezus. I started dressing again, taking notice of some spider veins on my legs as I pulled them back into my pants.

I go back and forth between I accept that I’m aging and don’t look like I used to, so just relax and enjoy life and I can fight this, I just need some drastic changes to my exercise and diet. But I’m actually more fit than I’ve been in years, I exercise regularly and I’m strong. And I eat pretty damn healthily. This is who I am! And I needn’t look further than my beautiful dad–who had a stroke at 55 and has significant hearing loss–to know that as I age, health brings more satisfaction than physical attractiveness ever could (that’s right, Ego, you heard me).

I ended my time in the changeroom with a small affirmation I had read in a magazine that a particular woman did daily, naked, in front of the mirror. “I am strong, I am beautiful, I am enough,” I said to myself, feeling like a total idiot. Nope, that didn’t have the effect that the woman in the magazine said it would. But thankfully, I left the changeroom feeling no worse than I had going in. And I bought the jeans.

When I got back to work from my Winners experience, I shared with two of my female co-workers that I was avoiding looking at myself in the changeroom mirror while naked.

“Wait, you didn’t look, did you?” was the immediate reaction of one of them. We laughed. But this surprised me, coming from a woman about ten years my junior, and thin.

“So I’m not the only one who does this?” I said, normalized. “And yes, I did look. I’m going to blog about it.”

“And talk about how we shouldn’t look in the mirror?” she asked.

My other co-worker chimed in, “I think she’s going to talk about how we should look in the mirror.”

“Well, I figure if we don’t,” I said, “then we’re giving ourselves the message that we’re ashamed and scared of how we look.”

I then brought it up with another friend. Though a fitness instructor and appearing to have a perfect little body, she could relate to these feelings of shame and fear about our physical appearance and aging. We all have our parts that we don’t like and parts that we do. I’ve heard people fawn over their beautiful ear lobes and degrade their stubby toes. And it likely doesn’t surprise you that even young supermodels feel insecure as I observed in this interesting TED Talk.

“Yup, we’re getting older,” I said to my fitness instructor friend. “Man, if only I could take my body back twenty years or so… even ten.”

Williamson calls this “youth-itis”.

But then my friend said something interesting. “Yes, but when I think back to my younger self, the thoughts that were going through my head about myself weren’t that different than they are now. My body looked younger and better, but I still had my insecurities.”

“You know, you’re right!” I said. When I was young, I was worried about the zits on my back and if my butt was too big, among other things. “Why didn’t we appreciate what we had back then? But I guess in ten and twenty years from now, we’ll be saying the same thing about who we are now.”

Our reality is, however, that we’re growing older; it’s one thing we can’t evade. There is a Buddhist saying: “All human unhappiness comes from not facing reality squarely, exactly as it is”. So my question to myself is how can I enter this new phase of my life with strength and positivity?

I mean, let’s face it, youth and attractiveness turn heads. As I age, my ego equates my loss of youth with loss of power. But Williamson states something interesting:

“I don’t think we need to be less compelling with age, we’re simply compelling in a different way. Being where we are with neither shame nor apology is what matters most. The beauty of personal authenticity can compensate for the lost beauty of our youth. My arms aren’t as shapely as they used to be, but I know a whole lot more now about what I should be doing with them.”

It’s natural for us to be drawn to appearances as, evolutionarily speaking, this has helped us survive (youth, health and strength in our partners were what we looked for when procreating). But we’re gaining a new kind of power as we head into midlife. The Aboriginal and Japanese cultures seem to have it right: elders are revered for their wisdom. The typical North American approach is to value external attributes (physical appearance, possessions) over our internal attributes (wisdom, passion, tenacity). As a result, aging people are often seen as a “burden on our system” and senseless for not keeping up with new technology; it’s no wonder that getting older is something that so many of us fear.

We do so much work in our younger years: shine light on our fears; heal from painful experiences; go down paths that lead us no where or somewhere dark; create, shatter, rebuild, and maintain relationships. It would be a shame for us to have gathered all this wisdom along the way and then, to not apply it—to throw our hands in the air and say, “Well, the best years of my life are gone, I guess it’s all downhill from here.” Our world is in a fragile state, so I figure I’m not going down without a fight.

I’m finally at the stage where I can finally start saying “ah-ha!” more than “oh no!”. And as noted above, I’m shedding my fears about what others think, which doesn’t mean telling everyone to eff off, but rather, tuning out the negative critics and turning my attention toward the things and people that really matter to me—that allow me to grow and move toward my full potential.

So, I say, let’s talk about our aging experiences with others and not pretend that we’re not feeling at least a bit insecure about it all. My close group of girlfriends from high school have started to gather every summer in our hometown and when I arrived last year, the first thing one of my them said was, “Nic, do you have to pluck hairs on your chin?”

“Totally!” I said.

She replied, excitedly, “Thank goodness, apparently I was asking the wrong people!”

We then laughed about the horrors of seeing chin hairs in the rear-view mirrors of our vehicles, when the sun shines just right, only hours after we plucked at home and thought we had them all. I overheard other conversations involving nipples facing downward and peeing a bit with laughter… but rather than dwell, we laughed. The rest of the time was spent sharing our failures, our successes, and what we’ve learned from them all to become the women we are now. Oh right, and we dressed up in silly outfits, told dirty jokes, and drank and danced a wee bit too… which is a fountain of youth I’ll choose to dip into again and again.

~

If you have any reflections or stories about your body and aging, please feel free to share them in the comments! Or, if you’d simply like to pass the link along to a friend because you identified with at least some of this and you think s/he may too, then by all means 🙂