Mirror, Mirror: release me from your spell. Please?

an incomplete reflection on beauty and aging...particularly, mine

I’m troubled about something, and I’m troubled that I’m troubled.

The reason?

I’m less pretty than I used to be. I’m also less thin. To add insult to injury, I’m visibly older on top of it.

As problems go, it’s not a huge one; I’m pretty sure, too, that I’m the only one concerned about the inevitable esthetic decline of my own body. My partner is not concerned, my child is not concerned, and I don’t think my friends and extended family are concerned, either. Likewise, I am unconcerned about their physical beauty: it is truly the least important thing about the people I love.

So why does it feel like a “top five” priority for me personally? How did my own beauty become so tied to my identity as a person, and more importantly, how can I knock it down into, say, slot number 35?

I’d hoped it would move down naturally as I aged. I was promised it would. And it is, but too slowly if you ask me. The clock is ticking, and I can either get cool about my changing physical self real quick or suffer incrementally until I die, continuing to delete nearly every selfie I take.

But as anyone with anxiety will tell you, trying to force a relaxed attitude is a tricky game.

The question of my life: why is the grace and understanding that’s so easily extended to others so difficult to extend to oneself? Indeed, my therapist long ago identified this as my main sticky point: insisting that everyone else has a perfectly fine excuse for every imperfection, but judging myself with the harshest measuring sticks available.

At least among women, I think this is a pretty common condition. If I mention feeling concerned about some physical (not health-related) aspect of myself, most people look at me as crazily as I looked at my friend a few weeks ago when she apologized to me for not wearing makeup (see? I’m not alone!).

But it’s one thing to know and understand something logically, and another to turn that logic into an actual gut-level belief.

It’s hard, I think, to talk about physical beauty, and to care about physical beauty, without seeming either frivolous and shallow or really, really angry and defiant. (I deeply admire the “fuck your fascist beauty standards” faction, but I could never join them; I just care too much.)

I feel ashamed and silly that I care about my looks as much as I do, and simultaneously ashamed that I no longer look exactly how I want to look. Where is this shame coming from? Many people that I love do not conform to commercial beauty standards, after all, and I see them as beautiful beyond compare. Why is it so hard to that believe others might actually see me in the same way?

An obvious part of it, of course, is a sexist culture in which physical beauty is extremely important for women but not so much for men. It’s gotten to me like it has to everyone else, as has the beauty industry as a whole, happy to make money off of women’s insecurities. (Products for men and their physical insecurities seem to center around hair growth and penis-enhancing/assisting, which as far as I know, are not booming anywhere near the level of the cosmetics industry).

Between the imagined judges surrounding us and the very real judges inside of us, it’s hard to get a break and feel okay looking in the mirror. And besides, this obsessive concern about one’s physical beauty casts everyone around as impossibly shallow, unable to look past one’s wrinkles or cellulite or fly-away hairs to appreciate the person within.

I’ve seen a meme online a few times that says something like, “You do not owe prettiness to anyone.”

Hopefully soon I can convince myself to believe it.

In the meantime, hear my prayer, gods: please let me stop caring so much.

P.S. If you could also let me be pretty forever, that would be great.

Sigh.