I’m at an age now where I’m going through a new phase in my life and part of this journey meant that I have been re-evaluating a lot of things such as health, family, friends, relationships.
What serves me, what doesn’t.
What I care for and don’t.
I watch my face and body change form, there’s creaks from my joints when I get up in the mornings and I take things a little bit slower. I’m letting my grey hair grow out again (who knows, maybe this time I’ll keep it without resorting to changing its colour for the umpteenth time!).
I’m at an age where the majority of my friends are female (well, all of them are), they’re around my age; they’re single, or if they were married, their kids are grown with families of their own. I say ‘were’ because all of the married ones have since divorced. In the earlier years, I had known their husbands, we socialised with their family, but now our friendships are back to what they were like before they got married – before marriage, before kids.
It got me thinking about a few things when we reach this middle age. It’s an age where we start to think about the next phase of our lives and where we shed things that don’t serve us anymore and there’s a freedom that comes from it too.
I’m not surprised that many women decide to take the plunge and make a drastic change in their lives, sometimes at great emotional cost to themselves and the people around them.
Some want to to get out of a rut and once again, be seen, have a voice and find themselves. Others, need to find their breath again.
I say good on them.
However, sometimes with age, comes the pressure to look younger in our society is great. After all, we are surrounded by media that show women our age who have had facial surgery, liposuction, and botox. It’s prevalent.
When I visit the shopping centre, I see more clinics opening up for such procedures and you can’t help but look at their offerings and wonder if getting ‘injectables’ will make me feel better about those wrinkles on my face and around my eyes?
Lucky for me I have a fear of injections anywhere near my face, so that’s never going to happen. I’ll take my wrinkles and saggy neck any day despite getting annoyed with them. However, I also don’t hold any grudges against those women who choose surgery to fight age and to feel good about themselves but more so, I do wonder how the pressure of society makes us choose these drastic actions.
If we valued and respected mature women in all their wonderful natural forms in our society, would many have resorted to such invasive procedures I wonder?
So the thing for me is that it seems for women our age, we’re fighting invisibility.
I have been watching the new series of Sex and the City called And Just Like That. Love or loathe the show, one of the things I like is that thankfully, not all of the actors have resorted to facial surgery and show themselves as they are. Grey hair, wrinkles and all. Watching the show is making me reflect on my own reactions to what the women on the show are going through.
I think we need to see and hear more women of mature age show themselves as they are and not be pressured to have their skin cut, injected, bleached or tightened so they can meet some society ideal. Let them have grey hair!
Why is it that everyone needs to look like they’re permanently at a certain age – usually about 15-20 years younger than they are?
After all these women have studied, had careers, they’ve had a full life of experiences – they have things to say, they have things we can learn about!
They are all interesting people!
Why are we focussed on how they look instead? Why do we not see them?
This came up in my YouTube feed recently and she explains this situation perfectly….listen to what she says about appearance, image, perception of others of a woman her age.
“I am a far more interesting person right now and you have phased me out because I’m no longer physically appealing to you.”
I’ve decided that I’ll age gracefully despite rolling my eyes when I see new wrinkles and rogue facial hair.
I’ll have a laugh about it and not worry about it because in all honesty, I see women my age who have vitality, exuberance and have found a new zest for life and to them, they don’t care how they look. It’s their outlook.
That’s what I want. That’s the secret.
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