I am 35 years old.
I look 35 years old.
I feel 35 years old on a good day; I feel 35 on the days when the temperature and sun and barometric pressure and my sleep schedule and the stresses of life all align in just the right way. On those days, I feel 35.
Other days? Other days I want to check myself into the damn nursing home. Let someone else worry about doling me out some canned peas and instant mashed potatoes at dinner.
I don’t think I’m alone in this.
In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m not: According to the standards of modern medicine, I’m a fairly healthy person. I’m missing part of a thyroid, and I try to keep an eye on my blood pressure, but beyond that, everything pretty much works how it’s supposed to. I’m mostly just tired and creaky in the way that all overworked, overburdened adults of a certain age are.
And, if we’re being honest, I’ve earned it.
I put in a lot of late nights. I put in a lot of long hours. I powered through a lot of sick days, and I also had a lot of good times drinking beer and hanging out on the water. I’ve tried to get my money’s worth out of life, and even though there are certainly days where I wake up wishing it all would have worked out differently, there’s no denying that I put in the effort.
Whether I succeeded or not, I tried.
This also means I haven’t looked 21 since I was 21.
Forget eternal youth; by 22, I had a body made for Talbot’s dresses and comfortable seating.
Not in a bad way. Just in the “Yeah, I’m probably not going to be hanging out in the junior’s section and sleeping on $40 Craigslist futons ever”-sense of things.
And that’s okay. I go into this bit of history not to bemoan looking 35, but to celebrate it.
…
I’ve been seeing more and more pieces about cosmetic fillers lately. I’ve seen the articles celebrating them, and the articles warning of the risks, and the articles about people flying out to the Caymans to get fillers no first world country will approve. I’ve read pieces about the growing backlash; about how they’re going out of style, as though the shape of one’s face is no different than the preferred hemline of the season. As though health decisions should be made following the same logic as deciding whether or not to wear a shacket.
I can’t count the number of friends of mine who swear by Botox; who dutifully go in to get their faces injected with botulism more frequently than I can muster the energy to do laundry.
And…okay.
It’s not my time, money, or face. I’m not the health police.
And moreover, there are people out there eating bath salts. If I somehow were the health police, I’m pretty sure that’s where I’d be focusing my resources; not on a bunch of housewives in Frontenac.
But also…why?
What’s wrong with being 35?
I mean, lots of things are wrong with being 35. For Christ’s sake. I once gave myself a black eye from yawning and rubbing my eyes too much. That shouldn’t happen to people; I deserve better. I deserve stronger capillaries and a nap.
But my wrinkles aren’t the issue here.
I wish I could turn back the clock and no longer be able to forecast the weather with my joints.
I wish I could turn back the clock, find the highest paying summer job available, and deposit every dime I made into a 401(k)...especially those recession era dimes. A couple of dimes from ‘08 would probably be worth enough to fix a few of my problems now.
I wish I could turn back the clock, and save my first husband and I from one another. I think we both deserved a lot of things the other person could never give.
I wish I could turn back the clock and pay more attention in math. I wasn’t a natural at it, but looking back, I wasn’t bad. I could have been an engineer if I would have applied myself—not like, a brilliant one, but an okay one. And even though engineering wouldn’t have been my dream job, I think it would have been a better fit than law. I probably would have made a little more, worked a little less, and been a little happier.
I wish I would have found a way to see something other than the exurban mid-south. I always said that only trust fund kids got to do that, but I don’t know. One or two of my old high school classmates managed to, and their families were no closer to appearing on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous than mine.
If they found a way, maybe I could have, too.
I should have spent more time with my grandparents. Those relationships weren’t perfect, but we could have tried harder. I could have tried harder. I could have been better about loving people exactly as they were; about accepting both myself and my loved ones as full and complex human beings, with all of the beauty and all of the flaws that entails.
Maybe the example would have spread. Maybe we all could have been a little happier.
Those are all things that suck about being 35.
No matter how hard a person works in their youth, no matter how well he or she sticks with the conventional wisdom, after three and half decades, it’s hard not to have some regrets.
But…Botox doesn’t fix that.
A younger haircut doesn’t fix that.
Shopping in the juniors section and racking up a $3,000 bill at Sephora doesn’t fix that.
The hard part of being 35 isn’t a few laugh lines; the hard part of being 35 is being 35.
And, if I’m going to be completely honest, I dare say that 35 year olds are a lot more interesting looking than 18 year olds.
I mean, I was hot when I was 18.
Lots of people were.
That’s the great thing about being 18: Everybody just kind of rolls out of bed looking like a knockoff Laker Girl, and nobody thinks anything of it, because on a scale of 1-10, most of the class is a 9.5 and above. Knockoff Laker Girls are as ubiquitous as gym clothes and graphing calculators.
At 35?
Actual Laker Girls no longer look like Laker Girls.
But at 35, a person’s face and body also have a much better story to tell.
At 18, looking good is mostly a matter of luck. The class hot girl didn’t really do anything to be hot; she just lucked into better genes than the rest of her friends.
And, at 35, it’s still partially a matter of luck. Some people luck into a good metabolism, good health, and the magical fairy dust of an easy life—a life where things generally fall into place, and there’s always plenty of money for flattering clothes and good hairdressers, and the stress and workloads are all pretty minimal.
Other people, through little or no fault of their own, end up with the exact opposite of that.
But still, compared with the total roll of the dice that is life at 18, a person’s appearance at 35 tells a story. A story that probably has quite a few ups and downs; a story with a lot more nuance than it had 15 years earlier.
Beauty at 35 is a Choose Your Own Adventure story; a composite of afternoons laying by the pool, and after-tennis drinks, and brutal workloads, and sobbing over stacks of bills, and going to too many funerals, and also dancing on the beach with friends and being able to buy the Umbro shorts Mom and Dad said no to in 1994.
At 35, looking in the mirror is like looking at a roadmap of the last three and half decades; all of the brightest days and darkest nights etched into flesh.
Do I sometimes wish things would have etched differently; that the story itself would have been different?
Yeah. Of course. I think everybody does.
The novel of one’s life is almost never without some ups and downs; some parts a person wishes he or she could delete entirely.
I’ve had a pretty charmed life in the grand scheme of things, but if I could, I’d re-write a few of the chapters. Sometimes by changing a sentence or two, but other times, by scrapping whole years. Whole eras. There are thousands of days I’d chuck into the sea; let them get caught up in the discarded fishing nets and empty soda bottles so that they can form an island of complete and utter shit, far away from everybody and everything.
But also, I wouldn’t.
Maybe I’d be a couple of pounds thinner if I could re-write that novel.
Maybe I’d look a couple of years younger, or at least a little better rested.
I might even be a little bit happier. A little bit more carefree. I might have an easier time wearing headphones; never worrying that I’ll miss something I need to hear. I might be a little more okay after being startled by a garbage truck setting down a dumpster, or the breaking of a plate, or any of the other 1,000 noises that make up day-to-day life.
I might be able to order dessert with dinner, never worrying that I’ll need that $6 one day. Never worrying that a $6 slice of cake is somehow what stands between me and the guy begging for change on the street corner. I was always kind of neurotic about money, but the recession took that to a whole different place.
I might not feel so threatened by all of those girls I see walking around in sweatshirts from fancier colleges; the ones with the perfect, tight bodies, and promising futures, and the ability to pronounce foreign words.
I always look at them, and worry that they’re going to eat my lunch.
They can.
They still have the energy for 80 hour workweeks. They still turn guys’ heads. Our culture worships them. They still promise the hope of a better future, by sheer virtue of existing.
I feel like an aging hick in Barbour.
I might have an easier time keeping my cool. I might not get so resentful over stupid things. I might be the kind of person who can just split the bill at dinner, without getting pissy that my entree was technically $2 cheaper than the other person’s; the kind of person who can genuinely “like” an acquaintance’s vacation photos without secretly thinking “It must be nice to have a money tree…”
But also, if I erased all of those chapters, and threw all of those days into the Gulf of Mexico, I wouldn’t be me.
A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor, and I dare say a perfectly smooth face rarely makes for a particularly compelling human being.
Besides, there’s a real danger to thinking that history could have been re-written; to telling oneself that one or two changes could have fixed everything.
Doing so turns a person into a victim of history and chance. It takes away a person’s autonomy, and sands away the more complicated sides of human nature—after all, when I was 18, I wasn’t reveling in looking like a knockoff Laker Girl. I wasn’t thinking about how cool it was to still be in high school; to have the option to learn pottery or sculpture at taxpayer expense. I wasn’t taking advantage of a body that needed less rest and less Aleve by hanging out at the ice rink and hitting up every bounce house I could; by doing so naked, to let all of the world appreciate just how hot I looked.
No, I was yelling at my parents over the fact that my best friend got a new SUV for her birthday and I didn’t.
I was exactly as bitter and neurotic then. Probably more so.
If anything, watching my life go up in flames during the recession probably made me a little bit nicer of a person. Seeing the people I cared about most struggling to eat kind of helped me realize that there are more important of things in life than worrying about who has a new Tahoe. More important things in life than fitting into size 0 Lilly Pulitzer.
…
If someone wants to fly out to the Caymans to get injected with a mystery substance that might the fountain of youth, but also might be an industrial solvent, that’s not really my business.
Again, people can do what they want.
In fact, if this will come out of the person’s house-buying budget, I’m probably in favor—after all, I feel threatened by sprawling colonials in Ladue, not women my age with duck lips.
But also…why?
No injectable filler will actually erase the years.
No filler will freeze time.
No filler will delete the shitty chapters of life, or let a person go back to being 18. And, again, if we’re being honest here, I’m not even sure I’d want to go back to being 18. The sepia-toned 18 of nostalgia, sure, but actual 18?
That was as hit or miss as actual 35.
…
The hardest parts of getting older can’t be fixed by Botox, or Juvederm, or Restylane. The hardest parts of life just are.
Fillers are just…filler.
They might help camouflage the crow’s feet, but they won’t change the nights that formed them.
They won’t undo a thing. And that’s probably for the best.