The Work of Growing Up

How come everyone wants me to be ashamed of aging?

Every so often I receive, unsolicited in my inbox, an offer from an image or brand consultant to help me "maintain my relevancy." This has been happening to me for years and years, always with the same goal: to coax me into appearing younger and cooler than I really am. The tips used to focus on vocalizing more popular opinions about the broader cultural zeitgeist (translation: stop being such a dork, you nerd!) but in the last few years they've mostly been about how I look. One consultant said, "Babe, you let yourself go gray WAY too early." And another woman said, "Your laugh lines are too deep to erase with a filter, but we can at least try to smooth them out.“

The ship to appear hip sailed a long time ago for me personally, probably right around the time a whole bunch of youthful fans of a show I was recapping started tweeting "KYS!" at me, which I thought was just a sweet and overly familiar way of throwing a *kiss* at someone. You know, like how people call strangers "besties" even though they've never even had a single sleepover? It was a wildly overconfident estimation on my part, I know that now. I kept tweeting it back to them, in an attempt to seem friendly. KYS! KYS! KYS! to dozens (hundreds?) of schoolchildren. Anyway, apparently KYS means Kill Yourself, and I spent half a season of Pretty Little Liars telling teenage shippers to walk into traffic because I thought they were just being nice to me. 

Actually. That reminds me of this time in the fourth grade when — well, hang on. What you should know about fourth grade is that I was terrified, absolutely petrified of vampires. I'd had a run-in with one in kindergarten and never recovered. 

On Halloween, in fourth grade, my sister got onto the school bus in front of me, and when I pulled back the orange and black streamers hanging down from the door, freaking Dracula was sitting in the driver's seat. Obviously I assumed that my bus driver had been eaten by this evil fiend who then hijacked my bus with a plan to eat all my classmates too. So I jumped off the bus, screaming to beat the band, sprinting as fast as a baby gazelle back across my yard, hollering for my sister to run for her life like I was doing. We were the last stop before school. Basically everyone we knew saw me do that. So I didn't have what you'd call "a lot" of friends.

Anyway, one day, in an assembly, when someone behind me got my attention and pointed to a group of very popular fifth graders in the back of the cafeteria gesticulating wildly at me, I eagerly waved back and mouthed “hey! hi!” because of course I wanted to get to know them and hang out. Really, though, I was just very tall and in their line of sight and they were motioning for me to sit down so they could see the entertainment. 

The point is that you cannot maintain your coolness when there was never any coolness to begin with. 

Here are the most ridiculous things people have suggested to me over the years to stop looking like  — as a former colleague loved to call me — such a "shucky duck": Never apologize. The people you're writing for need to think you're smarter and trendier than they are. Do not share the access you have worked so hard to gain. Make yourself into a brand and stay on-brand. Nobody cares about your feelings. People don't want to see your real life, they want to see "aspirational content." Your first goal is to stir up emotions in other people that you can "leverage." Your main goal is to use that "leverage" to "add value" to brands that will pay you. Choose something universally beloved and stand for that so you won't be goaded into standing for anything "too controversial." Don't give away anything. Climb the rope ladder and cut it off below you. Amass power. Hoard your influence. 

I did not follow any of that advice because it is all terrible.

Lately, people really, really, really want me to feel weird about my face. In the last three months, I have received suggestions to dye my hair, to stop wearing masks in my photos because it makes me seem “radical” and “inaccessible,” to "take a basic make-up class," to "lose the glasses," to get filler for my lips and cheeks and chin and forehead and "especially" my eyes. One unsolicited consultant told me to seriously consider a nose job if I wanted to get a book deal. Bare minimum I need something done before my author photo gets taken, she said. And these are the people who want me to pay them to help me! Presumably they think they're offering friendly opinions! 

It's especially weird because the older I get the more I like the way I look. Part of it is for sure that I'm finally looking like the soft butch on the outside that I've always been on the inside. Part of it is that, in certain lights from certain angles, I look just like my most beloved Mamaw. Part of it is that I most often see myself reflected in my wife's perception of me. The other day, she walked into the room and stopped dead in her tracks and said, "Oh wow, your eyes! They look like early Voyager 2 images of Neptune!” which is an incredible compliment coming from my sweet astro-nerd.

Part of it is the thing people want me to be most ashamed of: the lines. My life has not exactly been a cakewalk, and yet! I have managed to laugh long enough and hard enough that the proof of my good humor and fortitude is etched onto my face! Why would I want to fill or filter such a testament of my own resilience? 

I've been reading a lot of famous mothers' letters to their daughters lately, and I suppose it's no surprise that Maya Angelou's has stuck with me. She said, as adults, we find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. She said we "carry the accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces," that we "act sophisticated and worldly." But that's just getting older. She told her daughter that when we are safe with our own hearts and minds, when we can go inside ourselves and find home, that's the real sign of maturity. 

Maybe the main reason I'm not scared of the lines on my face is because the signs of my own aging align with all the work I've done to grow up. Like a tree maybe. Or a homemade cinnamon roll. Definitely the opposite of a vampire.