Aging (dis)Gracefully

GLP-1s, Lifts, Fillers, Anti-Fatness + the Beauty Industrial Complex.

Hurray for $10 wrap pants from a stall in Mexico City. Should’ve bought them in more colors.

Apologies! Last post went out with an accidental paywall. This one is free. - Kim xo

My last essay included a bit of discussion about the movie, Babygirl, with Nicole Kidman. And this prompted some discussion in comments about plastic surgery and procedures. I’m not going to lie, and I’m not proud to admit it, but I’ve silently wondered why Kidman has leaned so hard into fillers and facial procedures.

It’s very human of us to wonder about these things. But I also know if I were endlessly wealthy and my job was being a famous A-lister in a youth-obsessed business, wouldn’t I be maximizing my assets? Aren’t I doing that now on a slightly smaller scale? What’s the difference between a brow lift and a Mounjaro shot every week? Where’s the line between botox and blepharoplasty? Brow pencils and brow lifts? Is one cool, the other vanity?

Add to this: I know very little about the pressures of being a celebrity, where everyone has a say about you, and it’s usually a stupid say. Like this ridiculous headline about Pamela Anderson at the Met Gala last week:

Apparently Pamela is not aging well. But Demi is? Is resisting aging, aging well?

Demi has long held that she hasn’t had a lot of invasive plastic surgery, even as professionals say she’s probably had lifts, fillers, botox and resurfacing. So, is it not aging well if she looks and feels great, but she also had some work to get there? Are we shaming people into hiding their efforts to look and feel better? Is it more important to be rested or look rested? Why doesn’t it count unless we come by these impossible standards naturally?

Again, for women - damned if we do (Demi), damned if we don’t (Pamela).

And yet this opens so many questions….

Should we be trying to look our age, and if so, what does looking our age mean? What is beautiful at 50? 60? 80? Do we need to be beautiful by culturally-defined standards? Should we be trying to look younger? Should we be trying to look sexually viable? For whom? Should we conceal our age? Or is this about longevity and health? What does it mean to grow old gracefully? Can aging be (dis)graceful? Is there a wrong way to age?

All of these questions seemed to play an unconscious role when I chose the photo for my about page on this newsletter. I picked one that came from an evening when I felt great and felt like the outside of me matched the inside of me. Read: young.

It is not lost on me that the photo of me (top of page) has two things: 1) thinness and 2) the appearance of youth for my age. I’m even dressed in a young-ish outfit, sneakers, my hair is blonde, not gray. It’s sort of messy-bedhead, which reads young, arty and like I just got out of bed after having crazy-sex or something. Chunky glasses obscure lines and aging in my face. The glasses are essential to see things, but also a look. I seem like I might be able to do a cartwheel across the bathroom floor (I cannot.)

As I look at a lot of the folks out there writing and creating content around aging and health and wellness, I realize how most of us fit into a specific category. Many of us are white, but there are also a lot of people of color and various ethnicities out there talking about aging, too. This is great. But the diversity doesn’t extend much further than that.

We writers on aging are generally able-bodied, not sick. Or we do not appear so. We are generally thin or thin-enough, look good in clothes, and can meet some physical metrics of what is considered attractive in our culture. The aging space feels very anti-fat. We look good for our age, is the message, and good is young and thin.

Aging well is also about being of a certain socio-economic class, one that can afford to care about fashion, to know what looks culturally relevant on our bodies, to have the bandwidth to be able to consider wellness, have relationships with medical providers who get it, have consistent access to the right foods, time and motivation for exercise, stable housing to live in. If I were worried about eviction, writing about aging well would not be my job. In order to write about aging we have to kind of defy its existence and set up an aspirational relationship with readers.

The message is: I’m living my best life. Why aren’t you?

And of course, the wellness space is where people can sell you something so you can win at aging, too. In other words, to even write about/ worry about/ hack aging, we have to fit into a type that is built on privileges that a lot of people don’t have, and then, market those privileges so that people feel some kind of way, and want to buy what you are selling so they can feel better, too. Capitalism, baby.

So, would I be writing about aging if I were still fat?

I think about this a lot, particularly after reading the work of Virgina Sole-Smith. She is the author of the excellent book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and writes a hell of a newsletter, Burnt Toast. I love that she talks about thinness as social capital. I have talked a lot in the poverty/social justice space about social capital and how it is nearly as important as all other kinds of capital. Think of it as the value of our personal networks, the reciprocity that can be gained, favors given, a person you can call, a helping hand, a sense of trust in the world, in our neighborhood. Being thin by our cultural standards, gives people more connections, more introductions, more positive interactions, more acceptance. And because of that more value-laden relationships that can help propel, nuture and safeguard us.

Thin makes life easier. Thin makes aging easier.

Me with the family + the judge on the day Raffi and Desi were adopted. Pre-mounjaro.

I’ve certainly had help to be thin.

I started taking Mounjaro at the same time I started taking hormones and getting ADHD meds. Not to mention a xanax prescription to help my panic around public speaking through my book launch (which I seem to have vanquished, happily.) This was all because I had the kind of doctor (a woman) who listened to me talk about how I was feeling and responded with actual solutions. I am able to pay for that privilege. This kind of attention would not happen at a clinic or a typical urban doctors office that takes medicaid. I barely had to explain symptoms to her, before she was nodding and laughing and commiserating because she had actually been where I was.

Life changing. (I wish this kind of doctor-patient relationship for all of you)

I started Mounjaro for a chronic skin and nail picking disorder. My therapist and I discussed it (Another privilege. We pay out of pocket.) because I had been trying EMDR, and all kinds of therapy, to beat it into submission. Nothing worked. When I was promoting The Meth Lunches I wanted to be able to sign books without being embarrassed about my hands, skin and nails, and so I willed myself to stop picking and it worked. My hands were beautiful for my book launch. But of course, the minute I wasn’t focused on the picking, the anxiety took over and I went back to it.

The Mounjaro didn’t work for the picking. Too ingrained in my psyche, too terminal, too part of me. It has been an anxiety coping strategy since I was 4. I mutilated myself over and over and continue to do so. This is just me and it will always be me.

But in the process of figuring out what wasn’t working, I noticed that I did peel off 30-ish pounds, and ended up balancing blood sugar levels, so I wasn’t spiking and dropping out throughout the day. I wasn’t as moody. I had more energy. I wasn’t led by my hunger. This made me a happier, calmer person. All of a sudden, the ADHD meds made work more productive and I had less angst and guilt about my productivity, the hormones replenished my estrogen and progesterone, pushing me back into a place where I felt like myself again.

And the weight loss was unexpectedly life-changing. A return to an old me that was kind of a new me, too.

I’ve written before about how I had been thin my whole life - effortlessly thin - until two late in life pregnancies, extended breast feeding and the onset of perimenopause, all back-to-back, pushed my body into something I didn’t recognize. In my head, I was thin. In the mirror, I was unrecognizeable.

I slowly morphed into a body that I didn’t know or understand. I’ve never been much of a shopper. I tend to buy something that looks good on me in several colors and just wear those things, but I stopped being able to tolerate shopping at all. I began Defensive Dressing. Will this shirt hide my belly? Will these pants make my butt look smaller? Will this color hide me? How can I be more invisible?

I remember this crowd photo of a bunch of performers from one of David’s shows and everyone is smiling and making these grand kooky poses, being outrageous and performative for the photo. See me, upper right, wanting to evaporate into the scenery? Every time I see the photo, I remember myself hoping for invisibility. I hate this photo, even as I love these people.

Sole-Smith has written that this is phase in a woman’s mid-life that gets reduced to being a mom. In a talk with Registered Dietician, Debra Benfield in Sole-Smith’s newsletter essay, You Are Not Considered a Whole Person After a Certain Age, they talk about how being a mom (signifying middle age more than actually having kids) is how older women are relegated into invisibility.

“The “mom” haircut or the “mom” jeans; it’s used as a pejorative to convey uncoolness.” Benfield says. “And it doesn’t matter what you do as a woman. You’re just going to be the mom.”

And this includes a kind of life hustle that prioritizes the needs of others; marriages, kids, ailing and dying parents, work/school. This is the last burst of time to really get your shit together, and maybe make good on the dreams you have been holding onto.

During that time, I was ghostwriting books. I was momming. I was fucking my husband and cooking dinner. I was cooking with my kids in their elemetary school and I wrote a book about it. I was angry and I wrote a Kindle Single about it. We were foster parents. We traveled. We were busy as fuck. I was doing life. But I just couldn’t get my body to work the way it had for me in the past. I felt it personally. And it was also felt in how diminished I was in the world. Because so much of a woman’s youth is entrenched in sexual appeal for the benefit of the patriarchy.

“When we talk about mom in a negative way, we’re talking specifically about a woman whose body is no longer thin and young,” Benfield says in Sole-Smith’s newsletter.

“We both want women to be mothers so badly in this country that we are taking away our rights to do anything else and we want women to look like they’ve never given birth or gone through any of the physical changes.”

I have some work to do around my own anti-fat biases. But I do not regret taking Mounjaro, even as I know that what I am doing is catering to this self-loathing that has been manufactured by our culture and taught to us directly. I acknowledge that being thin makes me appear youthful. It gives me the sense of longevity. I am closer to the “privileges of youth” as Beden would say, because I am thinner. I am more valuable in the world because I am thin-enough and reap the benefits of the connections that can be made more easily now. And somehow, the thinness and the attractveness feels like it innoculates me from the uncertainities of aging.

If I’m hot (read: thin). I’m not dying.

Obviously, I’m still working this out.

So, I’m going to give us all some grace about procedures and drugs and hacks. Because we are doing our best. We have our crutches and our ways of coping, even as we know we shouldn’t need or want them. I mean, this is centuries of bullshit heaped on women from all kinds of cultural experiences. It’s not our fault. As Beden and Sole-reminds us: “…in workplaces, ageism becomes a factor at age 35, for women.” And that’s not even Hollywood.

Maybe it’s enough to recognize we have inherited these issues and they aren’t ours. Instead, we are left to manage them as we can. Hopefully we can be kind to each other while we do it. And also talk about these issues openly, so we can bust them open and change things for the women coming up behind us on the ladder.

Looking forward to your thoughts in coments.

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END NOTES:

Super-fun light saber high-jinxs at David’s show (this one in Vegas at the Rio) The Empire Strips Back. Hope you all are having a great week.

Thank you to the folks who have become paid subscribers. Your support means so much to me. See you in the comments!

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim