Hey 19

Over at Unfogged, Ogged has a post up about aging and men's body, how they deal with the changes and slow erosion of some abilities. I read the post last night, and it intersected exactly with my preoccupation of the evening - how women, and this woman in particular, deal with aspects of aging.

The occasion for my preoccupation: I went to a concert, and I don't want to say what concert, at least not right out here on the main page, because it's sort of dorky. And I'm not sure how totally objectively dorky it is, but I know it is dorky for me because, honestly, I was a little young to be at this show. I am 30 and this was a crowd of Boomers. And I'm not someone who thinks too much about age in regular life and I definitely am not someone who is antagonistic about Baby Boomers. But really, a person couldn't *not* think about it in this context.

So I found myself spending a lot of the evening wondering what I would look like in 20 years, how my shape will have changed, what my face will have done. I mentally evaluated women around me, making notes of good and bad things that can happen. It was pretty loathsome of me.

But this is part of what getting older has meant for me. I notice the things that Ogged notices, to a certain degree: I get sick more easily, it is much harder for me to recover from sleep deprivation or over-consumption.  I used to able to replace breakfast with cigarettes for 3 days and lose 3 lbs. But on many counts my body is much stronger and more flexible on account of I now do yoga and I didn't before. 

But here's the thing about my relationship to my body that really bugs me out: I no longer feel at all confident of my own perception of it. As in, I feel pretty sure the mental picture I have of myself is stuck at around 24. When I see pictures of myself these days, they are not precisely what I expect them to be. And when I am surrounded by women in their 50's, I think, "Hmmm, do I look more like this one or that one?" I do not see any reflections in my college students anymore.

I can't over-emphasize how radically unsettled I feel by the idea that I can't get a good picture of my body anymore, That I may not be able to trust my own portrait of my physical self. And I think this unsettlement has very much to do with the value women are socialized to place on hyper-awareness about their forms. I suddenly feel like Im not doing my job both because my body is aging and because I am less sure that I know how it looks.

I guess these are mostly mundane observations, but I think it is telling and more or less disgusting that my female perspective on getting older is bound up in the arena of appearance, but more precisely one's ability to monitor appearance. And the comparison to a piece that dwells on the male perspective of noting what one's body can and can't do any more seems equally telling.*

*Obviously, I know neither of these are exclusively female or male preoccupations. But I find them instructive when considered in these parameters.