For Crying Out Loud

There are vanity apps on phones that do age progression on your photograph to show how you'd look in old age. I know these are fun. I get it. However, when you start posting the photos on social media so that your friends can laugh and be disgusted by the older "you," then I think you've crossed a line.

I have thought about this hard and long. What I have to say is this: The app picture of people looking older are not ugly to me. If I had friends who looked like the older photos, I would see them as beautiful.  I love the faces of my older friends, don't you?

Growing older and aging is not a bad thing. However, it is hard to adjust to growing older when we live in an insensitive youth culture that despises older women for aging. I wish young people could know how wrong it is to be judged harshly for becoming something more than sexual objects for men's fantasies. And that's the key, we are becoming something MORE, not something less. 

As a woman with wrinkles, gray hair, and age weight, the laughter and disgust over the age progressed pics diminishes me as a person. I feel invisible. I feel like I am disgusting and should never leave the house. I feel like I am the end result of everyone's fears about growing older. I begin to wonder why my ugly, useless self is still alive. What purpose do I serve when I am so reviled? Seriously, this is how ageism makes me feel.

Let's care less about how we look, and care more about what we do. Vanity is not a virtue. Women don't have to be young and beautiful to have value. The world will be a better place when we stop playing games.

self portraits over time:

I was never beautiful, but still I mourn the loss

I was never beautiful, although I think there were times in my life when I was reasonably attractive. If not attractive because of beauty, then at least attractive by the strength of my will, or the intensity of my stare. I mourn the loss of youth because, as they say, there is beauty in youth. It is hard to say goodbye to all that when your concept of beauty is limited to cultural norms.

Is there also beauty in aging? I think so, if we can only get over our fear of death and our revulsion over the aging process. Wrinkles, gray hair and all the rest less obvious trappings of age are confusing. The changes that aging bring are horrifying only sometimes, but always astounding in their creeping permanency. Still, the older women I have loved always seemed beautiful to me.

I'm inclined to let age have its way with me. I would put my energy elsewhere, because this is a fight I cannot win.

My maternal grandmother.  I didn't know her but I love the children she raised so I guess I love her, too.

My paternal grandmother, one of the best people who has ever walked this earth

My sweet mother (big sigh)