I looked around my bathroom this morning after I had finished getting ready, and wept inwardly a little at what I have to do these days to maintain my appearance. I use no less than six products on my hair regularly to keep it from looking like I’m wearing a Tribble atop my head, and I have to plug in three different appliances to style this mess. Five different moisturizers do I massage over different parts of my body every day. I shave all the hair that is not on my head (and even some of that, thank you very much, Greek heritage) except for my arms. (That’s not a thing now, is it? Oh god, do I have to start shaving my arms?)
Really, it’s as if my body spat out a child and then flipped a switch - Continuation of the species: Mission Accomplished. This body will self-destruct in ten years.
Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror by Giovanni Bellini, 1515
I know, I know. I’m getting… *cough cough cough* … older. Really, I don’t think I’d rail against it so hard if I didn’t feel as though my twenties had been stolen away from me by an undiagnosed thyroid condition. I spent those years when most people are sowing their wild oats in a state of quiet depression and with a non-existent sex drive. I wore large, baggy t-shirts that hid every aspect of my body and took every precaution to be as sexually desirable as chalk. (Is there a chalk fetish? You should totally rule 34 that for me, k sweetie?) And even when I did make some attempts at attractiveness, I never felt completely comfortable in my body, not the way I’m starting to feel now.
I work with a lot of very young people, and I hear talk of their antics the morning after, of drinking and dancing and, I dunno, frolicking among the flowers of the field, maybe? Who can tell with kids these days? I keep thinking, man, I never did that stuff in my twenties. And now I have a toddler and a job and a mortgage and a bedtime of 9pm. I guess I missed out. It’s not that I regret having my kid. I really do love the little stinker. Mostly I’m just annoyed at how things have worked out. That I have the desire to put myself out there just when it’s no longer practical.
Or maybe that’s part of it, that I want it only because now I can’t have it. I do have a tendency to think in a grass-is-always-greener sort of way.
I suppose I need to fight this sort of self-pitying bullshit. Anyone can have regrets about their past, but in truth, it is the circumstances of our life which make us who we are today, and to give that up would be unthinkable. Better to forge on to the future. Better to make of it everything I can, everything I could ever want, so that when I’m sitting around in my mid-forties I’m not lamenting all the things I didn’t do now.
Not that I’ll ever admit to turning forty.
I live on but I learn nothing.
