Getting Used to Our Changing Appearance

Each decade comes with its own look

Our self-recognition gives us a pretty basic sense of stability. Yes, there I am in the mirror. Whether or not you like your reflection, it’s a comfort to count on its continuity. And yet, this continuity is subtly changing from the day we are born to the day we leave. It helps us to feel solid even while the wind is pushing us toward our final transformation.

Little me

All my colors have changed now. My hair is supposed to be honey-brown, my eyes blue-green, my skin tan, my teeth white, my nails pink. But now I’m just happy when I recognize myself. When we don’t appreciate what is, we are reminded what a loss our once-ordinary lives were.

I have spent hours of my youth changing colors. Playing with shades of paint and powder and cream. I grew up in a house of women, and the business of beauty was taken seriously. This focus was countered by weekends at dad’s where nobody talked about cosmetics. There it was all books, and music, and life lessons. Girlfriends from that era were grouped into one of those two worlds, and the bookish girls could not understand my devotion to makeup. One (who I suspect felt pressured to comply with these feminine practices in my presence) tried to shame me for it. “Are you putting something on your face again? If you didn’t wear that crap, you wouldn’t need to carry a purse when we go out.” (Never mind that she wanted me to cart her cigarettes in that very same purse.)

In this way, there was a kind of dual-shaming of each other in our friendship. I was the girl who was acting not serious enough, playing with foolish toys like a self-centered airhead. She was the lazy girl who couldn’t be bothered to highlight her best features or appreciate her appearance. It was all the kind of silly competition that young women fall to. If I had it to do again, I would never participate in women’s competition. If only I’d recognized it for what it was then.

But this happened in my pre-art days and I’ve come to realize that choosing eyeshadow colors or sharpening liner pencils to color myself was an outlet for creativity. I did it out of compliance too, and because of the habit of my once-girlish household, but it was also creative expression. I started to realize this many years later when I moved to the tree farm. My late husband told me then that I didn’t need to wear makeup out in the country. But need didn’t have anything to do with it. He was implying that he liked how I looked either way, and since no one else would see me out there, I should just be free to let it go. But in true manly form, and much like that young girlfriend, he just didn’t get it.

After he died, I realized that I was still putting makeup on for my walks alone through the woods. I skipped mascara so tears didn’t paint my face in black stripes, but I knew for certain then that the makeup was for me. There was a brief period after he died where I stopped wearing it all together no matter where I went. It was an act of defiance, showing the world I didn’t plan on being here much longer. But the old me missed myself and the ritual of morning transformation, no matter how subtle. The practice of femininity. The everyday choosing of colors. There were many forms of me, and makeup helped me decode which one I was feeling most like.

So now as an oldish woman, that hasn’t changed. But there are days when it doesn’t feel so much like a choice but an expectation from the world that certain colors just aren’t right anymore. The most annoying one is teeth. The things I used to be able to eat and drink without changing the shade of my teeth is puzzling to me now. How did my teeth do it? And how did I not see how beautiful my naturally-white teeth were? This was not a color I ever faked and yet it’s one that’s subtly changed and that I try to restore.

This morning I was wondering who decides which of these colors are right, my skin that should be tan and the sclera of my eyes white. “Maybe they’re wrong,” I thought. “Maybe gray and yellow and beige are the new smart colors.” But I can’t fool myself. There is no “they” deciding these colors. These are just the colors of my youth. And as everything changes, it would be reassuring to continue to see my familiar self in the mirror. Not because a magazine article or a friend or a man suggests it, but because I need the comfort of continuity that is me. It just requires an effort that I’ll have to monitor from here on to see how much this old girl is willing to exchange for it, no matter how reduced the outcome is.

It takes a decade

We have periods of stability in our appearance and then when it changes, a readjustment is necessary. Every decade comes with a slight shift in our physical form, and it takes almost the full decade to accept it as the new me. By then, the next change has already begun. At almost 63 (tomorrow, in fact), I still expect to see my 53-year old reflection in the mirror. But if you’d shown me her when I was 43, I’d have asked what was wrong with your camera. It is frightening to look and not recognize ourselves, the one person we can count on having with us all the way through.

Age does have its gifts, and finding humor and appreciation in all our forms is one of them. I can now accept that this changing form I live in will keep changing even more dramatically. I can even appreciate that however I look now or in the future, I’m still here. The young Trevy is still buried in there too. I just don’t yet know what my last age will be. I’m betting there will be lipstick involved whenever it arrives.

May you always see the glimmer of your humanity in the familiarity of your reflection. Thank you for reading.