I Haven't Made Peace with Aging

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I share a little more in the podcast and it feels a bit more personal, but if you prefer to read, it’s still juicy. I also created some images to represent the content of this podcast, so feel free to scroll down even if you are listening. I have a song added to the podcast too!

I haven’t made peace with getting older. I’m not sure when I will.

And I’m genuinely curious about that. Because when people talk about aging, it’s usually one of two things. Either fighting it, all the serums and the anti-aging products and the injectables. Or the acceptance version, the ‘aging is a privilege, grow old gracefully’ one. And lately there’s this whole shift from anti-aging to pro-aging, (whatever that actually means).

But regardless of the different perspectives people have on aging, for me there’s a real grief in it. And it’s not about wanting to be twenty again, because I don’t. And it’s not like I was a super model in my youth and have now lost that ethereal beauty.

Some the grief I experience is of being one person on the inside and seeing someone else looking back at me in the mirror. And some of it is the sense that time is running out to do all the things I thought I might do.

It’s that there are parts of being a woman that are closing off to me. Doors shutting. Even the doors I didn’t especially love. Take my period. I’m perimenopausal, still menstruating, and like most women, I haven’t loved having a period every month for decades and decades (especially when I was younger and had very heavy cycles).

And yet I already know that when it stops for good, some part of me is going to be sad. Sad about losing a thing I didn’t even like. That makes no sense at all, and yet when I recently had a missed period, I suddenly felt sad at the thought of not having another one.

Another grief for me about a woman’s biology, was the realization a few years ago that I would never have another child, never be pregnant again, nor breastfeed a beautiful little baby. I didn’t even want another child. Yes, I was sad that the door closed for me (despite having periods).

There are so many of these moments in a woman’s life thresholds we cross throughout life, that pass by with no acknowledgment. Just a door closing somewhere behind you that you only notice is shut when you turn around. And that is sad to me. I know in other cultures they have rituals and ceremonies for so many of these changes from girl to maiden, maiden to mother, mother to wise woman or elder.

I get that aging is privilege and that we need to be grateful for being able to grow older when so many don’t. I feel it especially hard because I have people in my world living with cancer, some younger than me, some my age, and I’ve lost people to it. Being alive to get older at all is the very thing they’re being robbed of.

So when I catch myself obsessing about a line on my face or the extra weight I’m carrying, I try to stop and remember that I’m here, and they’re not, or they’re fighting to be, and how lucky am I.

But the gratitude, as real as it is, doesn’t cancel the grief. I can hold two opposite things as true at the same time. I can be genuinely grateful that I’m alive to age, and also be sad about how I feel about aging.

Feeling lucky doesn’t to be alive doesn’t stop me feeling the loss. My sadness about the changes in my own body doesn’t take anything away from someone who’s sick. The people I love who are unwell would be the first to tell me to go and live my life, apple belly and all. We know that grief isn’t a competition. We get to hold the gratitude and the grief in the same two hands.

I am the oldest I have ever been. And I am the heaviest I have ever been. And I look in the mirror, or worse, I see a photo of myself, and it’s genuinely disorienting. Because I’ve got these slim wrists, slim ankles, nice slender calves and arms, and then this apple, right in the middle. And that’s not how I feel on the inside. Inside I don’t feel like this plump woman in that photo. This mismatch often catches me off guard.

Ironically, I also feel attractive. I do. I’ve got good skin, only a few gray hairs coming in, I’m on HRT, I’m riding out all the perimenopausal weather, and somewhere in all of that, I still feel like I have a nice face (even if it has a little extra padding). It might not make sense, but I feel that most of us are made up of contradictions.

If you listened to my vanity episode, this is the same thread. I care how I look. I’m a bit vain and I’m not sorry. And aging makes this even more prominent in my psyche.

I have complicated feelings about a common compliment: ‘You look good for your age.’ It’s meant as a compliment, I know. And I’ll take it, I’m human.

But listen to what it’s really saying. For your age. There’s an asterisk in there. You look good... for a woman who’s as old as you are. Why can’t I just look good? Full stop. Why does it need a qualifier.

I love compliments about looking younger than my age. I gobble them up, like I’m starving for them. They make me feel good. Looking younger than I am, is something I aspire to, which is a bit rich given everything I’m sitting here saying to you.

Sometimes, I’ll turn to my kids and go, don’t I look younger than her? Oh my gosh, that person’s fifty and they look so much older than me. I have really said that to my children and they roll their eyes, but one day they might actually understand why I soak it in. (And yes, these are another example of me sharing unflattering little conversations I have with myself, and sometimes with my children.)

All of this comes back to the same old story we’ve been handed our whole lives, that our value as women is how we look. It’s not just from me. I think I have some internalized misogyny around this where I am thinking the same thing even though I know our value shouldn’t be based on our appearance.

And then we also have to deal with everyone’s opinions about how we are aging. I feel like I am getting whiplash from everyone with an opinion about how to age.

Fight it. Don’t fight it. Get the injectables.

How dare you get the injectables. Go gray. Don’t you dare let yourself go. Age gracefully.

I don’t think I want to age gracefully. Even though I love the word grace so much I name my daughter Grace. To me ‘gracefully’ has come to mean: age quietly, don’t complain, don’t make us look at it, disappear politely.

And I’m not interested in disappearing politely. I’d rather age honestly. Loudly, even.

And it’s not only about my face. It’s also the life I thought I’d have by now. You get to a certain age and you catch yourself measuring the life you’ve lived against the one you pictured when you were younger.

I imagined that I would still be married and living with my husband and children. That we’d have a plan for our retirement, and more money in the bank than I do. That I’d be fit and healthy (this has been a goal since I was very young and struggling with my health for so long).

And instead?

I don’t feel that great. I’ve gained weight. I’m dating someone lovely, but I live with just my children and their two cats. I thought my business would be further along than it is, and this year I’m making less than I made last year, which has been genuinely stressful.

And at this age, that gap between the life I imagined and the life I have stops feeling like ‘not yet’ and starts feeling like ‘maybe never.’ I feel the grief of that. It’s one thing to not have done it yet. It’s another to wonder if the window’s closing and I will never do it. I feel the disappointment in the gap between my expectation of the life I would have and reality. And the current reality isn’t bad - though it’s a lot more mundane that I imagined, and it’s definitely different to what I had anticipated.

I also have a bad habit of comparing myself to women who’ve done more than me. I have some amazing mentors in my life and they seem to have their shit together and are doing successful launches in their businesses.

I have to remind myself, I spent fifteen years caring for an unwell child. Ninety percent of my energy, for fifteen years, went there. And when I remember that and I try to find some compassion for myself. Because I didn’t waste that time. I spent it on the most important thing I’ll ever do but it was the hardest thing I have ever done.

And then I think about everything I HAVE made. The music. The books. A business I love that has kept a roof over my family’s head for years now. The fun things I’m building right now, in real time, like my Substack.

I haven’t done nothing with my life. I’ve done a great deal. Things I haven’t even shared with you yet. Like growing up in India while my mum studied with the Dalai Lama, working as an aid worker with Thai sex workers and then Burmese refugees.

But what if even justifying this to myself like I am here, is a problem. Perhaps even that is dangerous because what if who I am as a person is more important that what I have done. The kindness that I share with those around me.

I was talking to a woman in her late eighties recently, and I asked her how she met her husband. He’s been gone a long time now, more than twenty-five years. Her friend had set her up on a blind date when she was 18, and she didn’t want to go. She was going to cancel. But her friend insisted, and she went. She saw him across the dance hall and just like a movie, it was love and first sight and before long they married.

I’ll never forget the transformation that came over her face as she told me their love story. All the years and wrinkles fell away, and I could see the 18 year old version of her shining through. The joy in her face, remembering their romance. She was still the girl at that dance. I had tears in my eyes watching her as she shared her story.

It reminded me that we don’t replace who we were with who we are now. We carry every version of ourselves inside us, all at once. The girl on the blind date is still here.

For me, there is the child who had a tough upbringing, the young woman at university trying to find her career path, the woman who thought she would never be able to become a mother unexpectedly finding herself pregnant in a new relationship, the woman who fled family violence, and the woman I am now. All these versions of me co-exist, even if the mirror only shows the latest version.

When I was 17, my grandmother who was in her early eighties, said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. She looked at me while we were standing in her bathroom, her eyes meeting mine in the mirror as she brushed her lovely long silver hair.

She said, ‘I don’t recognize the person in the mirror. I don’t feel like that on the inside.’

She still felt like her younger self inside, while the mirror kept showing her someone she didn’t recognize. I could see in that moment, that it was hard for her to reconcile the face in the mirror with how she felt on the inside.

And I remember hearing that and thinking it was a story about being very old. But it wasn’t because I’m in my fifties and I’m already feeling it. That feeling that the inside doesn’t match the outside. It hasn’t waited until I turned 80 and looked so much odder. My reflection began drifting away from my own perception of myself much earlier and I think I have seen this with myself and other women after becoming mothers.

That happens over time. But earlier this year, after feeling unwell for a couple of months, I woke up one morning and I felt like I had aged 10 years overnight. I suddenly had big bags under my eyes. I was actually shocked as I have never really had eye bags, and I am not sure how I got away with not having them for so long, but they really impacted me when I looked in the mirror.

I quickly got a new eye cream. I doubled down on my face routine for lymphatic drainage. I watched countless reels on Facebook on how to hide the bags with concealer and color corrector.

Every one of us, aging in real time, feeling like ourselves on the inside and meeting a version of ourselves that doesn’t align to our internal view of ourselves.

I want to come to peace with aging because I’m wasting way too much energy on it just like I’ve wasted too much energy on worrying about my weight for 30 years. I don’t want to waste the time I have left which could be bound for or not worrying about what my Facebook looks like. But I do want to feel good in my body regardless as much as possible.

We are all on a road to the same destination and it’s hard to imagine ourselves not being alive. I can’t get my head around not being here in the future. And even when I think about loved ones who have died, there’s still a part of me that can’t believe that I will never, ever, see them again.

I don’t have this figured out. I’m still in the thick of it and maybe you are too. I am sure more things will come up as I grow older that I will finding challenging.

Thankfully, we don’t have to have it all figured out to live fully expressed. And now in the age of AI and so much inauthentic slop online, we need more of us to be living fully expressed and being real about what it’s like to be a middle aged woman dealing with the challenges that this stage of life brings.

When my stepfather was diagnosed with cancer last year, he was so upset that he’d never written his magnum opus on traditional Chinese medicine. But his cancer moved so fast that in the six weeks between diagnosis and death, there was no time. I still feel emotional when I remember the conversation with him.

This is why I care so much about living a fully expressed life. I don’t want to reach the end of mine wishing I’d done something I never got to. So, if you’ve got a big dream, or even a small one, the best time to start is now.

If you resonated with this episode, I would love for you to share it with a woman who might also be struggling with aging.

And come and join me on Substack, it’s called Fully Expressed, same as the podcast, and it’s where I keep writing through all of this in real time, every week.

If you’ve been with me for the pleasure episodes and the vanity one, you can probably see the thread running through all the episodes where I am exploring what it means to be a fully expressed woman, definitely warts and all. And don’t forget, if you’re a free or paid subscriber on my Substack, you also get the Pleasure Switch Meditation to keep.

I’ve heard so many people say that one of their biggest dreams is to write book. So, if you’ve been dreaming of writing a book, like my beloved stepfather always wanted to, and you still haven’t done it, come and have a chat with me. Because that’s something I can actually help you with. Don’t leave your book unwritten. Let’s get it out of you while there’s time. (Message me and we can set up a time to chat.)

I am taking my own advice. I have written a number of non-fiction books, and I have a degree in writing, and have mentored so many people to write and publish their books.

But for the first time ever, I am actually working on my first novel. It’s about a woman that goes to a 10-day silent retreat in the Blue Mountains in Australia and the world ends while they are meditating.

I got the idea for the novel decades ago when I was at a Vipassana mediation retreat in the Blue Mountains and I looked around the room at all these spiritual people and I wondered how they would truly behave if the world came to an end. My book is no retreat version of Lord of the Flies, but it does explore something that has fascinated me since I was a teen, and that is how people handle life when the rules of society are stripped away.

Here’s a song I created for this episode with a working title of called The Woman in the Mirror. Written by mean and generated by AI.

Here’s to living Fully Expressed!

Love
Ayesha xox

PS Find out how to work with me if you’ve got something you want to express in the world!

Ayesha Hilton is a writer, creator and mentor who believes there is often far more within us than we have yet expressed. Through Fully Expressed, she explores creativity, identity, self-expression and life in midlife, and what it means to bring more of who we are into the world.

She also mentors women who want to turn their ideas into something real, including books, journals, podcasts and oracle decks. Her Card Deck Creators Toolkit has helped more than 1,200 women create their own card decks.

Find out how to work Ayesha if you’ve got something you want to express in the world!