What are you feeling so insecure about?

My 40th high school reunion was this past Saturday. In the lead-up to the event, I bought a new eyebrow pencil, a pair of matte gold kitten-heel sandals, and foundation that promised not to settle into creases and wrinkles but instead to “float” above them, creating a “dewy” finish. I tried on and discarded seven or eight outfits, and my husband David tried his best to keep his face neutral as I demonstrated each one. But when you’ve been married for as long as we have, you learn to read micro-expressions like a wildlife spotter, and I could tell from his micro-expressions that my outfits were not landing in the way I hoped they would. Then David suggested that the common theme among all the outfits seemed to be that I was hiding behind voluminous skirts and blousy tops and maybe feeling a little insecure and I was like, “How dare you? Who made you the fashion police? Also, I am not hiding. I am trying to make a statement, which is I AM CHIC AND NOT OLD AND MOST CERTAINLY NOT INSECURE.”

Okay, maybe a little insecure.

I hate this about myself, that I spend so much time obsessing over what other people think. Do they like me? Do they think I’m smart? Do they think I’m improbably and enviably youthful? Am I being stupid and frivolous because I want to look younger than my chronological age? Yes, absolutely. Also, I can’t help it. I am vain and self-absorbed and, apparently, incapable of aging gracefully. Last year, I enlisted David to take headshot photos for my new website and we ended up having a huge fight because he kept telling me to look natural. “Natural” is code for “you’re going to hate how you look in all these pictures and you’re going to yell at me,” which is exactly what happened because in my head I look a certain way and in the pictures I look a certain other way. To save our marriage and my vanity, I ended up going to a professional photographer who, with the assistance of professional lighting and a professional hair and makeup artist and a professional level of flattery (at no point did he tell me to look natural!), managed to reconcile the discordance between how I look in my head and how I look in real life. Seven months after I wrote the headshot post, The New York Times published an article titled “Felt Cute, Until They Gave Their Husbands the Phone” and I just want to say that I had my finger on the cultural pulse of how women my age feel about photos taken by their partners way before the newspaper of record did.

Take these neuroses and triple them and you’ll have an approximation of how I felt in the lead-up to prom our 40th high school reunion.

I say “our” because David and I graduated from the same high school in the same year (Go Mustangs!), so it was his 40th high school reunion as well. We were not high school sweethearts, because that would be too nauseating, and also, we revolved in different social circles: David was clean-cut and was on the swim team and did speech and debate and I wore all black and smoked behind the auditorium with my drama geek friends.

I’ve been friends with the drama geeks since our days of Clearasil and braces. (Take that, Paul Simon.) Now we have children, mortgages, aging parents, bad knees, almost 45 years’ worth of inside jokes, and an active WhatsApp chat. It wasn’t them I was trying to impress (I mean, they know me. You can’t put on airs with people who’ve seen you wear leg warmers unironically). Who was I trying to impress, you ask? Honestly, I don’t think I had anyone specific in mind. But what I wanted was very specific: to appear effortless, nonchalant, elegant but casual. I wanted people (which people? I don’t know!) to look at me and think, Wow, she’s so different from the anxious girl with bad hair who talked too much.

What I wanted was sprezzatura, a word that’s like a party in your mouth, especially if you say it with an Italian accent accompanied by a dramatic hand flourish. Coined by Renaissance diplomat, soldier, and courtier Baldassare Castiglione in 1528, sprezzatura refers to expertise without any apparent effort, an ability to make accomplishment look easy-peasy. If you were a Renaissance nobleman with sprezzatura, you could control an unruly steed or a falcon, wield a rapier with panache, parse a passage from The Aeneid, dash off a poem, or strum a mandolin, all without breaking a sweat. Think Westley as Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride; think that lady in the Enjoli commercial from the early 1980s (she can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never ever let him forget that she’s a WOMAN). Think “duck syndrome” (placid on the surface, paddling frantically below), or, if you’re a young(er) person, think “rizz.” Different words, same concept, which in my case translated to wanting to show up at the reunion looking stunning but in an “I woke up like this” kind of way. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.

Maybe it’s not insecurity at all.

Maybe it’s an increasingly urgent awareness of passing time. It seems like only yesterday we were 17, marching off the field in our white and green gowns, the world our oyster. We thought: college. We thought: independence. We thought: we will always be this young. There was so much we didn’t know.

There’s an aching kind of tenderness in seeing someone you’ve known since early adolescence and glimpsing the outline of the kid they once were in their adult self. There were so many people at the reunion I didn’t recognize, but then they laughed, or turned their head a certain way, and I was like, Oh, it’s you.

Maybe I want to look younger than my chronological age because I want time to stop passing so fucking quickly.

The day before the reunion, I dug a sleeveless black dress out of the back of my closet. It went perfectly with my gold sandals, and it went perfectly with my high school affectation of wearing all black. David changed his shirt three times before we left (I so badly wanted to ask him what he was so insecure about, but I didn’t). We looked pretty good together, if I say so myself, and it only recently occurred to me that High School Irena would have been impressed by Grown Up Irena, in no small part because growing up takes real work, sprezzatura be damned.

Some additional notes from traveling back in time:

-Everyone I spoke with was massively grateful that there were no cell phones to document all the stupid shit we did in high school. Also, sort of shell-shocked about how much the world had changed, and how much we had changed (but also remained the same).

-One of the slides in the slideshow documented how much it cost to be a teenager in 1986. To wit: gas was $.99 a gallon, a large pizza was $8-10, a movie ticket was $4.25. If I remember correctly, a bottomless cup of coffee at Denny’s (where we drama geeks hung out) was $.59 and a pack of cigarettes was a dollar and change, and since Starbucks and stricter smoking regulations and an awareness of my own mortality were still light years away, I could pretend to be sophisticated practically for free.

-I still refuse to age gracefully but I’ve decided to try to age gratefully.