Over the hill

Damn, Gwenyth Paltrow looks good. So does Amy Pohler, for that matter.

I just Googled it. Gwenyth is 53 years old, and Amy is 54. I am 40 years old. Neither of these women could be my mother, and yet they feel SO much older to me. After all, I remember melting into my movie theater seat in eighth grade, watching a pre-GOOP Gweny and Joseph Fiennes (SWOON) on the big screen in Shakespeare In Love.

In 1998, she looked like this:

And I looked more like this:

Now you can see why it’s hard to wrap my brain around how few years are really between us. What is 40 supposed to look or feel like anyway?

I’ve been living it for about seven months now, and the jury is still out. I should get a mammogram, a colonoscopy (??), and maybe get serious about my annual physical. Settle down, my appointment is booked.

Turning forty years old has felt incredibly disorienting and sort of hard to swallow, to be honest, but perhaps not as much as the prospect of 41. It’s similar to 30. Not quite in your thirties, just sitting on a liminal precipice of potential. Ten years later, with some major life milestones left behind in a cloud of thirty-something pandemic blur, the gap year doesn’t feel like there’s quite as much runway staring down this new decade.

I’m not alone in not really understanding how to approach middle age. This seems to be a generational conundrum. It makes sense. There really is no blueprint for reaching this stage with this particular context. We’re the first generation to aggressively not be doing as well as our parents. Parenthood isn’t an automatic expectation anymore. Home ownership is impossible. Dependable work has become an urban legend. And, by golly, we love skin care!!

There have been many an essay corroborating my confusion, because what is a true millennial if not five navel-gazing, yet insightful think pieces stacked in a trench coat? Forty for millennials is an oxymoron. Apparently, we’re aging out of the internet, but we’re also redefining (read: defying) what middle age has looked like historically, yet last year was the year Millennials got old.

The skin on my neck has all but forgotten how to produce collagen (according to the unforgiving lack of blur on Google Meets, but my classmates in graduate school think I’m in my late twenties 😎 I don’t really like TikTok, but I can totally cook when I’m locked in at work with my Gen Z buds.

Clearly, millennials can hold two truths and a lie (not mine) about Botox at once.

To be honest, I thought I’d handle aging a lot cooler than I have been this past year. But in reality, I’m kind of being a little bitch about it.

Maybe it’s that I’ve been put on an account at work for an aesthetic medicine company and reading the words “resurface,” “tighten,” and “crepey skin” every day. It’s giving body dysmorphia in new whispers of “your face is falling the fuck off, girl.”

I distinctly remember sitting down at the NARS makeup counter when I was 26. “Your under-eyes are so thirsty,” the counter girl told me solemnly. It was the first time I gave my skin a thought beyond washing it in the shower and occasionally scraping a piece of toilet paper with lotion on it over my eyes to remove my makeup before bed when I felt like it. Similarly, I walked into a Fresh skincare shop in my very early 30s and was recommended the light-aging prevention line. A nice to have!

Now I don’t recognize myself in photos.

Perhaps it’s the twenty-something co-workers telling me about going to bars I used to go to when I was a twenty-something. Or, worse, new places that grew like a weed in the place of the ones I loved that succumbed to inflation, trends, and time.

I legitimately need reading glasses now. I can’t read anything up close, unless I slide my glasses down to the end of my nose. If I’m wearing contacts, forget it. I’m holding my phone at least one foot away from my face. I’m so close to needing a flashlight in a low-lit restaurant. I can feel it.

Mostly, it’s these goddamn gray hairs that are messing with my mind!

“Are they bad?” I asked my stylist at my last appointment.

“Not too bad,” she said, picking up pieces of my hair. I can’t tell if she was lying, but she doesn’t seem the type, so I’ll take her word for it.

Objectively, though, they’re proliferating like crazy. Starting in my thirties, I used to get an occasional rogue gray hair.

I’d promptly pluck the offender from my scalp and move on. But after I had my second child, I started finding more than one at a time. It is no secret that pregnancy and the subsequent stress of parenthood can change a body. And this past year…I fear my tweezers are useless. I guess the time has come to decide if I’m going to dye it or not.

I didn’t think this particular transition would affect me so hard. It’s just such a visible and notable signifier of the passage of time, the entrance into a new stage. Nothing says OLD like a head of pigmentless strands. Yet so many of my close friends have battled gray hairs since their twenties, shelling out hundreds of dollars to make them disappear. I’ve always encouraged them to let it go. Save your money; it looks cool! And it does. I have one friend who’s dying for a thick head of gray hair. She said it means wisdom.

But now that this inevitability has come for me…I suppose I eat my words. Maybe I don’t want to be gray. I’m grappling with how much I care, and maintenance is a commitment.

My friend Erin told me it’s my enivable Taurus rising. That’s why I’ve always had good skin and hair. Obviously, this is a delicious thing to believe, so I eat it up. Maybe it can sustain my youthful appearance a little longer. Though, as Emily Gould writes, 44 is an evidence-based turning point in the aging process, so maybe I’m just running the clock no matter what.

I’ve been thinking a lot about former bosses lately. As I rounded the corner to 30, I had so many prominent, slightly more advanced female figures in my career. I vaguely remember one even planning her 40th birthday party. She seemed SO OLD to me at the time. Here I am with my own in the rearview mirror.

At the time, their lives seemed interesting and foreign. They’d talk about their kids and parenting in a way I couldn’t comprehend, but it seemed important and impressive, particularly when I knew just how demanding their jobs could be. Now, as I watch them all cross over the threshold of 50 on Instagram, just like dear Gwenyth, they still seem OLD to me…but maybe not SO old.

The gap is closing in, and I find myself nervous of reaching the half-century mark, yet jealous of the freedom that accompanies older children you can enjoy as people––especially since no babysitter required. They all seem to be living fabulous lives. I may have fewer gray hairs and slightly tighter skin, but I’m still getting up in the middle of the night with a crying child and scraping together a monthly preschool tuition. Every season has its ups and downs, I suppose.

I’m sure my twenty-something coworkers look at me and think the same thing. I can’t wait until they're my age, parents maybe, and they think back to working with me and suddenly think, “Oh, I finally understand, Heather. How the hell did she do that?”

Every generation likely experiences forty a little differently. During a friend’s speech at her own 40th fete, she recalled her father’s 40th birthday party decor, replete with “Over The Hill” gags. If Anne Hathaway in “The Idea of You” is any indication, millennials really are redefining the decade.

Is it because we have 12-step Korean skincare regimes? Botox, lasers, and the introduction of Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free (the wear sunscreen song) at a very formative age?

Is it because we grew up on the Internet––the original digital natives of a landscape that still represents the priomoridal soup of culture and trend?

Is it because we’re making up for our thirties, swallowed whole by two sour presidencies, a pandemic, parenthood (for some), global unrest, and a skyrocketing cost of living? Last I checked… I was 32 years old.

That’s how old I feel, 32.

My dad just turned 80 last month, and I asked him, “How old do you feel?”

“About 80,” he said confidently.

“I feel 20,” interjected his girlfriend (also almost 80).

“Really??” I asked, incredulously. I could not feel farther from the idiocy and naivete of my early twenties.

“Absolutely,” she said with conviction. Can’t argue with that.

My dad called a few weeks later. “I want to change my answer. I think I feel like Wilder’s age.” My son is six.

Age is just a number, but apparently it’s also a circular continuum. So, I guess I’ll keep rolling with it.