My birthday is in T-minus 3 days as I write this first official blog entry, and as I approach 23, I find myself thinking more and more about time, age, and existence, like most 20-somethings. What’s the point of your twenties if you don’t have an existential crisis every week?
I think many of us, since the beginning of our existence, have struggled to grapple with age. Age marks time, and time never stops moving. I feel as if we see time as a bad thing; the world around us wants to freeze it, whether through the million different facial serums marketed to “prevent aging” or the impending doom of getting old. What does being old even truly mean? What age is old? Ask a sixteen-year-old, and they’ll probably say thirty; ask a thirty-year-old, and they’ll probably say sixty; ask a sixty-year-old, and they’ll most likely say eighty. Now, if you are eighty years old, you might be old.
In the age of normalized cosmetic surgery, I often think of something a thirty-something told me, drunk in a bar bathroom, after she complimented my luscious, voluminous curls (her words, not mine): “Why would I change the face that my grandmother still carries?” As a woman who quite literally carries my grandmother’s face, I never put it into perspective until that moment in the two-stall, kinda grimy NYC bar bathroom. When I look at my grandmother, I see every laugh she’s ever had, every cry, and every moment she’s lost her temper. Weirdly, it reminds me of the subway map system, every line that connects to every borough- how a line forms so comfortably at the outer corners of her eyes and connects simultaneously with the ones around her mouth, the way the 1 train travels from 242nd all the way down to the South Ferry station.
Our faces carry memories: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I once feared aging and wished I could stop it, but now, as I write this three days before turning 23, I look forward to the map new laughs and cries will create on my face. But I draw the line at grey hairs… I’ll pluck every last one until I lose that battle! Or until the next, maybe forty-something, will drunkenly tell an insightful story about grey hair.
– J
