Where the body and the spirit meet and define each other

On 'life-deep beauty' and learning to see yourself uninhibited by objectification

There’s the ideal beauty of youth and health, which never really changes, and is always true. There’s the ideal beauty of movie stars and advertising models, the beauty-game ideal, which changes its rules all the time and from place to place, and is never entirely true. And there’s an ideal beauty that is harder to define or understand, because it occurs not just in the body but where the body and the spirit meet and define each other. - Ursula K. Le Guin

I’m coming up on six months without alcohol but don’t worry. I’m not going to write too much about it. The only thing worse than someone yammering about their newfound sobriety is a sober vegan. And so I will mostly refrain from exhortations on sobriety other than a few updates here and there. Like this one:

I have long been aware that I drank to douse the fiery anxiety that burned my insides, to take the edge off and let my brain ‘float,’ so to speak, after a stressful day. I also drank to celebrate a great day. Honestly, I was low-key always looking for little justifications to drink. It’s been a terrible day! I accomplished a lot today, I need something extra to go with this lovely dinner, I’m meeting up with friends, seeing a band. You get the idea.

But I recently realized that being sober is now my safe place. A fuck-ton of therapy has resulted in a level of comfort and security within myself that I’ve never experienced. Ever. Having a clear head in the evening doesn’t just feel good physically, it feels safe from a mental perspective.

Whereas I used to drink to escape myself, these days, as I learn to trust my perceptions, instincts and reactions to the shit life throws at all of us, altering my mental perspective via alcohol now feels scary instead of the solution.

I was drinking to escape the contents of my mind but the contents of my mind have improved so much that my mind feels like home.

How ‘bout that?

For funsies, I recently recreated a photo I took of myself exactly year ago, before I stopped drinking (the one I posted here) to see if there was a difference in my appearance. Both photos were taken in the same place, first thing after waking up. It’s not a huge difference but it’s something!

Jan 2023/Jan 2024

I think what I want most out of 2024 and the rest of my life, really, is the ability to be honest with myself. We all create so many stories about ourselves; things we wish were true or things we think are true based on bullshit from our past and we don’t really even know we’re doing it. I don’t want to do that anymore.

Some truths about me are wonderful and others are shitty and that’s ok. I don’t think the shitty things from the past are as important as what I do with that stuff now. Do I drag it around like an overstuffed suitcase with a bad wheel or do I acknowledge it and move forward with the intention to do better?

Honesty with ourselves isn’t just about the content of our minds, it’s extends to our physical appearance as well.

Cory and I have started watching the latest “True Detective: Night Country” and although the first season starring Matthew McConaughey as one of my all-time favorite TV characters, Rust Cohle, is tough to beat, if anyone can do it, it’s Jodie Foster as Liz Danvers.

I haven’t seen Jodie in a while and before she appeared on the TV I mentioned to Cory that I was kind of holding my breath, wondering what she’d look like. I keep an eye on aging women, especially when they haven’t been in the public eye for a while and while I have no judgment on how someone chooses to age, I am admittedly disappointed to see another well-known face begin the slow transition into something vaguely familiar.

I clapped in delight when Jodie appeared with a face full of beautiful wrinkles that moved in all directions as she portrayed her character.

I have nothing but love for all women and support their personal choices to make themselves feel good regardless of whether they are choices I’d make for myself but that doesn’t preclude my burning rage at a society that worships youth and sets a standard of beauty for women in their fifties, sixties and seventies that revolves around the faces of twenty-year-olds while praising men for aging like fine wine. What’s the saying? Something like ‘men age like fine wine while women age like cut flowers.’

Fuuuck offfff.

When I see women I admire - Jamie Lee Curtis, Andie MacDowell, Emma Thompson, Lauren Hutton, Isabella Rossellini - looking like the finest wines on offer at a three Michelin star restaurant, boldly paving the way through aging without injections or surgery amid intense pressure to look youthful and flawless, I feel so goddamn thrilled.

I’ve also been joyfully observing Pamela Anderson’s journey from Playboy centerfold and Baywatch babe to graceful gentlewoman gardener in Canada who spent the past year in the spotlight sans makeup and cheering her on every time I see her luminous, barefaced beauty featured. And this ain’t no celebrity Instagram I’m-not-wearing-makeup-here’s-my-skincare-routine, this is real deal zero makeup and she looks fan-fucking-tastic.

In the photos above Pamela epitomizes the quote from author Ursula K. Le Guin I began this essay with and to which the title refers. Pamela started as “the ideal beauty of movie stars and advertising models, the beauty-game ideal, which changes its rules all the time and from place to place, and is never entirely true,” but she has gracefully aged into what Le Guin calls the “ideal beauty that is harder to define or understand, because it occurs not just in the body but where the body and the spirit meet and define each other.” Le Guin adds, “That must be what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in Rembrandt’s portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep but life-deep.”

Portrait of a Woman, Possibly Maria Trip, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1639

Society can never reach a place where we appreciate the elegant, humanizing beauty - the life-deep beauty - inherent within the aging process if everyone considered aspirational is altering their faces to chase youth or, not even youth but some bastardized, Jessica Rabbit, cartoonish male gaze-y version of womanhood à la any Real Housewife or Kardashian sister.

Still, it’s hard to know how to talk about it without coming across as judgmental. Again, there is no right or appropriate choice. I maintain the best choice for you is the one that, after careful consideration, makes you feel happiness from the inside out.

In a society so rampant with physically and digitally altered celebrities and influencers shilling the latest greatest must-haves in skincare (cleanser, toner, serum, moisturizer, tretinoin, retinol, peptides, vitamin C, salylic acid, glycolic acid, hyaluronic acid wtf) I have no business telling you how to age or how you should feel doing it. You do you, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone is my forever mantra.

But I do feel a responsibility to counter the ‘beauty game.’ If not for myself, for my kids and even my women friends, if they have similar impulses. I feel an obligation to try to fight the so-called ‘beauty game’ by placing myself firmly in a specific category the way Jamie Lee Curtis and Pamela Anderson have and offer an example to others who feel the same unfortunate face-altering impulses I experience when I look in the mirror.

I can start by writing here and amplifying what other thoughtfully aging women are saying. Women like Justine Bateman, who, in an interview with Vanity Fair, shared a perspective about aging that resonates:

“I just don't give a shit. I think I look rad. I think my face represents who I am. I like it.” She went on to admit that in the past she's been tempted to try out things like Botox and filler in order to make herself look younger, but ultimately decided that her face is a reflection of a life well lived. “I feel like I would erase, not only all my authority that I have now, but also, I like feeling that I am a different person now than I was when I was 20,” she said. “I like looking in the mirror and seeing that evidence. Bateman added that another reason she ultimately decided to maintain her natural appearance is because of all the women she's watched become obsessed with trying to halt the aging process. “I feel sad for them, I feel sad that they are not just enjoying life,” she told the interviewer. “I feel sad that they are distracted from the things that they are meant to do in life…with this consuming idea that they've got to fix their face before anything else can happen.”” - Vanity Fair

If women who make a living off their faces while under intense pressure to look a certain way can make these choices, I certainly can from my little neck of the Pennsylvania woods. Instead of shifting my face, I want to shift my perspective so that the aging face, the face blooming with wrinkles that I see in the mirror is a face I love and protect.  

It’s hard work, perspective-shifting.

I want to learn to see a reflection I love specifically for the lines, wrinkles and sagging skin without wanting to change it to fit some shape-shifting definition of beauty decided by social media influencers and the Kardashians, who are all just victims themselves.

I’d like to address what’s happening inside to cause me to want to alter the outside. Believe me, I’m constantly pulling and prodding my skin as I stare in the mirror in disbelief but I keep going back to something simple beauty editor Valerie Malone wrote in a Substack post she called Winning at the Beauty Game and maybe it will stick with you as well.

“It's crucial to learn to love your face no matter how you choose to accept or confront the aging process, because you'll never be really happy with how you look unless you can actually see yourself uninhibited by objectification.”

I can spend the next decades of my life fighting an expensive, losing battle all while feeling increasingly dissatisfied with how I look or I can learn to really and truly love my face.

When put like that, the choice seems easy.

Malone’s words reminded me of yet another inspirational woman whose words gut-punched me with such force I felt compelled to shave off my long, blonde hair a few years back.

Cheryl Strayed, the woman who wrote “Wild,” the book about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone that inspired the movie starring Reese Witherspoon wrote something on Instagram about putting on her swimsuit to do laps in a hotel pool and, after decades of fretting, simply chose not to care what anyone thought about what her body looks like in her swimsuit.

"I thought about how simple the deepest revolutions tend to be. Sometimes it’s just saying no. Sometimes it’s just saying okay. Sometimes it’s just saying I am not sorry. This is my body and I do not and will not aspire to your gaze." - Cheryl Strayed

Her words landed like a blow. Yet, even though shaving off my hair felt empowering and liberating in so many ways, I ended up growing it long again for reasons too lengthy to unpack here. Suffice it to say that my addiction to long, blonde hair is a result of the same system that has millions injecting their faces with Botox and Restylane.

In much the same way I have found that a sober mind is my safe place, I’d like to peel back the trappings of societally created beauty and discover that presenting the real me to the world is a baseline at which I belong and long to live from.

I’m not where I want to be yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. It’s hard to even pick a battle front in women’s lifelong war for ‘life-deep beauty.’ Is it even possible? Have we already lost? Skin, hair, body; it’s all been objectified to oblivion.

I can only start where I can start and for me, it’s no injections. It may be something else entirely for you and I wish you well on your journey.

This is my body and I do not and will not aspire to your gaze.

182 days