Nobody likes getting old. When we are young girls, we want to grow up as soon as possible. We want to be older, but we don’t want to be old.
We are in a hurry to grow up because from the onset, we believe that being adults will give us the freedom to do what we want, to fulfill the dreams that only as young girls we are capable of imagining. The book of life has just begun and the excitement at the expectation of what is to come makes the years of childhood and adolescence go by with extreme slowness.
Then we really do “get older” and have to live life as it is. Some projects begin, others fall by the wayside or simply change. Life begins to go very fast and the years follow one another like the beads on an abacus.
We study, we find a job more or less in accordance with what we had planned. We live love stories with more or less success, and we marry with more or less fortune. We decide not to have children or we do not have children, or if we have children, we take care of them, we watch them grow. Maybe we divorce. And one day, suddenly, we realize that we have reached our fifties and we have already lived possibly more than half the book of our lives, without having done even a tenth of everything we had planned.
We also discover that getting older has rather little enticement. There is a priori much more loss than profit. A bad deal in any case.
Reaching fifty places us in the youth of maturity. We reach a peak from which we have to start descending carefully. It is a turning point that can lead us to live a crisis in which fears are unleashed, fears that did not previously concern us because we felt them distant and alien.
We experience the fear of illness and ailments, the process of brutal change in all aspects of menopause, and the physical change that goes hand in hand with revolutionized hormones. And last but not least, we sense the deterioration of physical appearance, of the beauty that we have always associated with youth.
We live dancing around a bonfire of vanities, in which our outward appearance weighs heavily. Social networks, so much a part of our day-to-day life, present a showcase in which we are forced to be perfectly young.
The filters of beauty are triumphant in stretching our skin to leave it a flawless canvas, enlarging our eyes, mouth, chest, buttocks. We become slaves of retouched images that show how imperfect we are in nature. We question whether we should consider surgery to stretch here, put on and take off there.
The slavery of having to grow old without being noticed is a devastating task that ends up throwing us into an all-out struggle with ourselves. We become the most relentless critics in front of the mirror.
Our grandmothers and mothers did not experience such discomfort growing up. There was a trade-off, a dignity associated with getting old. However, nowadays it seems that getting older is a defeat. We fight to look eternally in our thirties, knowing that we are fighting a lost battle beforehand, as aging is a process that starts from the first day of life. There is no Instagram filter that can avoid reality. Aging is the price of living, and we should begin to see it for what it is, a privilege that unfortunately many do not have.
It is important for us to change our perspective and fully embrace the process. Discover the beauty of our age without disguising it as youth. Nurture ourselves, be healthy and feel satisfied, complete and happy. Make plans and be active, get excited again. Fall in love…
Be conscious that having lived fifty years is nothing or everything … in order to begin living.
Pilar Rodriguez.
Aging. Beauty. Mental Wellbeing.
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