My Complicated Relationship with the Rapidly Changing Face I See in the Mirror

Each day, I see a different woman...and have to say goodbye to the reflection I once knew so well

Photo by SHVETS production from Pexels

I look in the mirror and I feel confused. Maybe even a little sad. I barely recognize this woman.

I smile, just as an experiment, and sure enough. There is a flash of recognition. It’s not the face I know so well, but I recognize the curve of the lips, the crooked teeth, the light in my eyes.

I know that smile.

But it only serves to remind me that I’ve changed. I’ve changed so much, I barely know this person in the mirror.

My heart feels heavy. For the first time, I understand I will never again see the woman I used to be.

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Do you ever think about the process of aging? The way we become somewhat suspended in time for a couple decades (our twenties and thirties), and then, suddenly, our bodies cycle through change so fast, we have to reacquaint ourselves with our own appearance on a daily basis?

There’s a face I have seen in the mirror for a very long time. I began to see her at the age of 12.

Of course she changed over time, but not very dramatically. She lost the plump cheeks of her youth by the time she was 25, and as the years went by, she found more and more wrinkles taking up residence around her mouth and eyes.

At 40, I felt surprised. So many people had told me I’d turn into an old witch overnight. That I’d go to bed 39, wake up on my 40th birthday, and look like a wrinkled hag.

“That’s exactly what happened to me,” a friend once told me, two weeks after her 40th birthday. “I wish someone had warned me so I was prepared. That’s why I’m telling you. Now you’ll know what to expect.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. She looked exactly the same to me. I didn’t see a single difference in her face or body, both of which she described as “wrinkled, sagging, and bloated.”

I thought she looked beautiful.

I woke up filled with trepidation on my 40th birthday, which was nearly ten years ago now, and was relieved to see the same face I’d seen before I’d gone to bed the night before.

In fact, I thought it was an especially beautiful face. I’d spent my twenties and thirties hating the way I looked, and had been surprised to suddenly find beauty in my reflection in my forties.

I know I wouldn’t have said this at the time, but honestly, I was hot.

If there’s such a thing as peak beauty (at least in terms of patriarchal standards), I was in it during the first half of my forties. My hair was long and thick, my face lean yet soft, and I was in the best shape of my life.

I’m still absolutely shocked that men weren’t lined up outside my door.

But things started to change after 45.

My wrinkles suddenly committed. They no longer faded as the day went on, but remained ever present, furrowing even deeper into my skin.

I began to notice sun spots on my cheeks. My eyes became more sunken. I lost clumps of hair and ended up with a much taller forehead than I had ten years ago. And perhaps worst of all, I realized I had developed jowls.

It didn’t feel good. In this day of social media and plastic surgery as preventative care, I have been hyper aware of the fact that I look significantly older than my contemporaries. In fact, in many cases, I look older than even elder Gen Xers.

But what really flummoxed me was trying to navigate what I saw in the mirror with what I felt on the inside. Because, you see, when you start to notice undeniable signs of aging in the face, things you associate with old people, it affects your self-perception. And I did not see myself as old.

On the contrary. If you could look inside my heart, I think you would find that my truest self is six years old. Or maybe nine. Or maybe sixteen. Somewhere in that ten-year window is the real Y.

So much of this world still feels new to me. Intimidating. Sometimes scary and often thrilling. I still have so much optimism and hope, even if I learned to preciously guard it.

And as a childless woman who never married, there’s still a huge part of me that feels like my life hasn’t even started yet.

How can I have jowls when my life has not yet begun?

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As much as I believe the woman (girl?) inside me is a real and honest representation of who I am, I understand that the woman I see in the mirror is showing me a different kind of reality.

Maybe the word “old” is too loaded to use here, but I at least understand that the face in the mirror is telling me my body is no longer young. My reflection is showing me that I’ve been alive for nearly half a century and that I’m entering a phase of life that is very different than anything I’ve previously known.

The life that I once dreamed of might have never started, but I can’t afford to ignore the fact that my life has not only begun, but is probably more than halfway over. It doesn’t matter what happened or didn’t happen. Time doesn’t care. It just moves on.

I think that’s what my friend was trying to tell me all those years ago: Time will surprise you with its insistence.

Her timeline seems off to me now that I’m nearly ten years older than she was back then. I suspect the mild despair she was expressing was more a product of internalized ageism in a culture that erases women over 40.

If there’s such a thing as overnight change, my experience tells me it happens at the end of our forties, not the beginning. As I mentioned, the years after 45 were rough for me. And the age of 48 brought about changes in my face and body that have shocked me.

About two months before my 49th birthday, I woke up and honestly did feel that I looked totally different. I had to keep looking for familiar markers to confirm that it was really me: the birthmark on my leg, the mole on my stomach, the now-familiar wrinkles between my eyebrows.

Yes, it is me I see in the mirror. But a new version.

This version has a face that feels almost like a stranger. A body with a new heaviness in the stomach and hips. In fact, with only one small misstep - an extra bite of bread, or too much water during a hike - and I look genuinely pregnant. My stomach will balloon out bigger than my friend’s daughter who is well into her second trimester.

I look at my body’s profile in the mirror when that happens and I’m staggered. I never got to experience being that round in pregnancy. But I sure am now in late-stage perimenopause.

It is hard for me to accept this. It feels cruel.

I tried to become a mother. And that’s not all. I tried to be a runner. I tried to be good at sports. I tried to get down to a certain weight. I worked so hard to achieve what I wanted to achieve in this body.

But I failed at all of it. And there’s no chance it’ll happen now.

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In the past year, it feels as if the life I once had has largely burned to ash. With a death in the family, and other major changes, I sense that I’m at the beginning of a familiar cycle, learning how to start again.

Yet this time, it’s different. I’ve been painfully aware that an era of my life is drawing to a close - those decades in which it feels like most of your life is still ahead, in which you feel like you have a million fresh starts in you.

I don’t know how to make a fresh start at 50.

Similarly, my body feels as if it has left one era and entered a new one. Despite my rigorous exercise routine and healthy eating habits, it’s becoming apparent to me that my body is going to need more. A lot more than what is currently already my best.

I suspect there aren’t going to be any more resets. Avoiding gluten for a week isn’t going to help me lose the five pounds I put on during the holidays. Upping the weight on my dumbbells isn’t going to magically prevent me from experiencing yet another joint injury.

I’m going to have to change the standards now. Perhaps less emphasis on my weight…and maybe none at all on my appearance.

I suppose that’s how it should have always been.

I’m going to have to learn to accept my growing belly. Accept the fact that my clothes fit differently, and sometimes not at all. Accept that my diet is going to have to continue to evolve as I navigate these difficult years of wildly changing hormones.

And I’m going to have to learn that the slow aging I experienced between my teenage years and early forties is over forever, replaced now by changes that I imagine will be much more extreme and rapid. For me, 40 didn’t look that different than 30, but I can already see 50 is astoundingly different than 40, which means I might see an entirely different woman in the mirror at 60.

It’s okay, I tell myself. It’s okay.

Isn’t is strange and sad that we have to remind ourselves of that? That we are so brainwashed to fetishize youth that we have to work hard to be kind to ourselves in the journey of aging?

Yet here I am, a little bit scared and a little bit sad. I wish I could see the girl I am on the inside in the reflection I see in the mirror.

Since I cannot, I think I have to learn how to help this older woman coexist with my six-year-old self. I have to learn to love this aging woman like I love my inner nine-year-old. I have to help this wrinkled woman find her sixteen-year-old spark.

Maybe the only thing that ever mattered was who I am on the inside.

I just look a little different now.

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