Posted by leeran on April 19, 2003, at 16:27:37
In reply to Re: That makes you above-average! :-D, posted by fayeroe on April 19, 2003, at 14:51:36
Pat,
The numerical age doesn’t bother me as much as watching "things" fall apart. I'm in early menopause and I've seen such a decrease in some areas (my hearing/my eyesight) and such an increase in others (my weight/my bra size - yes, that subject again, but I have read that it can be one the hallmarks of menopause).
I definitely wouldn't want to go back to being younger from an emotional sense. Not at all. I suppose I agree with you, in some ways I feel younger than 44, and after all, it is just a number. However, I’m definitely not as comfortable with it as you sound. Maybe someday . . .
As an aside, I have never lied about my age. It’s just not something I would ever consider doing. My age is too tied up with what I’ve done in my life and how I got to this particular moment. I’m always fascinated with the notion of hiding one’s age (especially as I get older). I have an acquaintance who is obsessed about keeping her age a secret, to the point that she’s tried to have another driver’s license created for situations where she has to show it as her i.d.
There’s no question that I’ve had my own real issues with aging the last two years but it’s been from a physiological sense, not from a concern with the actual age. I attribute most of this to perimenopause/early menopause. A hormone is a horrible thing to lose . . .
Pat, if by "remember how hard it was to maintain" you mean maintaining appearance/weight and all that, then I suppose I'm still in semi-active battle mode. I used to post on a plastic surgery board and this topic was often broached:
Is it harder to grow older if you’ve always considered yourself attractive OR harder to grow older if you never were particularly fond of your looks and the aging process has just accentuated what you didn’t like in the first place.
I’m in the second group.
I have always had low self-esteem regarding my appearance, but professionally, I felt very successful so I just held the other feelings at bay. I guess “worlds collided” when I started perimenopause/menopause. My weight went on a hormonal heyday, I left my job of seventeen years, remarried, moved to California, and one day looked in the mirror and realized I didn’t even feel good about myself professionally anymore. After doing the same work for seventeen years I had really “become my job.” People used to laugh about the fact that my initials were, coincidentally, the same as the publication I worked for.
I have had plastic surgery and I feel a lot better about myself physically. Better than I have in years. Now, do I like admitting that plastic surgery helped my self-esteem? Not really, but it did - so I can't really lie to others (or myself) where this is concerned.
Should I have been more positive about my internal self in order to accept my external self? Yes, probably, but a lot of this started in childhood and now, as an adult, the money for therapy went toward my physical self and now I'm trolling around the internet trying to fix the rest of what's broken (this part is tongue in cheek I hope you know!).
Oh these message board postings . . . they do sound so self-absorbed (the ones I pen, not anyone else’s!). I really need to just write them and save them to my hard drive, but there's something about this "box" that invites the soul to perform an agonizingly slow striptease.
In a rather odd way, fixing what was broken on the exterior has given me a little more courage to look at what needs tending to on the interior. TA DA. I had a moment of self-realization (or rationalization?) so I feel ready to tackle the day.
If anyone actually had the patience to get to the bottom of this drivel known as my post, I would be curious to hear how others feel about aging/appearance and its effect (if any) on emotional well-being.
Lee
poster:leeran
thread:220364
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030414/msgs/220707.html