On Preservation...

Age determinism is a fool's game!

For a recent campaign for No7’s new Prime Forever range, I was asked to think about what I would want to preserve in my life forever. I mulled it over for a while. Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about changing as I get older, leaving behind old parts of myself to discover the new.

I realised that is exactly what I would want to preserve: the propensity to keep becoming the person that I am.

This is often pitched as a young person’s game, isn’t it? You ‘find yourself’ in your teens and twenties, then march solidly on in that direction. But some of my favourite stories are from women who uproot or dismantle the life they previously subscribed to. To me, that makes ageing exciting, the idea that nothing is truly set in stone. You can change your personality, your style, your whole approach to life, your mind. You can get thrown about by the choppy seas of unpredictable and uncontrollable circumstances, but you can also find ways to ground yourself and adapt.

I have quite a visual mind. I don’t know if there’s a name for it, and actually when I try to put it into words it’s almost like I can’t grasp it. It only makes sense when it’s ambiently populating my thoughts, if I zone in it goes blurry. But one example is, I imagine the year in the shape of an athletics track: winter and summer are the long stretches; autumn and spring are the bends. Numbers, names, months and places have colours, or a sort of aura. Somehow my mind categorises things in a subconscious way that carries meaning that I instinctively understand but can’t explain. There’s a sensoryness to everything.

I used to find it hard to picture my life beyond my twenties, because, in my mind’s eye, it sort of flat-lined. Maybe it’s the generation I grew up in, but the stereotypical domesticity I was taught to expect in my thirties brought me a sense of dread. Where my twenties were a colourful, messy, abstract piece of art, my thirties and beyond loomed like a muddy, grey abyss. An expanse of drudgery and monotony. Millennial greige.

Now that I’m here, I know it’s not that, obviously. Age determinism is a fool’s game. The sooner we let go of the idea the better. My life is quieter, more domestic, more ‘settled’, but it turns out I like it even more. The greys turned out to be soft teal waves. As I get closer, this painting is becoming readable. I feel more attached to it, like I am confidently walking towards the life I desire rather than being chaotically thrust into a world of unknowns.

You just have to keep going. The days will pass anyway. You can either be dragged by your heels, kicking and screaming, or you can greet the day as it comes. Days and years amount to experience. Even if you don’t have the tangible markers of success you crave, you do have experience. Most paths you’ve trodden before, the Freudian slip, the heartbreak, the financial irresponsibility. This is not our first rodeo. The new challenges become manageable once you straighten up the information you’ve already collated.

There’s an impulse to imagine that life ‘ends’ at a certain point. Not with death, but with circumstance. We’re told that becoming a mother or not achieving something by a certain age or losing your ‘youth’ means the vibrant life is over, as though we no longer have access to it. That we ‘peak’. That’s only true if you allow it to be.

I started getting tattoos when I was eighteen. I know lots of people lasering theirs off. But I love even the ones I don’t really like anymore. ‘Breathe’ on my hand for example, a 2020 edition. I love the placement and font, but breathe, really? Very funny from me, I think. It makes me laugh when I see it. It also reminds me that I did stand up comedy for five years. I used that as my reason for getting it, ‘it’s so when I am on stage if I get nervous I can look at my hand and remember to breathe’. Really, I just wanted a word on my hand, so I found something and retrofitted a reason. The funniest part of that story being the tattoo artist convinced me that you can’t have a tattoo that faces you, ‘all tattoos should go in the direction of the body,’ so it’s upside down when I look at it.

All of my tattoos are reminders of times in my life, transportative. I wanted them for so long when I was young. I started with small ones in discreet places, then gradually got bolder as I got older and realised it’s my body to decorate as I wish.

So no, I won’t laser mine. I am someone with tattoos and I will and do continue to get more.

Wrinkles are much the same, they’re the rings on a tree trunk, markers of our years.

I have a complicated relationship to beauty, and participate fully in skincare, makeup and beauty practices. But I also find myself becoming resistant to too much intervention. I’ve had Botox in the past. I loved how it looked and how my makeup went on, but the feeling it gave me wasn’t youth, it was a kind of stagnation. I couldn’t move my face, and I am a very expressive person. I started finding it so much more attractive to see women’s lines in the content I consumed; I wanted to express myself through those micromovements. My smile lines are a part of me. My crow’s feet - my favourite of all the wrinkles - are travelling down my cheeks. My mum has a dimple that eventually joined paths with a wrinkle as she aged; mine is doing just the same.

As much as I care about my appearance, and like to look after my skin, and look ‘good’, whatever that means, I don’t want to preserve my sixteen-year-old skin or my twenty-year-old arse. I’d like to look like a glowing thirty-something, sure! But I am forcibly uncoupling from the idea that you should want to look like an age you’ve already completed. I don’t want to ever be stuck, why shouldn’t that show on my face? But hey, I could change my mind on this, too. (One thing they don’t tell you about ‘booty building’ at the gym is that you have to do it forever to keep it. I eventually grew out of that in favour of running. It was my brain or my butt. I chose my brain.)

I want to look back at the woman I was five years ago and find her to be a familiar stranger, the woman who led me closer to the one I am now. I want to preserve the me that keeps on going.

No7 helps preserve your skin’s visible prime, allowing you to focus on everything else that makes you, you.

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