Please, please, please, let us age

We are asked something literally impossibile.
To stop the aging process.
This is simply against human nature.
I say “we” referring to women because it appears that women and men are not allowed to age in the same way.
I’ve been reading “On women”, a nonfiction book by Susan Sontag. Written in the 1970s, the insights are scarily contemporary and serve as a window into a brilliant mind whose analysis continues to provoke.
The books includes essays and interviews about feminism, beauty, aging, sexuality, and fascism.
Susan Sontag argued that women experience aging as a “humiliating process of gradual sexual disqualification”. She highlighted that while men are permitted to age, growing from boy to man, women are pressured to remain forever girls.
Instead of letting the struggle be too intense the writer gives a non dramatic perspective that every woman should embrace:

“Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier – and remain active adults far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived.”

Reading these pages has been both painful and eye-opening, because the issue of aging makes me very angry with our society.
Someone once told me that I sure looked better at 25 than I do now.
I am 35 and those words kind of killed me inside. What is that even supposed to mean?
That my skin looked better ten years ago and my body was firmer?
That sentence had forced me to do a general check on my appearance.
Truth to be told, I do much more sport today than I did ten years ago because back then I was very lazy.
Today doing sports has become one of my top priorities just because it makes happy and it gifts me  with dopamine.
It is not an obsession for a fit body.
The unpredictable fact is that maybe the look of my body is quite the same.
So that person was probably mistaken. He didn’t intend to make me feel ugly nor old, but that is exactly what happened.
Do I have more lines than a decade ago? Obviously. And it will only get worse.
Still – I refuse to be seen as a Greek yogurt with an expiration date on the side.
Women are much more than that. We have fought and we are still fighting huge battles for gender equality but our entourage of male friends and family members still tell us that by the age of 30 ( or even sooner ) a woman starts her decline. Even if some of them might joke, women take it seriously. We suffer.
But either we learn to accept that this is how we are made and that it’s everyone’s destiny, or we might as well give our debit card to the plastic surgeon and cry all our tears, because it will never be enough.

[Fuck this!] Sorry mom for the language.

Let’s disobey like Susan suggested and be an example for the next generations of young girls and women. 
We must leave them a better world so that they won’t have to feel the discomfort and shame we are feeling.
Let’s reverse the rule that we are judged for our appearance and often sexualized because of it, rather than being valued for our mind or inner qualities.
Let’s not compete with one another; this life is not a contest to win a “Forever Young” Nobel Prize.
That is a non-existing prize.
I always have bad discussions with my male friends because it seems they don’t understand how difficult is to age for us. While some of my female friends are doing botox to avoid the unbearable feeling of becoming mature women.
They forget that botox or those invasive facial treatments are merely a palliative against a process that is beyond our control.
In 20 years from now I wish to meet them in the waiting area of a psychologist, strengthening our self love rather than in the waiting area of a plastic surgeon.

Aging means we are lucky to get the chance to live, otherwise we would have died young.
Be grateful for that. Stop fighting it.
When we’ll leave this world, at the end of our days, one thing is sure.
We won’t be remembered for our levigate skin.
We need to hope to be remembered for a deeper trace. Whatever that may be.

Let’s hope to be remembered on a spiritual level.