Weirder As We Go

"Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself..."

Anne Sexton said that in her poem You, Doctor Martin: “Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself…”

On its own, out of context, the quote fits neatly on a post-it note stuck on my desk and makes me feel better about all the weirdness of middle age. It makes me think that yes, I was beautiful once (though of course I have never believed I was beautiful when I was beautiful. I could only see it later, over my shoulder, through a layer of years). Now much of my youthful beauty is lost, but I am so much more myself, so much more sure of myself. And that’s what really matters.

If you take the quote in context, though, you realize the narrator of the poem is a woman locked away in an insane asylum for suicidal tendencies. She addresses the poem to her doctor and keeps herself from thoughts of death by making rows of moccasins: I am queen of all my sins / forgotten. Am I still lost? / Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself / counting this row and that row of moccasins / waiting on the silent shelf.

So that makes it a lot weirder. But weird is the theme of this particular reflection, so I’m just going to go with it.

Recently a friend invited me to a mezze dinner at her house. Mezze means “sharing” in many Middle Eastern cultures, and my friend had filled her table with warm pita bread, homemade hummus, halloumi cheese, baba ganoush, falafel, tabbouleh, olive oil and zataar. She invited another couple I hadn’t met before, and asked us all to bring poems to read and share. Marido was invited too, but he was away for work so I attended alone. And though it was a beautiful setting with delicious dishes and interesting company, by the end of the evening I was near-squirming with a growing realization.

I am getting weirder.
Indeed, the older I grow, the weirder I get.

I mean, I don’t think it was obvious weirdness? It’s not like I was jumping on the couch or flinging my baba ganoush about the table or reading poems in obnoxious Poetry Voice. I behaved in a perfectly civilized manner. I doubt my dinner companions clocked anything amiss.

But I felt it, thrumming through me all the way to my toes.

Now, I’ve been an introvert all my life, so I know I can get weird at large gatherings and parties. I’m known for sequestering myself in corners or making speedy Irish exits. But I also know how (have learned how) to handle my introversion with grace. Any shyness I possess isn’t painful. I know how to read a room and work it. I am comfortable speaking to (very) large audiences from a solo spotlight on a stage. I can conjure the required small talk when required. I can fool you into thinking I like it.

Perhaps the one-two punch of a global pandemic plus sequestering myself in the Portuguese countryside means I have fallen out of practice in glad-handling the world.

Or perhaps somewhere along the journey to middle age I’ve jettisoned any fucks I had to give.

What I’m saying is that maybe the weird vibe isn’t because I don’t know how to do the polite society dance. How to hobnob, how to bob and weave. Mix and mingle and make the rounds. Maybe I’m getting “weirder” because I am no longer constrained to make nice about all the things that don’t actually matter.

In relation to all this weirdness detection, I’ve been thinking a lot about a Facebook post Rebecca Solnit wrote just a week ago in which she said:

“Habitual politeness defeats me again; as I'm unlocking my electric bike an old man starts a conversation with me about whether I like my bike and it's fine and innocuous and suddenly he's asking questions about charging the battery and then he's telling me I'm doing it wrong, and [insert GO TO HELL DECAYED FECAL SLOP BUCKET TERMINOLOGY here] did I ask for advice? I regret not telling him I did not. Gentle reader, I goddamn did not.

This has happened to me in one form or another about ten thousand times. Always from men, often from older. It's a sort of verbal self-stimulation for their pleasure and def. not mine/ baboon humping dominance rite.

Adding, from my memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence, a passage about my twenties (aka this has been going on a very long time): Men were always telling me what to do and be; once in my emaciated youth I was walking through North Beach eating a pastry from one of the Italian bakeries when a portly middle-aged man chastised me for eating it because I should be watching my weight. Men told me to smile, to suck their dicks, and when I owned an old car with loose battery cables, men would wander by to tell me what needed fixing when I threw up the hood to wiggle the battery cables, and the ones who spoke up were always wrong and never seemed to notice I already knew what I was doing.”

All women have this kind of experience—innocuous and otherwise—all the time, but most often when we are younger and/or prettier.

But it’s not just the way we get accustomed to being spoken to as if we are insufficient minds in need of constant attention and input. There is also the way our physical bodies exist in the world, as eloquently described by John Berger in Ways of Seeing, his series of essays on viewing art:

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.... One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

So if women are continually watching ourselves being watched, what happens when we begin to disappear?

My friend Sarah and I have discussed this for a few years now, what it means to lose the male gaze. It’s like: All your life you resented the unwanted sexual attention. The catcalls, the close calls. The knowledge that your worth is tied to your perceived fuckability.

Over the years, slowly and then all at once, that attention wanes. You are no longer desirable to a certain segment of eyes—the loudest, most aggressive segment. And it can feel like you have disappeared simply because you are suddenly able to walk the streets with nary a neck turning your way. It can be disconcerting because you’ve learned not only to deal with it but to use it to your advantage, to wield your beauty like a weapon. Now you’re empty-handed.

Or are you?

Author Jami Attenberg wrote about this recently on The 52 Project. “I will take invisibility,” she said, “if it means I never get circled by a stranger in a car again. Feeling unsafe on a street. Why are women even worried about being ‘invisible’ when we can do our best work and live our best lives when no one’s paying attention to us?”

Once we were beautiful. Now we are ourselves.

…which also means now we belong to ourselves.
That’s a weightier superpower than youthful beauty ever was.

While it might be easy to embrace the power of being and belonging to myself, making peace with the small and large indignities of middle age is gonna take a little longer.

Knees are creakier, hips are wider, stomach is softer, breasts are lower. There are new lines and grays all the time. And the other week, when the chiropractor gave my spine a yank at my weekly appointment, out popped an entirely unexpected fart.

It wasn’t smelly but it was audible. My 20-something self would have sunk into the floorboards in a ruin of mortified slush and would NEVER have told ANYONE about it, EVER. Would probably have never returned to that chiropractic office, either.

But my current self was only mildly embarrassed. I quickly decided that a man who deals in a business of bodies is not going to be fazed by a fart. I’m sure I’m not the first and won’t be the last person on his table who passed a smidgen of gas.

So yeah. My body is not what she used to be, not even five years ago. And that’s going to be a pattern until I reach my end.

“I shift, I melt, I fade,” wrote Jami Attenberg in another entry on The 52 Project (52 = age 52, btw). “I am trying to get to a place where the decay of my body is interesting rather than distressing, meaningful instead of depressing. It’s my body. I’m supposed to love it however I can.”

Wobbles and all. Weird and all.

In this time of endless decline and expanding weirdness, I am taking a cue from the kids.

Back when Filha was in first grade in San Francisco, she and a few friends started calling themselves “Olympics Weirdos,” as in the highest quality of weirdos you could find on the entire planet.

They even had a theme song which basically involved repeated singsonging of the phrase, “I’m an Olympics Weirdo” at top volume until any parent within earshot lost their mind.

Someone at school had called one of them a weirdo. And rather than take it as the insult it was intended to be, they decided to wear it as a badge of honor: “Yeah. We ARE the weirdos.”

The club lasted for quite a few years. To this day we sometimes catch Filha singing “I’m an Olympics Weirdo” to herself. Next time I might have to join her in the singalong.

Because, yeah. I might have felt like an absolute weirdo at the civilized grown-up people dinner party, and I might feel like a squishy lump of weird when I pull on a certain pair of pants or catch myself sidelong in the full-length mirror at an inopportune angle. But with great weirdness comes great freedom.

The less I am an object for someone else’s viewing pleasure, the more fully myself I can be. And the more I give myself permission to be myself, the more meaningful I find my life. The things I create, the things I consume, the people I spend my time with—all of it is more fulfilling, more worthwhile.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am an Olympic Weirdo.
I’m cool with that.

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