One of my Medium peeps wrote me recently that because she had spent most of her life fat, as she aged, she wasn’t as troubled about “losing her looks.” There’s a great deal of wisdom in this, June. Those of us who have been able to trade on our faces, our bodies and our beauty, male or female or otherwise, often tend to age very badly (please see Hollywood), and the anxiety they feel about losing our primary currency is horrific. The idea of not getting special treatment on the basis of appearance is unimaginable. Yet age we must. Get old we must. It’s not just the aging part. When you and I (and my hand is way up here) buy into the universal lie that the ONLY thing worth being is young, and then on top of that beautiful, we have just enslaved ourselves for life. There is no escape. Every year, every wrinkle is a veritable death sentence. There is no rest, no peace, no enjoying life for life’s sake. It becomes an endless, hopeless prison of addiction to pills, procedures, process, supplements, exercise, abuse, self-loathing- all for the two things that we most assuredly WILL lose, WILL have to forfeit over time. Let’s be clear. This sells a whole lot of SHIT. It also costs us our entire lives. Makes us a mockery of our humanity. All for a chimera that we cannot ever capture: eternal youth, eternal beauty. Just imagine. And yet, that is how we live. I did too. These days, while I enjoy still being pretty, still being slim and strong, the truth is that I no longer wear makeup except on very rare occasions. I DON’T CARE. I no longer dress up unless I’m giving a speech. I DON’T CARE. Not the same way I used to. This is what I mean: I care about my body, I care about my appearance, but not at the expense of my quality of life. At 66 I simply want to live out loud as richly as I can. Being obsessed with what I can no longer hold makes me the things I fear: ugly, fearful, jealous, envious, terrified. Prison. In every sense of the word.