Should I Just Grow the Beard? The Dilemma of an Aging Woman
I believe that if I were the last person on Earth, I would continue to tweeze my chin hair.
Post-apocalypse dystopia, nuclear winter, zombies shuffling through the streets, groaning, sniffing eagerly for still-pumping human hearts. Whatever. It might look like that episode of The Twilight Zone, “Time Enough at Last,” but instead of a man in a deserted library with coke bottle glasses, I would be a thirty-something woman crouched in a desolate landscape clutching a Hello Kitty compact mirror and a pair of tweezers.
And when the tiny screw that holds my tweezers together fell away, I would drop to my knees, wailing inconsolably.
I’ve devoted some time to this image and here’s why: self-acceptance is high on my personal docket of non-negotiables. Unconditional love of self would seem to preclude the need to compulsively run the pad of a forefinger delicately over one’s chin, alert for rogue bristles. Yet, if I’m being honest, the “self” I accept is a finely modified version of the original. I accept the self with the shaved legs and the colored hair and the smooth chin. She’s great — I like her and we mostly get along. But I’m starting to wonder if this makes me a self-love fraud.
Enter the zombie apocalypse scenario.
Making changes to your appearance, in particular changing things because you dislike them, doesn’t mean you don’t love yourself enough. But it can mean that. So I’ve decided the ultimate test of my self-acceptance is in the why. Why am I tweezing my chin? Or, maybe, for whom?
I pluck my beard for me. This is evidenced by the fact if I were the last person on Earth, I would still do it. And not just on the off-chance I misjudged my sole-survivor status and someone might show up, be grossed out, and run away before I saw them. I think I’d keep shaving my legs on the reg. Though I’d probably give up makeup. Anyway, no one would be left to manufacture Tarte so I’d have to use charcoal briquettes for eyeliner, crushed rose petals for blush, and the powdered bones of the dead to even my complexion. It just seems like too much trouble.
As I get older, I find myself both more and less challenged when it comes to self-love. More because time changes our bodies and there’s always something new to come to terms with. I mean, it’s not like I always had chin hair. And less because time changes our minds, too, and my mind has come to think I’m pretty ok. What my younger self would have looked at as flaws, my older self sees as evidence I have lived in this body and put it to good use. My bristly chin is propping up a pretty nice smile.
When we say someone is “aging gracefully” what we mean is that they don’t look as old as they are — whether by having disguised their age cosmetically or because they won the genetic lottery. In the world of self-love and acceptance, I’d like aging gracefully to mean allowing age rather than resisting it. I’d like it to mean not being ashamed there is evidence you have lived in your body.
Most of all, I’d like to believe that I can love my body completely, even if I never let my tweezers out of sight.
