I’ve Turned Into an Ugly Old Hag
And this might be the best thing that’s ever happened to me
When I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself anymore. I see her. She’s me…but not. I see the ghost of myself in her face…but just the faintest glimmer of something I recognize.
The person I see in the mirror is old. And unattractive, at least according to cultural standards of feminine beauty. In fact, she looks so old and unattractive to me, it shocks me.
I don’t feel great about this. But I also don’t feel badly about it, either. It’s a strange phenomenon and a strange feeling.
Does this just happen at my age? I started seeing this woman in the mirror last December. I was halfway between my 45th and 46th birthdays. Is that what happens at the midpoint of the forties? The crone makes her sudden appearance?
Is it the aftermath of Covid, which I contracted in October last year, and which ravaged my hair, making my already thinning hairline almost bald?
I also went through one of the most brutal breakups I’ve ever had last December — one that ended with him ghosting me soon after we became sexually intimate, an experience that keeps happening with only slight variations over and over again. I thought he would at least reach out with an email within a month or two —…
