#33 Just a vain post
trying to make sense of the increasing desperation of my youth-clinging
On Sunday nights I and a dozen or so other folks meet in Skid Row in DTLA as part of an organization called Feed The Streets (FTSLA) to serve food and distribute clothes and supplies and hygiene products to the unhoused residents. It’s one of the joys, if not the joy, of my week, and I don’t leave without having some unbelievably wonderful or unbelievably awful story to report (such as this: two weeks ago Kanye West’s team showed up in a peach Sprinter van passing out what looked like very necessary clothing to very impoverished, mostly Black folks that ended up being White Lives Matter shirts which was about as cruel and fucked and vile as it gets (here’s the donation link to FTS). The whole thing is a love fest and the very essence of humanity and of course it’s run by AA people and it’s where I feel most alive and most human.
Anyway this week my story to report falls into the self-interest category, and goes something like this: I was standing next to a woman I thought of as close to me in age, who aside from her white skin and brown hair looked absolutely nothing like me, and another woman came up and asked if I was her mother, and when we both said no, the asking woman planted herself in front of me for ten minutes insisting in a very loud voice that we were fucking with her, that I am absolutely this 27-year-old’s mother, that she’s sorry if she’s offended me but come on stop lying. I thought, maybe it’s my haircut.
On a plane ride recently, a man my age tapped me and said “Ma’am” and I said “MA’AM?!?” and he said “Sorry! Young lady, Miss, Young Adult?” A few weeks ago I asked my friend Jordan if he thought I looked old and he said I “looked my age.” Earlier this summer, as I believe I reported here, I tried on a sunflower baby-doll dress and asked the 20-something clerk if it was great or a mistake and she said “It’s aging you.” I have a 23-year old surf instructor and a friend asked me if he was “hot” and I did the sign of the cross and told her I am* (*or so I imagine, in this case) the actual age of his mother.
This all feels like a surprise. Like it just started happening out of no where and I am completely caught off guard, and I’m wondering at what point exactly I grew up and into middle-age. One day I felt like high school just ended and then all of the sudden I’m like “Men the age of my grandpa are hot.” How did that happen? Was it during the pandemic? Was it when I was alone in the woods? When exactly did the grays overtake the brown, or the fifty other fucking conspicuous yet somehow subtle things that announce my departure from the ones who can “get away” with a sunflower baby-doll dress, happen? Where was I?
The Thing about waking up one day with jowls or crepey décolletage or a shifting cycle that keeps shortening and prompting Emily to warn me “It’s perimenopause…”; the Thing about the gray pubic hairs and the sands of the hourglass of my fertility making their final slide into the “never” part; the Thing about the breaking of the cultural pact where your only job is to cling to maiden and a nasal labial fold is a fucking sin. The Thing isn’t any of these things! It’s what they represent, which is the time of my life before them when I chose different things; the parts when I was too busy being somewhere else surviving. All that time in active addiction and hyperactive pain; all that time building Tempest when I could have been building a family; all that time in the forest by myself still recovering from all the lost time before that lost time. It was like all that happened to someone else, and here I am arriving on the scene, bewildered, slathering retinol creams under my eyes like someone else did this to me, like some careless beast stole half of my life and the only way to get it back is to stop any further march forward.
I think I am telling you I am not feeling a fear of getting old, the fear of my own image as it changes and moves closer to its inevitable disintegration back to this earth, or the fear of failing at late stage capitalist beauty standards, which is what I took it for. I think I am telling you: I have been feeling an unnamable grief that I haven’t even let myself see let alone feel; I’ve been too busy at the surface trying to cover its tracks, confusing the scars with the actual event that bore them. I’ve been running fast and furiously toward the Medspa instead of looking. And you know how it goes when you can’t be with something at all, or look at something directly—when you deny. It whispers it yells it screams, it finally sends a very nice lady to stand directly in front of you on a street for ten minutes yelling “YOU LOOK OLD!” And then you listen.
NOTE: I debated leaving off the comments because I think this post could be verrrry misinterpreted. Instead I’m leaving them on with the following disclaimers and requests:
I like how I look. I do not actually think I look old or am old, whatever old even is. If I could go back I would buy the dress. I will wear cat eye-liner until my lids fall off. The term “young at heart” can feel punitive when used in specific ways. I absolutely am aware of beauty culture and patriarchy and their insidious demands. I am also aware of our tendency to tell people their very real fear and grief are invalid because it’s all a social construction! Finally, please don’t comment on my appearance, good bad or neutral; it’s probably also a safe practice to never comment on anyone’s appearance unless they’re directly asking for feedback. Idk. I think that’s it. I love you a lot.
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Ten Things Right Now
The 7-11ing of weed distribution, nutrition labels on booze, maybe it’s not capitalism’s fault you can’t get out of bed, a song on repeat, the best chocolate I’ve ever had, healing ourselves to heal the planet, pregnant folks have a 50/50 chance of getting addiction support, the conversation about suicide we need to be having, a prompt.
A refreshing take on writing about recovery. In other Writing News, I adored this article on Toni Morrison’s Jazz and how she wrote her most challenging novel. It inspired me on at least seven different levels and I ended up with my own notepad drawing sketches with arrows and circles
Mood: “The inability to do basic tasks is not always a political problem”
On our way to buying weed at the Circle-K
“In some ways, the business model for psychedelics is deeply problematic, analysts say. Most psychedelic therapies are based on just a handful of sessions, a potential obstacle to big profits. By contrast, many of the most lucrative drugs on the market — like those that treat diabetes, hypertension or kidney failure — are taken over the course of a lifetime.” I hadn’t thought about this but basically, because you don’t keep people on psychedelic maintenance, this means Big Psych is going to have a high cost of customer acquisition (CAC) with low customer life time value (LTV) which means it’s not a stable business model; if you’re gonna pay to acquire customers, you’re going to want to keep them, not just give them a few therapies and pronounce them integrated. Also this from the same article:
“One patent application for psilocybin therapy claimed its treatment rooms were unique because they featured “muted colors,” high-fidelity sound systems and cozy furniture. Another sought exclusivity on a therapist reassuringly holding the hand of a patient. Then there’s the patent seeking a monopoly on nearly all methods of delivering the drug to patients, including vaginally and rectally.”
“Soon, we may enter an era where mercurial celebrity landlords dictate the terms of service on their own social networks.” This article acting like this didn’t already happen in 2013 lol
I was a guest on This Sustainable Life, a podcast about systematic change through personal change, hosted by Joshua Spodak, and I have not listened to it yet as I never really listen back to me but holy, the host was fascinating. He gave up air travel (FOREVER!) and is trying to make it a year without using a refrigerator. We love him. Very fun, interesting conversation.
Melatonin makes me hungover. There, I said it. I have to be careful but not because I feel like it’s slippery slope just because it makes me feel Very Very Bad if I use it too much or too regularly. Here’s an article on whether or not you can form a dependency on it.
“When a woman with a substance abuse disorder becomes pregnant, a striking dichotomy arises, addiction experts say: She is now among those most motivated to overcome addiction — but also among the least likely to receive care.” I’m sure to a lot of you the reasons for why pregnant women with addictions are the least sympathetic and also least likely to receive care is obvious; to those looking to pull the thread I deeply appreciate the insights I gained from Caliban and the Witch (not a book about addiction; just a book about how the uterus became classified as a means to production, and the subsequent policing of it)
Related: I still remember the night my friend Sarah and I said, Wait, who was Fallopian? (A man.)
A really gorgeous and rare conversation about suicide, with helpful resources
I think I want to try out prompts here instead of threads (like this one we did on meaning). Like “what is your favorite book” or something similar to crowd-sourcing. What are you thoughts? You like the threads do you hate the threads do you just want to do it here? Discuss.
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I generally think people actually have no idea what a 30, 40, 50 or 60 year old woman looks like, who naturally ages. Mass media largely contains images of women who are frozen. It's all a bit same, same but different!
For what it’s worth after I read about the yellow dress incident I jumped in my car and drove to Northampton (where all the young college women shop) and bought a yellow babydoll dress which I plan to wear on Friday with brown leggings (it works okay-ish) just BECAUSE. I am 67 in 7 days. Thank you. Every word you write resonates in some place in me that needs a voice.