Finally, at Fifty, I Can See Myself

I participated in the betrayal of my face because it’s easy to do when your thoughts about beauty are colonized and your appearance is a battleground.

I hate that the “women turning fifty” narrative is just another reclamation project urging women to hold back the ocean of aging with lube, a jade face roller, a bucket list. So much of this narrative rests on the assumption that we took the road much traveled, as we’re reminded that we “earned” our wrinkles, that we can finally lose our inhibitions with partners, that we should love our bodies and the evidence of childbirth. I never gave birth, I’m not a spouse, I haven’t yet hit menopause or even “middlepause.” How do I redefine myself at fifty, without these relationships to other people? Sometimes it feels unfair that the only relationship to redefine is the one between me and my face.

The scrutiny and rejection of my face began when I was young. When I was four, my mother pointed to my baby photo and said I didn’t look like her because I was adopted (I’m not adopted). Immigrant mothers like mine often parent in contradictions, and my face was a trap: too round, too square, too much makeup, not enough effort. My uncle used to bully me by drawing on my face with a marker. An art teacher once drew my portrait, realistic in every way except for my eyes, which were drawn as two tilted lines.

This continued as I got older: A dermatologist examining a possible melanoma offered to burn off some of my freckles with liquid nitrogen, and I let him. When a complication with LASIK made my eyes so dry my eyelids stuck to themselves and turned from hooded to folded, my aunts rejoiced. “We just saved thousands of dollars,” they said, as if I was considering eyelid surgery to begin with.

For decades, the face in the mirror never seemed like my face. It surprised me to see it. It shocked me with its ugliness, or startled me by not looking as horrible as I thought. Years after the fact, I wondered, was this face why a fellow student had entered my room, the last night of freshman year when I had beer for the first time ever, become drunk-sick for the first time ever, and pinned me with his full weight? Even though I was not awake, even though there was the telltale smell of sick on my pillow? Was it because this face was neither too ugly to put him off the trajectory of his assault, I thought, nor pretty enough to warrant better treatment?

When I turned forty, I sat before a healer in Bali who told me to smile at myself in the mirror—it would “heal my heart,” he said. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hold my own gaze without embarrassment.

Now I’m turning fifty, and something rich is unfurling: a loamy self-acceptance that emerged not from a process of elimination, but a long, accidental gestation; years of fighting the good fight, even when I thought I was succumbing to it. Despite the whispers from all quarters about its defects, I didn’t want to change my face. Of course I tried serums and potions, but I didn’t want permanent alterations. I didn’t want surgery. My cheekbones are high, and my nose healed perfectly after a dog bite. My wrinkles grew from smiling, from squinting while reading something great in dim light. My freckles were earned on walks with dogs and hikes to summits, and during the summer when I trained for a marathon. My face is my history, so why peel it down to a bland canvas?

Sometimes it feels unfair that the only relationship to redefine is the one between me and my face.

As a girl, I looked at my feet when I walked, but now I look up and forward, not just to be seen but to see. It’s both a trope and a truth that at fifty we care less what other people think—as if in becoming invisible to others, we return the favor. The more I see myself, now, the less I see what anyone else might want or need from me. I see less and less of what supposedly needs fixing, masking, or changing.

Making peace with my face after a lifetime of internalized self-loathing feels like both a triumph and a betrayal. Betrayal because so much of the self-loathing is inherited from my mother, her sisters and her friends: Shouldn’t I hate myself as they seem to? Isn’t that my legacy? It feels like triumph, dissent against a hierarchy of beauty that put me somewhere near the bottom—I finally feel aligned, inside and out. When I look in the mirror now, what I see there feels like me. I feel liberated and joyous, yet also ashamed of all the time I wasted—ashamed for not seeing my face before, for not smiling at myself in the mirror with my hand on my heart.

I’ve always been a late bloomer, so in a way the late arrival of this comfort isn’t surprising. I feel like I am running out of time to marvel at my image before I can no longer see much at all. For me, the power in turning fifty and finally seeing my own face isn’t the power of flouting cultural norms. It is the power of recognizing myself at last and feeling a welcome there.

Yes, I participated in the betrayal of my face for most of my life, because it’s easy to do when your thoughts about beauty are colonized and your appearance is a battleground. But now, in some kind of golden midlife hour, when others tell me I am supposed to be fighting my face the hardest, I am more comfortable with it than I have ever been before. I fought to be seen, I learned, I insisted, I resisted. I have come home to my own face, and I not only see it, I marvel at it.