Why Don’t We Celebrate Getting Older?

There’s something about older women I’ve always returned to. Not in an abstract sense, but in the way you notice someone across a room and can’t quite look away. I grew up surrounded by them: my grandmother, my great aunt, women who weren’t afraid to age. Lines, moles, veins, grey hair, hands marked by the sun – there was a fearlessness,  they were unphased by ageing and in that, there was an acceptance – they felt complete with who they were. Nothing was concealed and they weren’t trying too hard to be something, they were just unashamedly themselves. 

When I was younger, I couldn’t wait to be older. It felt like the moment when everything would settle into place. You would know who you were, you would care less, you would live more freely, that feeling seems harder to hold onto now.

There is, particularly in the West, a persistent attachment to youth. Faces are smoothed, corrected, and adjusted within an inch of their lives. The goal is perfection – and it’s difficult not to absorb the harmful affects of that as a woman. You see it everywhere; on screens, in passing conversations, in the way women speak about themselves. There is a constant awareness of time, and an underlying suggestion that it should be strategically  managed for one’s own self projected benefit. And yet, the women who remain most compelling appear untouched by it. 

You think of Audrey Hepburn, Jane Birkin, Elisa Perti, Benedetta Barzini, Cicely Tyson, Louise Bourgeois, or Vivienne Westwood; women who allowed themselves to age and to change. Their faces shifted over time, but the reality was their beauty didn’t disappear, it just took on another dimension. 

Which makes you wonder why ageing, particularly for women, is so rarely framed as something to look forward to. There is an idea that value or worth diminishes with age. That a certain kind of relevance expires, it’s subtle, but it’s really persistent. And yet, the women I remember most clearly weren’t diminished at all with age – they seemed to gain something as they got older. A steadiness. A clarity. A way of moving through the world that felt less encumbered by how they might be perceived. They were not trying to be younger. They were not trying to be anything, really. They just were. 

It makes me reconsider what ageing could feel like, if it weren’t something so culturally and socially acceptable to resist. To get older, once meant to me that I would be more connected to who I was, less concerned with being seen in a certain way, more interested in simply being. I think that’s still what I’m looking for. Not a return to youth, but a return back to the way things once were; towards that same level of complete self acceptance, of valuing something greater than what you look like, and the same certainty I recognised so early on.