Who is that old woman in the mirror?

Making friends with my changing and ageing body.

Summer 2023, age 59. But how many selfies did it take to find one I liked?!

This year I will turn sixty, and I find I’m having difficulty reconciling the woman in the mirror with the woman in my mind's eye - it's not just that I'm two dress sizes larger, but also that the shape, texture, colour and everything else about the way that my body shows up in the world is changing.

Even though I have been congratulating myself on how well I’ve been embracing the process of ageing, earlier this week I was attending an entry-level Pilates class (my gym-injured back having slowly been rehabilitated by physiotherapy) and found myself in a group of women in their sixties and seventies. I felt much younger than them, but when I saw the whole class reflected in the wall of mirrors, I realised that I was just like them; an older woman, moving gingerly in the beginner’s class on a weekday afternoon. I am no longer the young or middle-aged woman looking at older women. I am the older woman.

Right next to me on the ‘reformer’ (I’ve always found the language and machines of Pilates strangely aggressive) was another mirror which showed me lying down, concentrating hard on locating my ‘core’, that semi-mythical entity that will ravel my unravelling body. Seeing myself this way, the flesh on my face falling back under gravity’s weight, I was reminded of my mother’s emaciated face in her final hours recently. But what shocked me most was that even lying down my body looked so much larger than it does in my mind. And whilst I don’t mind being a bit overweight, having made huge strides since mid-life in feeling gratitude towards my body rather than seeing it as some kind of capitalist ‘project’, I was still shocked. Who was this large, matronly, old woman lying there? And how could she be me?

I spoke to a dear friend by Zoom yesterday; we are one year apart in age and I shared this ‘not my body’ experience with her, and she confessed that she is going through the same. And for both of us, it’s not the changes to the body that we are most unsettled by, but this feeling of alienation. ‘How can we have become so divorced from the reality of how we look right now?’ I asked.

For me, I realise that I have stopped looking at myself. Whereas once upon a time I would get dressed and check myself out in a full-length mirror, perhaps changing my outfit if it didn’t look quite right, now I just put my clothes on, often the same ones I wore the day before, if they’re clean enough. And if I do check my reflection, it’s a very cursory glance in a beautifully lit mirror. I’ve learned to pretty well much ignore my reflection, and in many ways, that’s been quite peaceful after the neurosis-driven vanity of my younger years. And I think that was what caught me out in the Pilates studio; because I didn’t know that mirror, that particular reflection of myself, I hadn’t prepared myself for the woman I would meet there.

I’ve been post-menopausal for over a decade now and my hair, once a hank of charcoal silk, has thinned to a filmy grey cloud; when I gather it into one hand to put it up, instead of the two hands it would once have taken, I feel a pang of grief. I mostly appreciated my low-maintenance, dead straight hair (apart from a period around the age of eight, when I wondered if my life would improve had I a glorious hedge of hair like the cartoon character, Crystal Tips.) And I’m okay with my new colour; it reminds me of my beloved Grandad and the more silver I go, the more I am reminded of him; he took care of me whilst my mother was out at work when I was very young, and I owe my core of ‘good enoughness’ to his love.

When it comes to my clothes, these days they tend towards the sensible; it’s hard to buy or wear much else here in deep rural Ireland. I admire Lyn Slater and her stylish vibe (and wish I didn’t envy her slim frame), and the boldness and IDGAF energy of @Cathi Rae on Instagram, but it seems I’ve misplaced my fashion mojo; I think it might be because I don’t know the woman I’m dressing for anymore.

As a 1980s teenager, living in the English Lake District, pre-internet and with only the Freeman’s catalogue to lust over, I would spend hours sewing eccentric and often not-quite-finished outfits to wear on a Friday night out in Kendal. In my twenties as part of the London fashion, PR and magazine scene, I was a clothes horse for whatever designer was having a sample sale, mixed in with brilliant 1940s and 50s finds from the vintage market at the back end of Covent Garden; those clothes, supplemented by staples from Marks & Spencers (it was good back then!) and quirky pieces picked up whilst travelling in India and Paris saw me through my thirties too as an interior designer. I was tall, slimish and slightly exotic looking and I had ‘a look’, but it was one based around having generous hips, a slim waist and a skinny torso. Now I'm more of a chunky tube, and my old look and clothes don’t fit me or my life anymore. Old versions of me lurk in dress bags at the back of my wardrobe, but I’m gradually giving them away to my nieces in their twenties; I smile wryly when I see them on Instagram wearing their latest ‘vintage’ clothes from the eighties and nineties. It seems I am pre-loved.

About 24; late 90s. Bitten nails and smoking (pre-therapy) but proudly wearing Azzedine Alaïa

These days, my face is sliding downhill, giving me either an exhausted or mournful expression when at rest, and the skin on my eyelids is wrinkling over my less sparkly eyes like the ankle socks I spent hours arranging ‘artlessly’ in the eighties. I’ve been blessed, for no reason other than genetics, with low-maintenance, lifestyle-forgiving skin. It’s made me look younger than my years most of my life, something that used to bother me as a young woman; I looked so babyish compared to my peers. I remember peering into the shaving mirror over the bathroom sink on the morning of my seventeenth birthday and my mother, who was much shorter than me, came and put her chin on my shoulder and asked me what I was looking for. ‘I want to see if I look grown up yet,’ I said. She told me that every birthday I would look in the mirror and wonder that, and that every year my face would look a bit older, and I would have gained another year of experience in life, but the person inside me would never really feel any more grown up than it did that day. It was a rare piece of wisdom from her, and a rare moment of mother-daughter connection too; she was mostly too tormented by her own demons to pay me anything other than annoyed attention.

When I do look closely at myself in the mirror, I usually only look at my face; I don’t wear make-up, I never have really, and so it feels reasonably familiar to me still. But it seems that unconsciously I’ve allowed my eyes to swerve away from those parts of me that have been undergoing gradual, but seismic changes this past decade. And so, as I prepare to leave my fifties this year, I’m realising that I’m also going to have to let go of my idea of what my body looks like. I’m going to have to let go of the woman in my head.

Something Lyn Slater wrote recently echoed this experience when she had her own encounter with The Stranger in the Mirror: “How could it be that I had never taken the time to imagine her? To know she would eventually come. Why had I not prepared for this day?"

And this feels like the nub of it. How do I find my way back to her? To me. How do I fully inhabit my one precious body, rather than living in a room nearby, full of old photo albums?

After a traumatic adolescence, and the infertility that left me childless, even at the best of times, being fully present in my body doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m close by, but I observe myself from a discreet distance. Yet I remember myself as a child hanging upside-down from trees and twisting myself into pretzels of joy copying Olympic gymnast Olga Korbut from the TV.

That version of Jody didn’t know she had a body; she was a body. Somehow, I need to find my way back to her.

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