The Trick is to Ignore the Evidence

caught offguard

Has this ever happened to you? Someone sends you a candid photo they took of you and you get a glimpse of how others see you. The camera doesn’t lie, but you’ve learned to make it fib a little when you pose for photos. You jut out your chin to disguise your wattles, open your eyes wide to hide you droopy lids, suck in your stomach, square your shoulders, and turn your best side to the camera, much as you do to the mirror every morning. We all do it—if we didn’t fool ourselves about how we look we’d never go out of the house.

Then, someone catches you unaware and you see yourself as you appear to the rest of the world. It’s humbling, and sometimes shocking.

I am very good at fooling myself. In fact, I’m a world-class chump when it comes to believing my own lies. Here’s an example of my capacity for self-delusion. Reading a catalog the other day, I was excited to see that Bohemian chic is back in style, even though the last time I wore hippie clothes I was 40 years younger, 50 pounds lighter, and had 60% more hair. In my mind, I look like the catalog model – tall and thin with hair like Jean Shrimpton in a 1968 edition of Seventeen magazine.

The reality of how we look, as horrifying as it is, is nothing compared to facing our true age and the perceptions of others about that number.

It’s the kind of thing that hits you when you’re not looking. You’re at the doctor’s office, she’s lecturing you about the need for a colonoscopy and all of a sudden you think, “Oh! I could be her mother.” Not in a creepy way—like you had a child you misplaced or something—but in a startling way, like her diploma says “Stanford School of Medicine, Class of 1998.”

These little flashes of reality are easy to shoo away as we go on our merry way toward the inevitable stint in our death bed, but others are harder to dismiss: the signs that our friends and family are getting older.

I may be still young and hip, but my husband’s hair is turning white and he has a birthday this month that Paul McCartney immortalized in song. If you’d like to know, the answers to the musical questions are: yes I’ll still need you, and yes, I’ll still feed you.

Oddly enough, my son is aging as well. He recently turned 35, a birthday I used to consider the gateway to middle age. Of course, I’m middle-aged, so it’s not possible that he’s even an adult yet. When I was his age, he was already 12 years old. I shared this fact with him just to watch him freak out. Hey, why should I be the only one eating a reality sandwich?

In spite of the empirical evidence in candid photos, the constant querying by sales clerks about my eligibility for senior discounts, and the fact that all around me, friends and family are growing older, I somehow manage to stay the same.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. And if you have any candid photos of me, burn them.