I like getting older

spoiler alert, it gets better -shit, I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.

Song of the week: Float On by Modest Mouse

My first ever substack I posted was called ‘the price of being alive’. I was twenty-four and had thousands of photos saved on my camera roll of my biggest insecurity of the week - a wrinkly forehead. During different weeks, it changed between looking up hospitals in Turkey for nose jobs or experimental beauty treatments on Harley Street. Unluckily for me, every insecurity had an answer only a Google search away. Of course, there were the slow approaches like retinols and fancy creams to deal with my wrinkly forehead or there was a simple option, so I took it. By the weekend, I was laying feet up in a botox clinic in Chelsea with a looming needle above me.

If you read that substack, you’ll know not only did I not go through with it, on Sunday night at 11pm I decided to write it up into an article and press publish. The next morning, I woke up to hundreds of comments on TikTok of people letting me know they had now changed their minds too because of it.

This isn’t to say I don’t find the lines in my forehead irritating still or the fact I have to keep dyeing over the incessant grey hairs that keep coming annoying - because I really do. I still sometimes get tempted to get botox again and I think about getting highlights. But, more than I feel insecure, I feel glad to just no longer be in my early twenties.

If you starve the thought, it dies. So, I try to stop consuming their content as much as I can. My feed is now filled with book reviews, recipes, and beautiful homes. There’s nothing wrong with how you look and if someone needs to convince you to buy something, you never needed it in the first place. Every now and again it’ll try to plant a seed to suck you back under its cold wave. The other day my favourite influencer posted for transparency reasons of course, her getting salmon sperm injected into her under eyes. Instead, you get to close the app and go for a walk.

My eyes were folded into corners at the edges, and my mouth lines were strongly defined, I saw when I smiled my menacing forehead lines folded gently into deeper canals. I thought about myself laughing with my friends on holiday when maybe I’d forgotten to apply a specific expensive face-only SPF, or from smiling too much with my nephew, or maybe they’re from when I’d met someone I liked and stayed awake too late being happy. All of these memories engraved into my face. These lines were actually just the cost of being alive. The price we pay to have experienced happiness. I read a quote a long time ago that said you can’t love yourself and hate the experiences that made you. Suddenly they didn’t seem so grotesque to me anymore, just human.

- Excerpt from ‘the price of being alive’

Your early twenties are prey to all sorts of bad advice like getting work done. There’s a belief that twenty-three is the worst year of your life. I couldn’t agree more. A year of transition - I really believe it strips everything away from you and you begin again with nothing. My early twenties felt impossible at times. I lost jobs, lost men found me, and most of all I didn’t know who I was. Or at least I had forgotten. It’s the type of age where the fig tree analogy haunts you because it should at that age. You’re staring up at all of these choices ahead of you and watching them rot. Life feels fleeting and you are no longer seventeen but I wish I could tell myself you’re still so young. Each year in my early twenties up until last year if I’m being honest, felt like someone was taking something away from me. Being young can feel like currency you’re losing instead of focusing on the things you’re gaining by experience. It is only now I realise I have been given something each year instead, and it’s true what they say, life does get easier.

Raw cuts of twenty-two fade into pink scars of twenty-six. This could just be a summer peppered between harsh winters but you know enough now to lie belly up in the sun when it’s here and enjoy it.

To age is a privilege, I’m excited to look down at these hands that have got me so far and see life reflected back to me. The same voice that I was scared to use at seventeen, stands up for me at twenty-six. The same hands that will write this substack today, will someday hold my children, and one day hopefully theirs. I like that with each month that passes, I cement further into who I am whilst also becoming someone entirely new. Like coming home, I can’t wait to meet myself in the future.

With each year that passes, you kind of stop giving a shit about the things that felt so important when you were younger, in short, keep going.

I’ll take my lined forehead and my grey hairs if it means I get to keep the lessons learned that got me here.

-Shit, I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.