This is not a before photo

Aging is not a problem to solve, it's the fucking point

I’ve been growing out my gray hair. I haven’t made the usual several-hundred-dollar “make me blonde” appointment in maybe six months? And yeah, part of me likes saving the money — it’s obscene what it costs just to hide the truth.

Mostly, I just want to see myself as I am.

I want to know what color my hair actually is now. I also want to watch my face change. See how the lines settle in, how the skin loosens, how time leaves its imprint without needing to be erased.

I want to notice how my expression deepens, not flattens. I want to stay wide awake for all of it. Not just tolerate it, witness it. I don’t want to blur it out or brace against it. I want to meet it in the mirror and know I’m still here.

There’s something about witnessing it —not managing it or trying to fix it — that feels like taking my body back. Like saying: this is mine. This is what a real woman looks like, not some tweaked, frozen version built for consumption. I don’t want to be ashamed of the way I age. I want to be proud of it, proud that I’ve made it this far, that I’ve lived enough life to wear it on my face.

I didn’t survive all the shit I’ve gone through just to disappear myself with procedures. I’ve earned every inch of this face, and I won’t give a single line back.

This is not a before photo. This is the masterpiece, motherfucker.

I used to think aging meant fading. Now I know it means arriving. I’m not so much still here as finally here. Because aging feels like coming back to myself with both hands bloody. Like I had to claw through every lie they sold me just to stand here as I am.

But our culture doesn’t honor that. It treats aging like a failure or a threat. Something messy we’re supposed to clean up before anyone notices.

I hesitate to talk about this because I don’t want it to sound like I’m judging other women.

I’m not.

I understand why so many of us reach for Botox, filler, filters — all of it. Of course I do. I’m a living woman, ain’t I? At nearly fifty, I still catch myself in the mirror pulling the skin back from my jawline, clocking the subtle droop of eyelid, the crinkling skin around my eyes, the forehead furrows. The draw of Botox, the tug to try just a little filler is real. It hums under the surface. It promises ease. It whispers visibility. And some days, it takes everything in me not to listen.

It’s not even that I want to look a certain way although, yes, that’s part of it. Trying to look like the best version of myself. But I also know the game is rigged. I know I’m verging on invisibility in this culture, and I understand that Botox and filler are part of how women stay in the game. Because in the minds of most, a woman aging naturally doesn’t read as strength, it reads as giving up. God forbid a woman lets herself look like she’s stopped trying.

But allowing your body to age naturally is strength.
It’s revolutionary.
A quiet war waged in a mind bombarded by the propaganda machine all day every, single day.

Sometimes I feel caught in this impossible tension of wanting to honor every woman’s right to do whatever the fuck she wants with her body, but still feeling heartbroken over the implications of what that autonomy is being used to chase in a misogyny-soaked culture.

The same frozen face. The same pursuit of agelessness dressed up as empowerment. What are we doing to ourselves? What message are we passing down, not in our words, but in our mirrors? I don’t know. And it’s not my job to know. All I can do is explain how it lands in my own body and mind. And wonder what it means for the next generation when the price of being visible is to look like you’ve never aged at all.

It’s wild to me that I’m the one who has to dance around my reasoning to explain why I want to look like a real, aging person so as not to offend those making other choices. Because Botox, at least among most women I know, is a foregone conclusion, at this point. But I don’t want that. I want to look like myself. Even telling me I “look young for my age” isn’t the compliment you think it is.

I don’t want to wake up one day looking like a stretched, puffy, perpetually surprised-looking version of the societally brainwashed twenty-something I used to be. The ubiquitous, cartoonish, doe-eyed, puffy-lipped, smoothed faces contorted into some porn king’s jizz-dream version of woman are freaking me out. And yet every time I try to say this — that I want gray hair and wrinkles, that I want to age without fighting my face — it feels like I have to pad it with disclaimers. Make it palatable. Be careful not to offend the systems that taught us to dissect and dislike our reflections in the first place

It’s a strange line to walk.

I’m not judging women. I love us. I adore us. Feel deeply protective of all of us even when I can see that some of the choices we’re making in pursuit of so-called beauty are, collectively, hurting womanhood. But, we each do what we have to do.

We’ve survived centuries of being told we’re too much, or not enough, or only valuable when we’re young and fuckable and agreeable. So I understand why we reach for what helps us feel powerful. I understand why some of us are more comfortable with faces that are the result of surgery or filler or whatever helps us move through the world with more ease, more power, less punishment. Those considerations flicker through my own mind, too — especially when I trace the furrows across my forehead like highways on a map, while Demi Moore is looking better in her sixties than I ever did in my thirties.

So no, I’m not interested in judging the choices women make to survive a world that wasn’t built for them. I’m enraged at the culture that made those choices feel necessary in the first place. I’m angry at the industries making billions off our self-doubt. And I’m furious that the most radical thing I can do with my own face is leave it the fuck alone.

Let’s be honest — no woman inherently wants to go under the knife or spend thousands trying to match a digital standard of beauty that doesn’t exist in real life. We do it because the culture bullies and brainwashes us into believing that if we don’t, we’ll disappear. That if we don’t, we’re not enough or that we’ve somehow given up on ourselves.

And now the same industries that spent decades telling us we weren’t good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, have rebranded those pressures as ‘self-care.’ Selling age erasure as empowerment, as if choosing to look permanently 34 is a feminist win.

It’s not. It’s survival in a system that was never designed to let us age with dignity.

Sometimes I watch old movies just to remember what real women used to look like. I know the beauty standard still existed back then, but the faces weren’t frozen. Fillers and facelifts weren’t everywhere. You could still see real skin. Real teeth. Real lips. Real ages. Smiles that hadn’t been sculpted into perfection. It’s startling and, honestly, a little thrilling, to see how normal used to be enough. The shift didn’t happen all at once. It crept in slowly. A little more smoothness here, more symmetry there until suddenly beauty didn’t look human anymore. It looks manufactured. Unfeeling. Airbrushed in real life.

I’ll see a photo of a Kardashian face from a decade ago and realize how different they were and how used to the new version of their faces we’ve become. Then there are the thousands of female faces those Kardashian faces have launched… And I feel this jolt of despair in my chest, this longing for untouched faces, the unique ones with character, soul and defiance, the faces not trying to meet an algorithm. And I think, oh right. This is what women used to look like. Now it’s not enough. Enough is apparently the same age-defying face over and over again.

The baseline for what an aging woman looks like has completely eroded. We are bombarded with images of women who’ve obviously had work done — and also the airbrushed, filtered ones who haven’t, or say they haven’t, or have had just enough that we can’t tell and it has completely muddled our perception of what women of various ages actually look like.

We don’t know what ‘natural’ looks like anymore because so many faces have been altered, subtly or drastically, for so long. We applaud women like Demi Moore for looking incredible (incredible for her age, is the whisper-shouted implication), and yes, she does, but remind yourself of what it takes to look like that. How many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, how many injections, surgeries, tweaks, and high-end interventions go into maintaining that kind of face and body?

And then we turn around and celebrate her performance in a film like The Substance — a film that explicitly critiques this very system — without widely acknowledging the contradiction. Demi Moore is delivering an important message about the cost of beauty culture — with a face that has been shaped by that very culture at the highest level. We give lip service to the message and then we turn around and celebrate that face, declaring it ‘World’s most beautiful.’

What the fuck? The bullshit we must wade through to understand the conditioning and come back to ourselves is deep. We are drowning in it.

This isn’t about blaming Demi or anyone like her. She’s not the problem. She’s a delight, as far as I can tell although who the hell ever really knows? But she’s a product of the same machine we’re all trying to survive so the aging empowerment she’s selling with a seriously altered face is disorienting. Because even when the message is righteous, the medium still whispers the old myth back at us: that women can only be seen or valued if they stay beautiful forever.

These days, when I look in the mirror and see my face —my plain, makeup-less face — I’m sometimes startled by the raw, guilelessness of it. No performance, no polish, no mask. Just me and my bare face hanging out for all the world to see. The audacity.

There’s something almost tender about watching a woman let the world see her bare face, especially on a big stage. There’s a kind of quiet bravery in it. A softness that doesn’t apologize. And when it’s someone like Pamela Anderson, a woman who spent decades hidden behind a carefully constructed image of sex and beauty, eyeliner and lip gloss, it’s even more striking. Less like a rejection of the old image and more like a homecoming. Her bare face doesn’t just look different, it looks free. It glows in a way makeup never could, like light coming from inside the skin instead of laid on top of it. And it reminds me that maybe we’ve had it backward all along. Maybe bare isn’t plain. Maybe it’s luminous.

I look at my own face and see every version of myself that led to this one, all the Monicas layered underneath the one standing here now. And honestly? I feel lucky to have made it here. To be rising up out of the confusion, out of the shame, out of the need to be anything other than exactly this.

I’m the matriarch of all the Monicas — and I like her. I dig this bitch. The loud-talking one. The people-pleasing one. The one who constantly overshares to juice awkward conversations and regrets it. The shy, socially anxious Monica. The one who texted too many times. Who sent too many emails offering blanket apologies at the expense of her own reality. The one who compares herself to others and can’t stop trying to prove her worth. The one who’s desperate to be understood and terrified of being truly seen. The one who still can’t fully believe in the version of herself that Cory sees.

They’re all mine. All me. I don’t have to love how every version of me acts, but I don’t have to abandon her either. Every one of them survived something. Every one of them brought me here. I owe my physical body the same reverence.

So I remind myself not just to stand firm in my decision to let the aging process unfold as it will, but to remind other women coming up behind me what that actually looks like. Not the Instagram version or the magazine profile where "aging gracefully" still means Botox and cheek filler, an insane skin regime and a personal chef. I want them to see real skin. Pores, god forbid! Redness. Wrinkles. Real faces. Real years.

Because there’s power in choosing to live inside the body you’ve earned — not erase it.

I’m still here. This is my face. I know it, I love it, and I’m not giving it up. Not for anyone else’s comfort, and not for the conditioned standard of beauty embedded in my bones like a disease.

There’s power in standing in front of the mirror and refusing to flinch. Power in liking what I see, not because it’s flawless, but because it’s mine.

You will not teach me to hate myself. Never again.

This is my face. And it is enough.

In the end, aging isn’t even about beauty. It’s about becoming. A deep, hallowed becoming. A rite of passage. Aging is not a problem to solve, it’s the point of all this living. I’ll say it again: It’s not about managing to look young in spite of your age, aging is the fucking goal.

It means you’ve survived this long. You’ve questioned the answers and unpeeled the layers and finally arrived at the root of it all. You’ve lived through enough heartbreak and joy and confusion to hopefully earn some wisdom and with wisdom comes peace with the process of living, which is all aging really is. Aging is just another word for living.

So fighting the appearance of aging feels like attacking the very person I’m trying so hard to become.

The older I get, the clearer it is: I want to be someone with a quiet, steady certitude that I am enough. That I am good. That I don’t need to be polished or perfected to an impossible standard to feel worthy. That true sexiness comes from this attitude, not fuckin’ skin texture.

Because the women I see walking that walk — Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Andie MacDowell, Jodi Foster, Frances McDormand, Emma Thompson — they’re nearly vibrating with contentment and quiet beauty. They’re not trying to rewind. They’re not selling youth. They’re fully residing in their skin, in their bodies, in their power.

It’s magnetic.

And sexy as fuck.

At some point, you realize we’re all just animals. Soft bodies, molting skin, fragile minds doing their best to stay awake for the ride. And all of it, the wrinkles, the softening edges, the loosening grip on how we’re supposed to appear, is part of the journey. A wild, wondrous, liberating process.

Aging gracefully has nothing to do with looking a certain way. It’s about learning to feel at home in your skin in spite of everything you were taught to believe. Grateful to be alive in a body that still works.

I’m not chasing pretty anymore. I’m chasing the kind of peace that is earned, not a lie sold to me as the price of being desirable.

Pretty, whatever it even means, can find me if it wants to.