I looked at myself today and something happened that I cannot explain without ruining it. So I will ruin it.
This is also a kind of courage.
I am 44. I say this the way you say the sea is there. Not to describe. To locate.
There is a woman in the mirror who has stopped waiting for permission. I do not know exactly when she stopped. I only know that the waiting has vacated the premises and what remains is something more erotic, something that was always underneath — the way bedrock does not announce itself and does not need to.
At 22 I had a body I was always about to apologize for. I did not know this then, only the men that preyed upon it like dinner did. I only know it now because the apology has stopped and I can feel the silence where it used to live — a silence shaped exactly like a woman.
I used to listen to people that told me aging was a subtraction.
I was wrong in the way that only someone who has not yet lived or tasted great love or endured real loss can be wrong — completely, and with great confidence.
What is actually happening is an addition so slow it is impossible to observe. The softness at my jaw is the body releasing the clenching it did in its twenties. The lines around my eyes are from squinting at things worth seeing. I was not lazy with my gaze. I looked directly. I looked until it cost me something and then I kept looking.
This is what the face records. Not damage. Attention.
We tell each other the rebellion is feeding on mid-life rage bait.
Re-posting political memes and making fun of other souls. Chasing things we don’t care that much about like six pack abs. Jars of protein. More hormones. New drugs. The prize of the before and after.
The refusal to even say your age, which is a strange refusal — to refuse to say what you are.
They have packaged resistance as punishment and sold it back to us and we bought it because we were desperate and because the packaging was very good.
But I have found a different rebellion and it is quieter and it is total.
It is devotion.
Not discipline.
Devotion.
These are not the same word. Discipline contains a whip and a chain. Devotion contains a candle, a held breath, the specific quality of attention you give only to what you love or what you think might could become love. To be devoted to this body — this exact one, the one that carried three children and grief and more epic reinventions than I can count — is the most radical act I know. Not because it is difficult, though some days it is wobbly.
Because no one asked me to.
Because everything around me was designed to ensure I wouldn’t. Because a woman who is in love with herself is a woman who cannot be sold her own inadequacy, and her inadequacy was someone’s business model, and she has just bankrupted it by simply — looking in the mirror and staying.
There is something happening to me that I did not earn so much as evolve into. The self I am now required the deaths of several other selves. I mourned them. Some of them I miss. The girl who believed she could be loved without being known — I was so tender with her even as I let her go.
But I am not nostalgic for smallness.
My age and my health are rare prizes taken from so many. I do not forget this. I hold it the way you hold something that could break — carefully, and with both hands.
To be in this body now is to inhabit something that finally fits. Not because the body has changed to match some idea I had of it. It has most certainly not. Because I stopped having ideas about it and started simply living in it, the way you live in a house once you stop trying to make it a different house. The way you start loving your life partner’s flaws instead of dissecting them. I started thinking of my clothing and my movement and my rest and my beauty rituals as the curation of fine art. Because that is what this is. Because that is what I am.
I am obsessed with myself right now.
I say this without vanity, which is to say I say it with complete vanity, which is to say these are not opposites, they are the same gesture facing different directions.
She took decades to arrive. She arrived.
I will unapologetically celebrate her.
What was I supposed to do — look away?
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.
Ahhhh…so that’s who you are! ☺️😉