Trigger warning for mentions of death, dying, cancer, and eating disorders

I turned 35 last month, and in a post on Instagram that garnered a lot of DM’s from my followers, I shared one of my mantras about aging:

Hotter, smarter, funnier, kinder, every single day.

Some context: I came up with this mantra around age 27, and it has served me well for the last 8 years. At the time that I came up with this, I wasn’t where I wanted to be in life. I felt like I had hit a setback in my career. I wasn’t feeling secure in my closest friendships. I was single, and wanted to be in a relationship. I was trying to figure out what city, state, and country I wanted to live in. All of that resulted in me starting feeling completely disconnected from my confidence and flirting with the resurgence of an eating disorder. I felt like there was so much going on that was outside of my control, so what could I control: How I saw myself.

Hotter, smarter, funnier, kinder, every single day.

This mantra pulled me out of a slump. I might not feel like my hottest, smartest, funniest or kindest self today, but tomorrow? I would be better.

It gave me permission to feel like shit without feeling ashamed, while making an agreement that I wouldn’t bring the self-doubt of today with me into the following day. If I was a little bit more every single day, how much of those things could I become?

My internal child, raised by third-wave feminism, protests at the addition of “hotter”, but to my absolute core I believe that vanity is an act of resistance. In a world that wants women to be as small as possible, to apologize for taking up space, and to constantly suffer for: being not pretty enough; being too pretty; putting in too much effort, or not enough effort; for being too cookie cutter and too “basic” or for not adhering to the current beauty zeitgeist; I cannot help but feel like situating myself as the ultimate authority on my own hotness, and declaring it, is an act of resistance to a hostile beauty culture.

⁠In pursuit of said hotness, I have maintained a consistent relationship with a nurse injector since I turned 30. Several dozen units of Botox in my forehead to give me a light brow lift and manage the horizontal fine lines that someday will develop into deep set wrinkles, several into my 11’s to manage my resting bitch face, and occasionally a few in the corners of my eyes to keep crows feet at bay. Like clockwork, every 4 months I would hold a sterile, frozen, metal cube to my face to numb the quick pinch of the needle, and then 2 weeks later my forehead would resemble said cube: frozen, smooth, and sterile.

I’ve never had a good poker face, and have gotten in trouble at every job I’ve ever had for what my face says when my mouth isn’t moving. Botox helped sterilize my expressions and keep my thoughts private. I imagined that freezing my forehead and my eyes kept me looking friendly and mysterious, instead of frustrated and tired at the end of a long day. I had my last appointment in June of 2024 in anticipation of the summer wedding season.

In July of 2024, my dad’s cancer finally came to collect. His original prognosis was for 3 months, but through his own dedication to becoming hotter, smarter, funnier and most importantly, kinder, he held on for over 3 years. On July 11, 2024, the final day of his life, I sat at his bedside and tried to do the impossible: say what needed to be said. How can you say what needs saying after 34 years of a reconciled but mostly difficult relationship? What are the right words for the very final parting? I sat there hoping that my eyes would say what my mouth and brain couldn’t seem to agree to get out. I watched him drift through consciousness and dreams, and watched his face contorted with pain, sorrow, and wonder. The wrinkles on his forehead rippled like waves as he journeyed through scenes vivid to him and hidden to me. Watching his forehead move struck me as one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, and I realized that my face was frozen. The expressions I thought I was making to show him how I felt were locked behind a door that wouldn’t open for 3 more months.

My dad at his hottest, according to my mom, the current authority

My smooth forehead watering the flowers while he was in the hospital

The last bouquet I made for him

My dads forehead on the day he died, basically

As I write this I’m unsure if I will hit publish. This was a profoundly personal and intimate moment and although the idea/decision to take a break from Botox exploded into my mind, I'm still not sure how long I'll keep it up. Truthfully, I love botox. But, right now I love more that in the terrain of my face I can see a reminder of someone who was LUCKY to be as old as he became. ⁠I miss seeing my brows lifted and keeping my thoughts a secret, but I ache to think that the last time my dad looked at my face, it was too frozen to reflect the chasm that his death was carving through me.

One of the most confusing things about being in my mid-30's is the awareness of the precipice that I am moving towards one atom at a time. I tell my clients often that our bodies start slowing down after 25: our collagen production slows down, our metabolism starts to slow, our skin tends to get drier. But now I think of my dad, who walked 7 miles a day despite unknowable pain until a month before he died. He was missing organs and carrying around several pounds of tumors; his body was dying but his spirit and his commitment to being in the world didn’t stop him. His cancer was ravenous, and atom by atom he was consumed. I don’t think he thought about “aging” once.

There are many unintended consequences of modern beauty and wellness culture in which self care rituals easily turn into obsessions, compulsions, and disorders rooted in a fear of aging. When I'm not ruminating on my age, I feel young and I don't imagine there being a measurable difference between myself at 35 and 25. I imagine my dad felt that way, probably at 45, 55, and 65 too. But then I find another grey hair, and I see that my 11's are slowly becoming more permanent again without a neuromodulator to keep them at bay. And while I don't feel less beautiful for them today, I wonder about tomorrow. ⁠

And so, a mantra, a reminder, and some standard operating procedures are required. A fear of aging is a fear of being alive. It's hard to stay rooted in your confidence when nearly every piece of visual media you have consumed in your entire life is telling you that life for women ends after the first grey hair, and is revived only through a deep plane facelift and several thousand dollars worth of filler. But it doesn’t. Life ends when we decide to give up on being in the world, and then it ends again when our spirit parts ways with our body and drifts away on the wind.

I'll probably go back to botox sooner rather than later, but I'm grateful for the time I've taken off if for no reason other than to see my father’s beautiful, oceanic forehead reflected back to me in the mirror (...and honestly that it affirmed to me the power of a glycerine, glycolic, and SPF,) and for the knowledge that my confidence isn't dependent on denying my age via injectables--which I wasn't questioning, but the confirmation is nice.