Anti-Aging
On being the youngest (looking) person in the room
You’ll appreciate it when you get old. This is what the elders in my family tell me every time, to their delight, I am mistaken for a much younger person. Being carded at a restaurant. On Thanksgiving one year, at a casino, by a person who was clearly my junior. Assumed, by that person and others, to still be in college or high school.
Very slowly, I have been able to see my body change: gray hairs in every quadrant of my head; the first pounds I’ve gained since puberty; like most other women I know, fibroids. And yet my face, it seems, has not joined the party. I can see the changes in my face: flares of dermatitis that lighten some spots and flake others; more texture, more moles (Black people’s rings around a tree). I do think there’s something slightly more flush in pictures of me from 10 years ago—but maybe that’s just the hazy iPhone setting of yore. Whatever it is that has changed in my face is apparently visible to only me. In the last several years of these, my mid-30s, I’ve been carded while buying a scratch-off ticket; had two 20-somethings gasp when they found out I was not their peer; been asked by an election campaigner if I was of voting age; and had at least three different young men born in 1997 try to come home with me (!)
I already know how much youth is prized in this culture. Especially for women—in dating; in the workplace. Though in work, youthfulness often comes with the assumption of inexperience, where I have to assert myself as knowing more than might be presumed, where even with my generous context clues, I might be asked, as happened a few weeks ago, “Is this your first job out of college?”
For the first few years of my same-faceness, I enjoyed being perceived as younger because it helped slow down the existential realization that we’re all gonna die. But now, when I meet people whom I know have mis-taken me—which is nearly everyone—I feel like I have a little secret: that as long as I don’t mention things like, having lived in New York for approximately 6.1 million years or watching Jamiroquai on the VMAs in 1997 (how cool was it that they recreated the moving floor from the video?), nobody will know.
Though I watch Gen Z’ers with curiosity—watch how they wear Jay Kay-like hats, Cher from Clueless suits, and other 90s trends that I am stunned to see come around again—I still fear the rejection of one of them rescinding their invitation to friendship once they find out we’re not the same age. And though I do not want to bring any late-90s babies back to the crib, I fear that rejection, too. I am trending toward that age where women become invisibilized, de-sexualized, relegated to auntie-big sis-momma status. I think the realm of attraction is where it’s most clear that they are picking up something totally different than what I am putting down. Should I catch the eye of a 25-year-old—because I can perceive their age even as they can’t perceive mine—I don’t feel flattered: I feel misread. I know that if I looked my age—whatever that means for a melanated person—that they probably wouldn’t look my way.
To be clear: these are not complaints. Just observations. In the book I’ve been intermittently working on the last several years (emphasis on the inter-), I write, in part, about a branch of my family I only learned of as an adult—because they had passed into whiteness. Secret Blacks! Secret to themselves, some of them. I am ever fascinated by passing—racial, gender, age, and otherwise—for reasons I can’t quite articulate; but know that it has something to do with the layers of it all: what you learn, what you become privy to, what you gain access to when you’re in one group but perceived to be in another.
And to think—all this inspired by the simple act of voting in my local city council primaries! (I got to vote, even if apparently to certain poll workers I look 17. No voter fraud here!)
In other news…
After you revisit The Flaming Lips and Jamiroquai, check out Cécile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner’s gorgeous and quirky rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive” (those lyrics!)
I not so recently published a piece in the New Orleans Review, titled “Blue Daniel.” It’s one of my most favorite things I’ve written. Please give it a read (and listen to the Cannonball Adderley song of the same name)
Soon come: an episode I wrote of the podcast Scamfluencers! Stay tuned!