In fact, I’m totally happy. I love my job, I live in a domestic situation that suits me and I have my own cat. In fact, I think I’m at the height of happiness. Sometimes I sit back and think, “Wow, being young was so horrible, I’m glad I never have to do that again.” »

And yet. Very often I also slide into a bottomless void of fear, anxiety and hell and feel panicked and out of breath. For what? Because I’m old. And grow old.

I mean, I’m not that old. I am 44 years old. My father is 90 years old! Nine zero. NOW that it’s really old. But also, at 44, I am undeniably old. And the years won’t stop coming. I made my peace with 40 when he arrived and everything was fine I guess. But then came 41, 41, 43. Aargh! Shouldn’t I be dead by now?

My neck is starting to crepe, my knees have been hurting for a good two or three minutes in the morning, and I go to bed early, turn gray and say “Oof” when I sit down. My short-term memory is broken.

In my 20s, I never thought about what I would do at 40, because it was very unlikely that I would ever reach 40, because 40 was too old. But 40 have come and gone, and they are now far behind me. Sometimes, if I want to torture myself, I look at how old Joanna Lumley was when she played Patsy Stone (46), Anne Bancroft when she played Mrs. Robinson in The graduate (36) and Jennifer Coolidge when she played Stifler’s mother in American pie (38).

I can’t stand those condescending “celebrate your laugh lines” one-liners or assertions that old things are beautiful. Are they really? Okay, so why when you search for “Robert Redford” on Google are you prompted to search for “Robert Redford young” and not “Robert Redford old”? Growing old is scary, nightmarish and the natural response is to try to stop it, pronto.

I think about plastic surgery a lot. When I face my fifth-decade face in the mirror, I wonder what should be done about the lines on either side of my mouth, about the burgeoning weakening of my jaw. Would that just mean an “adjustment”? Or do they have to be fillers?

Sometimes I talk to my sister, who is 48, about it, and we self-consciously smooth our sagging jaws with our palms as we talk. “The thing I always ask myself when I think about a facelift,” she says, “is what would Mom say?” I mean, sure, she’d be horrified – but that’s the expense that’s a cold shower for me.

Read next

I was reading about a “mini facelift” the other day and it was £7,000! For what? To look better so you can do the same old housework and go shopping?

And it’s not just about what my mother would say: what would I tell my friends and neighbors about my mysterious absence and my bandages? How can I explain my new face?

If you live in a world of actors or other very wealthy people, this kind of stretched, shiny “look” is normal. But these people are not my friends. My real friends would start a WhatsApp backchannel called “WTF Esther Face?”

And finally, adjustments, fillings and botox don’t really make you look younger – they just make you look old in a slightly different way. Think about Madonna, who is 66 years old. This woman has all the money in the world and would stop at nothing to stay young, but she doesn’t look young, she looks absolutely weird.

The restart of Sex and the city was a watershed moment in the way we think about aging. There was a buzz of negative comments about the stiff, puffy faces of actors who had clearly had some “work” done – i.e. Kristin Davis – but also a lot of negativity about the face of Sarah Jessica Parker, who had very little work. , perhaps nothing, “done”. She’s very glamorous and takes care of herself, but she’s 59 and looks it.

It made me think that a) you can’t win and b) these women have deep pockets and a whole Hollywood machine at their disposal and still can’t mitigate the effects of aging. So what hope do I have?

But growing old in 2024 is an interesting thing. When my mother was 44, she wore calf-length kilts and cardigans, half-moon glasses, and did tapestry. She didn’t have a skin care regimen and she wasn’t expected to have one. She simply slipped into “old” because that’s what society demanded of her.

Things have evolved. We’ve never been so obsessed with how to stay functionally young. And we live longer and enjoy better health later in life. Being over 40 doesn’t mean you have to retire and live the rest of your life in a dark kitchen, wearing a mantilla. You eat a really good diet, lift some weights, take some retinol and keep going.

This interests me particularly Nobody wants thatthe hit Netflix series about a rabbi and a non-Jew coming together, features two actors in their 40s. Adam Brody is 44 years old and Kirsten Bell is 45 years old. Their ages are never mentioned. A show starring two people this old would never have been commissioned just 15 years ago, without it being a show about these incredibly old people miraculously finding love with each other. other, despite their advanced age.

And yet, even though I’m happily alive, healthy, and living in a time where growing old is no longer the shameful crime it once was, growing old still freaks me out. It’s something that happens like bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. If I linger there too long, I literally feel tingles of sweat at the roots of my hair.

This is when people tend to resort to the philosophical cliché that I hate so much: growing old is a privilege, age is a work of art, the years teach a lot. And I reluctantly accept that these things are all true. But I still don’t think old things are beautiful. Sorry.