Why write this blog

My photo
It is a way of giving my other self, my unconscious and perhaps artistic self, a way of expressing itself, and thereby helping me working things out. It is somewhat cathartic in a positive way. :)

14 January, 2011

Signs of Age


This post is a copy and paste from Kim Ayres brilliant blog Ramblings of the Bearded One.

Except... that I have changed a few things, he doesn't look like he feels, and I'm pretty sure I don't feel like I look!

I'm continually getting surprised each time I look in the mirror.

My eyes are bloodshot sometimes.

My hair is grayer than it was, the odd white hair is starting to show.

I have dark shadows under my eyes.

I don't know if I have excessively pale or sallow skin, but I may well do.

I have huge sagging bags under my eyes.

I have a haunted look etched into my face, every time I see a photo of me posted on Facebook by friends recently, the word that comes to my mind the most is haggard.

It astounds me I don’t feel anything like I look.



I know I'm getting old, or older. Despite my kips to people at work about being an old man I don't actually feel old at all, its just working with students and people at work it's crazy that there is now a gulf of more than ten years between us. I was having this very same conversation with my friends about a year or so ago, sitting in a bar in Bairro Alto in Lisbon.

I am 33 years old. I did not mind the barrier of the 30 at all. It's how you act, it's how you feel, and it's what you do. I don't mind being my age, I like it. I know more, I understand better, I am more patient and perhaps, dare I say it, am wiser, certainly wiser than 15/12 years ago!

So it has come as a shock the physical manifestations of the inevitability effects of time on my physical self. Especially recently. When I compare photos of me of 4/5/6 years ago and the more recent photos a year old or so I can notice a marked difference. Which is odd, I think, surprising even. Arguably I have been happier and more willing to make changes than I have in previous years of morose passiveness. And I have felt better for it. Why the marked changes in appearance then?

It doesn't worry me unduly. It's just, that I don't feel it. I don't "feel" 33. I don't feel I'm in my mid thirties. Not that I know what that should feel like of course, maybe other people that know me probably do think that I do indeed look and act and should rightly feel my age. Whatever that may mean.

Am I not taking good care of myself? Am I in need of someone to take care of me? My ex-immediate boss who is still, now, my higher boss once told me, in passing, that I needed a woman to take care of me. I was quite offended by it, it's not that I want to be alone, or that I don't want a girlfriend, but I don't need someone to take care of me thank you very much, I can take care of myself pretty well actually. I don't feel those would be good reasons to find a partner anyway, so didn't take any notice of it. But I wonder, could there be a semblance of verisimilitude in that remark?

Whatever it is, the signs of aging are all too easy to see. I was always thought I would be a bald man, after all, it seems to run in the family, all the "males of the species", as it were, were very bald by the time they were my age. And I was always mentally prepared for it, but that has not yet materialized. Instead it looks I might grey out before I go bald. I wondered the other day, if it becomes more noticeable would I dye my hair? And instantly dismissed it. It is what it is, why should I be ashamed or afraid or embarassed?

It is what it is. But I don't feel it.