Sophie Heawood confronts the reality of growing older

Life begins at 40? Not if you’re looking in the mirror it doesn’t, writes Sophie Heawood
Sophie Heawood talks about accepting her looks in her 40s
Sophie Heawood24 October 2019

I got my hair cut the other day. I looked in the mirror afterwards and the thing didn’t happen.

That thing, that guilty little tingle when you see how good you can look with a bit of effort. When you fancy yourself. When you’ve been feeling knackered for the past two months but one glance in the mirror tells you, with great relief, that you’ve still got it.

It didn’t happen because even though the hairdresser had done everything I asked her to do, I saw my own reflection and immediately thought, oh right, that really is my face then. Is this it? I wondered to myself, as if I was Carrie Bradshaw having a quiet nervo in Aveda: will I never be transformed by a hairdo again? And then, though I’m embarrassed to admit it, a profound sense of sadness rushed through my body, and there it has lingered ever since, popping up sometimes when I notice another piece of my flesh and form gently slipping into middle age. I am in my early 40s and mourning the loss of something I never knew I had: beauty.

This isn’t a plea for attention so you’ll look at a photo of me and tell me I look fine. I’ve always thought I looked fine; that’s my point. I didn’t grow up as one of the prettiest girls, and though I was fascinated by them (and probably still am, as I choose to interview celebrities for a living) I knew that I’d have to work on my other strengths and forget about that kind of vanity. Which was great, because I always liked my smiley face with its round cheeks and snuffly nose and my eyebrows that were always thick whether it was on trend that year or not. So while most other women seemed to be wasting time and energy on multi-storey exfoliating regimes and stressing about their thigh gap, I was always proud of how much I liked myself in spite of the patriarchy’s attempts to make me care. In spite of not being stunningly beautiful or amazingly thin. I found my own beauty — it was my laughter, my excitedness, my interest in the world. So to find out that no, actually, it was also the fact that I had the supple skin and pert tits of a young adult, and didn’t need to put my hand on my lower back while rising from a chair — well, this has been something of a revelation. Turns out I was young and pretty all along. Gutted.

Happy 29th birthday in 2005

I see what was happening now, when I spent my 20s and 30s not always even bothering to wear a bra, because my boobs weren’t so big that it was uncomfortable not to. Nor did I refuse to leave the house with greasy hair, or carefully watch how much I drank. There was no need to appear ladylike, because if this was a test, then I still seemed to pass. I got as much male attention as friends who were more groomed. I had something else. So imagine my surprise, on approaching middle age, suddenly realising that the something else I had always had was being a twenty-something with low standards and no bra.

I’m a single parent now and I have to make an actual, huge effort to meet a man. In your 40s, if you don’t brush your hair you can’t convince yourself that you look like a Parisian model who is too insouciant to care. You just look like you can’t afford a Tangle Teezer. So I’m the owner of a hairbrush, a daughter, a dog and a life insurance policy, having invested in the last after attending four funerals of friends of my age this year. Three cancer deaths and one brain aneurysm. In a flash, it feels as if the beginning of life has turned into the end.

Noticing a whole crop of grey strands buried underneath my hair the other day, I called my kid over to the mirror to see if she could see them too, or was the light just tricking me. ‘Is it all silvery under here?’ I asked her, lifting up my curls to show her what lay beneath. She looked at them and did something that I wasn’t expecting: she screamed. It was an amazing scream, long and loud, as she realised, on some primal eight-year-old level, that the lifeforce was slipping out of her progenitor. I wish I’d never asked.

Did you ever see that Inside Amy Schumer sketch from 2015, where she, Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette have a picnic in the park to celebrate Julia Louis-Dreyfus experiencing her ‘last f***able day’. ‘In every actress’s life,’ says the apparently ageing lady, who is holding a glass of wine and calmly enjoying her own swansong, ‘the media decides when you’ve finally reached the point where you’re not believably f***able anymore.’ Everyone at the table nods in agreement. Well it turns out that Louis-Dreyfus has since admitted that doing the sketch affected her quite badly. The joke felt too true. It stung.

Having always liked older faces on other people, and thinking the best faces were the ones that looked like life had been lived in them, I understand now why people fear wrinkles. Wrinkles are a visible end to choices, to a life of infinite possibilities. They tell us that we have to make peace with the decisions we have made, or that we didn’t even realise we were making. They are a door that is closing on our own face. Which is why anti-ageing products, those little teases, sneak up to whisper to us that we can carry on dithering forever. Dithering is wonderful.

Then there’s the guilt, remembering how I railed against one of my university lecturers, an older Portuguese woman who told a group of us young London women that you missed being catcalled once you got to an age where it didn’t happen any more. I was 20, an ardent feminist, and furious that she was feeding us some kind of medieval Catholic bullshit where our value lay in yobbish men jeering at us. All I can say is, it has happened to me now and — well, I wish I still had her phone number. I’d send a text to say I get it, at last. The building site you walk past and there’s no response. The bar you sit at alone, waiting for a delayed friend, while nothing whatsoever happens to you at all. Your body is not in good danger or bad danger any more. You have developed an immoveable gravity.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I want to be sexually harassed. If such a phenomenon had never occurred in the world, I’d hardly be inventing it to give us ladies a little treat. But after a lifetime of being pushed up against those reminders that I was a woman, or perhaps that I was meat, it’s as if the pressure I was leaning against has gone, and I might fall right over, like Del Boy as he plunged right through that bar. I know you’re only supposed to use Fleabag as a comedy reference nowadays, but I can’t help it. I’m starting to show my age.

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