36

When I was a child, I read a novel about werewolves, and I’m reminded of it now as I contort these words out of my body with laborious breaths. As I walk through the forest, bright yellow leaves crunch under my feet. In the silence, I could scream. I’m turning 36 and for months my algorithm has been bombarding me with posts about becoming a wife and mother—but only if I’m in my 20s. Women my age might as well cease to exist.

Writers in their twilight years and short-statured comedians tell me that women’s value reduces in their 30s, and keeps reducing from there. They tell me that women my age are used up; that they have no business trying to compete with 20-somethings for marriage and children. They tell me that if we do succeed in finding a good man and starting a family, we’d better snap back to our pre-pregnancy bodies lest our husbands leave us for more fertile women to raise our babies.

I once thought I would age gracefully, but I find myself consumed by the pressure to use every means necessary to defy time. I look at the cost of putting injections into my face to smooth the lines of lessons learned, and pin photos of blondes that inspire me to cover up the white baby hairs growing from my scalp. These things aren’t controversial, but they’re not how I thought I would manage aging. I suppose I thought I wouldn’t age at all.

A cashier puts my groceries into a paper bag and asks me if I want to receive the student discount. I smile and thank her for thinking I’m young. “You are young,” she smiles. I look at the numerous lines on her face and feel like an asshole. I see 25-year-olds complain about losing their youth and roll my eyes. I know when I’m the cashier’s age I’ll look back and do the same towards myself. I’ll think about how I was so worried about these tiny lines and little white hairs, and how much I enjoyed incessantly being called pretty by the man who’s courting me. And how I should have enjoyed it more instead of wondering if it’s true.

From an early age women are conditioned to believe that the most important thing they posses is their youth and beauty. That without it we’re invisible, and in turn powerless in society. That being invisible is akin to social death. I’ve heard from women in their 40s and 50s that it’s freeing to embrace being invisible, but I feel far too vain to be close to that point. I despise myself for my vanity. I hang onto what’s left of my youth and beauty with white knuckles. I howl into the night and brace myself for the pain of the needles and the smell of the bleach—while secretly wishing I was brave enough to tell myself that red-pilled men with takes on the internet are wrong. Because as much as women don’t lose their value as they age, it sure feels that way. And I can’t lie: I want all the power.