Aging Gracefully Can Be Scary, But Psychologists Reveal How To Shift Your Narrative

The image I see of myself in my mind is that of a photograph taken in 1992, when I was 22 years old. The photo is of me and my friend, Sean. I’d gone with him to have his professional headshots taken (he’s an actor and songwriter) and the photographer offered to snap a few of the two of us. The frame is a close-up shot of both of our faces. I am sitting on his lap, my arm around his neck, my eyes fixed on something past the camera. Sean stares directly into the lens with all the confidence and defiance of youth. We are both so very, very young.

While I know, as a relatively intelligent, mostly adjusted, grown woman, that I no longer look like the person in that photo, what I see in the mirror these days always takes me a bit by surprise. It is my mother’s face that stares back at me, a face that sparks both distress and grief. When and how did I start to look so old?

“There’s a certain amount of sadness, grief when we look at our faces [as we get older] — I should mention I’m 73,” Naomi Woodspring, an author and gerontologist, told me. “Yet notions, ideas about what we see in the mirror are seen through the lens of our current age.”

And these ideas change as we change.

Intellectually, I know I cannot magically remove all the effects of aging from my skin and body, no matter what advertisers and (often) the media want me to believe. I also know there must be some way to let go of my inner psychological equation that youth equals beauty and that, without it, I am no longer attractive. I’m not sure, though, how to go about changing my outdated definitions of these things.

I talked with three psychologists and researchers about ways to alter the narrative running through my head, the one that prattles on about how I look