Accepting the many versions of ourselves
Published on
27 Aug 2023
Published by
The Straits Times
As middle age deepens we have to acknowledge that hair might fall, children will fly, jobs might be lost and that we’re imperfect
In the evening, tied to my book in the silence, sometimes my hand moves involuntarily. Starting with the frontal bone, it runs over the parietal bone and to the occipital bone. If you’re unfamiliar with this skeletal territory, be grateful. I am talking about my skull. It is absent of hair and I often wonder where it went.
It’s not that baldness reminds me of annoying uncles and skinheads. Or that it has often indicated punishment. It’s not even that I’ll never be as imperiously beautiful as Imperator Furiosa or as remotely holy as the Dalai Lama. It’s just that it isn’t me.
My being was tied to my hair and my beard, for they fitted my large, gruff self. It gave me a little darkness. Now some days I feel hollowed out, as if shears have been taken to my personality. Even my shadow looks like it belongs to a stranger. Still, I shave my skull to look tidy and find amusement in Ogden Nash’s poem, I’ll Get One Tomorrow.
Barber, barber, be verbose;
Be anything but clip me close.
Leave me razored, leave me scissored
Leave me hairless, as a lizard.
The hirsute fellow from the poem has a choice, but I am now an all-time, full-time lizard. Some folks opt for transplants. Others might listen to the Greek, Hippocrates, who – as some light reading on the Internet suggests – apparently claimed that opium, pigeon droppings, beetroot and spices were a fine cure for balding. To be inhaled or applied it is not clear. Either way, he clearly did not share this information with Socrates.
But opium is illegal here and in my single-man kitchen the only spice is solidified salt. And so in middle age – I’ve decided at 60 that old age begins at 70 and that’s the end of the argument – you do what we all try. You accept. You let go. You appreciate there are many versions of ourselves through time and this is just the latest. In an Instagram post I stumbled on, where a couple was interviewed on the street, the woman explained a marriage over time as a series of relationships because they are in effect to different people. No one stays the same and no one should.
I am intrigued by the slow dance of ageing, the twinges without warning, the freedom to be what we want (no one’s opinion matters any more; well, maybe my 90-year-old mother’s), the invasion of grey like an invincible army, the clarity of who we are, the golf drives whose distance is in constant decline, the way doctors see us and reflexively pull out their blood pressure monitors. Steady, guv’nor.
But throughout this all runs the thread of acceptance. It is the recognition of a new world and an agreement, sometimes reluctantly, to an altered life. Single people, for instance, know the world must mostly be walked alone and parents grudgingly accept the flight of a child.
On the day my friend AP’s youngest daughter got married she went to her room and wept quietly. Amid great joy nestled a plain truth. Her husband had died and her children had now gone to build lives in which she wasn’t central any more. “I felt hollow,” she said. In a year she’d understand the gift offered to her, the freedom she now owned to pursue her own life. But for a while, emptiness lurked beside her like an unkind ghost.
Acceptance is liberating and yet it is also an unsympathetic road to journey down. Another middle-aged friend is between jobs and the search for another at this age can abrade self-confidence. We all want to earn, of course, but it’s the curse of our eventual irrelevance, to go from a life of contribution to possibly not mattering, which has an unforgivable sting.
The elegant irony in acceptance is that I understood it most clearly from a tribe of young people. I’ve spent 37 years in the company of athletes, and as the shooter Jasmine Ser, 32, told me: “Our lives are up and down. Nothing frequently goes to plan. We lose, we have rough days, we don’t get selected for a Games.” Even as they fight on, they swallow adversity, they acknowledge their stumbles, they wear struggle, they accept. They’re walking tightropes and so are we, it’s just that as we get older it seems to turn windier.
Acceptance isn’t capitulation, it’s making peace. In time, hospital visits to see friends will become familiar and our bodies will fray like the collar of your old denim shirt. A friend, PP, a rather fit 60, was mistaken for a grandfather of a 14-year-old recently and briefly winced. Then he shrugged. Sometimes we see one man in the mirror and the world sees another.
Acceptance – at least how I see it – is acknowledging where we stand, who we have become and that the order of things keeps shifting like a dune in the wind. Yes, we might be slower to remember things but, as I read somewhere, it’s because of all we know. You might think we’re fumbling, but really we’re sorting through the vast libraries in our brain.
Acceptance is not a lack of fight, it’s sometimes finding the wisdom to let go of things and giving yourself permission to be someone else. Friendship for me, for instance, must run deep, laced with intensity and integrity, else I often let it go. The trivial is too flimsy to hold any attraction for me. One day it might leave me lonelier but I accept that deal.
Others let go of things in different ways. My friend, NB, finds music in words and yet wants to give many of her books away. Enough now, she says, accepting that she’ll never re-read them and someone else should enjoy them. In our youth we accumulate steadily as we search for meaning, yet as we get older we say goodbye to things because we’ve tasted them.
Acceptance takes work, and like a bespoke jacket it requires a series of fittings before you wear it easily. And yet it’s a gift, a release, like the acknowledgement – as my friend HS tells me – that we’re flawed and fallible, that we might strive for great things but we’re imperfect. It’s not a stain, it’s a relief, it’s human. Leonard Cohen, in his song Anthem, had a point when he wrote “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”.
Acceptance is a struggle yet joyous, resisted yet embraced. I swear there was a romantic time when a girl ran her hand through my hair, but I have since evidently evolved. Now my granddaughter, on her ninth birthday, brings her friends to me and says “bend down”, and I obey. “Rub it”, she says of my bald pate, and they do without fuss. My skull is now a toy, a crystal ball into which they see ageing. I accept this as a kind of magic.
Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Reproduced with permission.
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