The syringe of eternal youth
On that damned fig tree, baby-Botox reaching the friend group, and looking for God in Chemist Warehouse.
On Wednesday I turned 28.
It was celebrated with spectacular friends who only need some booze, Youtube karaoke on the TV and a cardboard box for a hilarious night. And I think it was probably the greatest birthday I’ve ever had.
I’ll admit that when you don’t have much of your shit sorted, it is slightly (*read very*) alarming to find yourself face-to-face with the age that articles claim is the best time to freeze your eggs. And yet, I do truly believe that growing up is a privilege - witnessing the lives of loved ones get cut very short tends to result in a particular perspective on aging. As my Aunty said to me this week (in response to her middle-aged colleagues lamenting their birthdays rolling around again), “well there is only one alternative to getting older and that’s dying, so what would you prefer?”.
Ya can’t argue with that, Susan.
There’s also only one big, fat question that is front of mind for me going into this lap round the sun.
Does anybody have any idea what the hell we’re supposed to be doing?
Because I, for one, do not.
It’s about now that many of us find ourselves standing dumbstruck underneath Sylvia Plath’s metaphorical fig tree. Those in first world countries seem to reliably arrive here in our mid to late twenties- though this might be not be our first visit and is unlikely to be our last (I’d bet money on a return trip when our future kids leave home).
For those unfamiliar:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” - Sylvia Plath
The choices our parents had at this same age were far fewer, and I think this probably made it easier for them to feel content with the decisions they made. Our fig options are nearly infinite. We are constantly told by elders and each other that ‘the world is your oyster, you can do anything you want!’. The sentiment is well-meaning, but the dizziness of freedom is a very potent elixir - one that I believe has given my generation a bad case of analysis paralysis. We’re just trying to pay rent and eat enough protein whilst always feeling this immense background pressure to live our best life, whatever that means.
What if we don’t know what we want? What if what we want is just some clearer bloody instructions?
But as usual, my guru Mari Andrew has a perfect reframe for when the road ahead is unclear. It’s the best antidote I’ve ever read for those of us who are feeling a bit confused and behind.
So perhaps I’m lucky to be lost right now. Maybe trying as many figs as you can in this life is kind of the whole point. Maybe it’s about the figs we meet along the way. At 28, I genuinely still have no idea what I want to do. But the good news is that I seem to be forming a better idea of who I want to be.
I think 28 is quite a strange age because life has suddenly diverged into such drastically diverse paths for all of my peers. Over the past year or so, I have been collecting clues from them in an attempt to discern what level of the Adult Game I should have reached by now.
Some mates are so sure about the person they love that they’re getting married. Some mates feel responsible enough to get dogs, others to make actual human children. Some weapons are still repping front left at Rhythm and Vines. Quite a lot have bought a house or two. Some are going back to uni. Others are still dating entirely for sport. I’m doing none of the above, and I’m more disorientated than ever.
And this summer, I also found out that some of my friends have been getting Botox.
Despite being theoretically aware that it is advisable to start Botox at this age, I was still stunned. I could have sworn that the girls and I were picking out matching neon t-shirts at Supre just last week, then I had blinked and suddenly we were here- syringing muscle paralysers into our faces because time was beginning to curl her fingers around our skin in ways that western society says makes us less valuable.
I’m so ashamed to admit that a tiny part of me judged them at first. They are such beautiful women already! So intelligent and considered and more than the sum of their crows-feet! Had they thought about how buying-in to this thing contributes to the discourse that the worst crime a women can commit is looking her fucking age?
Then immediately I judged myself for judging them- because truly, how dare I question the bodily choices of anyone, let alone girls I adore who have grown up with me under the insidious reign of Photoshop and Cosmopolitan. And then in an instant, I sprung back toward compassion for all of us when I realised that the feeling underneath this moment of judgement was fear.
I was afraid because I simply wouldn’t have expected these people to get Botox, so I briefly got the strange sense that I don’t know them nearly as well as I thought I did. I am now afraid that if I don’t hurry up and get Botox too, then I will soon be ugly and will die alone because any potential husband will leave me as soon as he meets my sexy, smooth, youthful friends.
And I am afraid that if I do get Botox:
something will go wrong and my eyes will get frozen shut,
or, that I’ll get addicted and not be able to stop until I look like Jennifer Coolidge,
or, that one day my dormant acting dreams will nearly come to fruition, but an audition callback panel will tell me that my ‘forehead just isn’t telling the story in as much detail as we need for the closeups’
or, that my future 13 year old daughter will find out what I have been doing to my face and begin to hate the way her own nose crinkles when she laughs. This is the most frightening of all.
It is confusing because I cannot separate what I want/ from want men want /from what my friends want /from what my mother would want for me/ from what I think I want just because she isn’t here to boss me around (probably a big reason why I got my mediocre tattoos). When it comes to this topic, I don’t know which voice is speaking.
At this stage, I still don’t think injectables are for me. However it’s confronting to realise that this age certainly seems to be marking a change of sorts- I didn’t ever used to think about the two little lines that divide my eyebrows, but now unfortunately I know that they are called “elevens” and I have started massaging them absentmindedly all the time.
Any last remnants of the shock slipped away entirely when I realised how much of my 28 years I have spent obsessing about my own skin.
Not wrinkles per say, but a whole smorgasbord of other chronic issues that have plagued me for a decade. I can keep it somewhat under control these days, but this is fragile and requires lugging a ten-step skin care routine everywhere with me (even when camping in the bush). It is an ongoing battle, and I have no doubt that if there was a Botox equivalent that prevented folliculitis then I would have long-since signed up for the jumbo course without so much as reading a side-effect pamphlet.
The Botox revelation reminded me of a passage in my diary that I wrote at a time when I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I’ve come a long way since then, given that last winter for the first time in SEVEN YEARS I picked up the courage to wear a sleeveless top to an event (sober too!!). It was a massive moment for me.
So I suppose I just want to send big hugs to the kids who choose to never get Botox and embrace growing older and prunier. I also want to send big hugs to the kids who choose to start Botox early and get a wonderful confidence boost from the results. Extra big hugs to the kids who are at war with their skin for other reasons, and who have never found answers to their issues.
No matter which figs we decide on throughout our lives, I hope that growing up helps us all to grow into our skin a little better. I’m doing my best to grow into mine.
E x
Verbatim from my diary, Nov 2023.
I feel a particular type of solidarity with the people I mingle with late at night in the ‘problem’ sections at chemist warehouse. I like to time my visits for immediately following a heavy-lifting evening gym session, because it helps to approach this in moments when my body feels powerful.
I don’t discriminate, floating between Eczema, Acne, Infection and Scarring, depending on which has demanded enough attention this week to distract me from the needs of the others. I’m looking for a holy solution that doesn’t exist.
A teenage boy next to me plucks a tall bottle of promise-flavoured carcinogens off the top shelf and his mother loudly questions the expense. Her first language is Mandarin and she doesn’t understand the word ‘Bacne’. The boy is not too embarassed to explain. He knows all of us around him, here, are allies.
The urge to reach out and hold his hand is overwhelming.
I think about what all the money I’ve ever spent on creams and lotions would look like if I could pile it up. Which far away place I could fly to for that much. How if I could see every layer of thick white paste I’ve desperately slathered on then I’d look like the Michelin man. More than a dozen doctors in a line, shrugging their shoulders and prescribing another course of antibiotics that will strip my already desert-bare gut of its precious last few tumbleweeds.
Once the university doctor weighed me during a checkup. I had dropped 6kg in a month, and he put me on an eating-disorder watchlist, unconvinced on my story about the extreme diet I’d been prescribed for my skin. I stared pleadingly at him with eyes that were brilliantly white from a lack of processed food, but there was nobody home behind them. I was starving in my search for answers.
I think about the night my drunk friends pointed out the pock marked shoulders of strangers ahead of us in the line at Burger King: “Why wouldn’t she cover that up!?” they whispered in disgust, as I recoiled into my own oversized shirt that hid a galaxy of angry stars.
Even the next day they probably didn’t remember saying it.
I will never forget it.
I want to apologise to my arms for scrubbing them raw. To the boyfriends who I wouldn’t let see me undressed and who have had to wait for hours for their turn in the bathroom. This insecurity physically hurts, it sticks around and sticks to the people around me, too.
Summer is almost here again. I love sun, and I used to love swimming. I spend the first week of November planning the shapes I will pretzel into at the beach to feel less exposed .
This week’s decorations on my shoulder blades are deep and painful, the dreaded purple colour taking hold already and the infection throbbing in my lymph nodes while I lie in bed and curse the olive skin Dad gifted me. It would be my favourite thing about my body if it didn’t scar so readily. I close my eyes and fists tight so my fingers don’t wander and repeat magic words I don’t believe:
You are not dirty. You are not dirty. You are not dirty.
But I know the spaghetti-strap tops bought in optimistic moments will remain at the back of the wardrobe again this summer, tags still on.