Anti-Ageism Will Not Be Televised: Turning 33 As A Black Woman
This birthday felt peculiar. I’m never particularly excited for any birthday, but this year I found myself trying to telepathically slow the reins of 33 galloping toward me.
I felt some grief about the delicate laugh lines starting to form on my face. Or the onset of health concerns that seem like early signals of my body’s decay.
Thirty may be the cultural marker of Real Adulthood, but there’s a youthful buoyancy that percolates between 30 and 35, the last few buffer years before the social pressure cooker of Grown Up Decisions must be reckoned with. And that those decisions — which type of work to do, whether or not to have a child, which city to settle in, and with whom — potentially calcify the rest of your life.
I’m aware that some of my anxieties are encoded with capitalist socialization. After all, to be young is to be a useful model for commodification, more malleable as a consumer, and most functional as a worker for capital. To give up formative years in the pursuit of your very own capital, so as to reach “productive” milestones of adult life.
I also know my trepidation about losing beauty comes pre-bundled with white women’s cultural hysteria about what aging will inevitably do to their own. And their persistent need to make their fears, our fears too.
White women, so accustomed to being ambassadors of feminine beauty and male status, seek deliverance from gravity in wrinkle cream jars or spinning class studios, or the offices of plastic surgeons.
Because to experience any atrophy of social capital, to move even slightly left of patriarchy’s center — to them — feels like free falling, feels like an ego death.
But Black women do not age into invisibility, so much as we inherit it. Our proximity to “ugliness” is already fastened much closer, our muscle memory for navigating expiration, far more acutely attuned.
I also recognize that youthfulness itself is a concept granted by privilege, that you remain young to the extent that Power allows. And when it cannot — gendered responsibilities often grow us into women before we’re ready, poverty kidnaps childhoods, and racial myths dissolve the safeguards of adolescence.
And even so, you can only really lament growing older when you are promised longevity, to begin with.
But Blackness keeps time on its own clock. I’ve watched too many in my community fade away in their 50s, 40s, and 30s. My brother died at 22. And I occupy a fascist State that erodes my mental health and actively plots my extermination every day. So each new year I see as a Black woman, even at its flimsiest, sort of feels like cheating, almost flaunts like vengeance. It stokes the fears of Power which is ultimately just a fear of the Black ancestor, and the historical memory that aging accumulates. The future birthdays that make us living memoirs of White supremacy and all the details of its traumas, capable of recounting them first-hand.
For us, growing older cannot guarantee the American dream of leisurely retirement and generational stability. But perhaps there’s simply more time to inscribe the imprints of our resistance. More opportunities to disrupt, to decolonize, organize, to teach. But also more chances to love and be loved in Black skin, to seek healing, and even steal a bit of joy in the margins.
