On the Arrival of Silver Hair
For a discussion of this essay, check out Hot Take Think Tank episode six.
Every morning, I turn the trifold bathroom mirror inward so that it surrounds my head. I crane my neck one way and then the other, catching glimpses of where the vanity lights hit my hair: gold, then brown, then silver. I always admired my dad’s raven black hair, especially when silver streaks appeared above each ear. I am watching those same streaks arrive in my hair, one strand at a time. It gives me a strange thrill.
For as long as I can remember, I have felt out-of-time. In preschool, I thought the smile lines and crow’s feet worn by my teachers were so beautiful that I would crinkle my eyes and grin as widely as I could, willing those lines to appear on my four-year-old face. I was devastated to discover there was no homework for kindergarten because I wanted to be a big kid so badly. When the eye doctor told me at ten to take reading breaks to preserve my eyesight, I did the opposite, reading for long stretches in dim light because I couldn’t wait to have glasses. I was a shuffling, tweed-swaddled professor stuck in a young child’s body.
When I was twenty-two I got sick, and stayed that way for many years. My body felt brittle and weary, sensitive to the smallest change, always on the brink of injury. My friends and lovers did their best to understand, but I felt positively ancient in their presence. A simple bike ride or hike was out of the question. My occupational therapist gave me a catalogue of assistive tools designed for the elderly, since I was having trouble turning doorknobs and opening cans. Once again I found myself out-of-time.
What complicated this is that I looked 18 for about ten years. I was always the friend to get carded or inadvertently patronized. I invited glares for sitting down on a crowded bus. It was hard for people to believe that someone who looked like me would lose my breath climbing a set of stairs. The dissonance was simply too great.
“A body is a slow time machine.” -Any Other City, Hazel Jane Plante
Over the years I became a bit of a know-it-all about managing pain, and as my friends hit their thirties and forties, I suddenly found a use for the intel I’d gathered. Dropping off heating pads and bottles of magnesium, emailing names of specialists and places to get cheap epsom salt, I knew how to be there when someone new joins the persistent pain club. Suddenly my own was not so out of place—it was simply one of the ways that I experienced being alive.
A friend of a friend just died. She was unloading groceries when she had a heart attack, and despite valiant medical effort, that was the end of that. I’d met her at a party this past summer, and she was bright and warm and curious. She was not much older than I was. My endless millennial youth is decidedly over—my peers are dying not only from poisoned drugs or at their own hands, but from their bodies betraying them, calling the curtain early.
It makes me wonder what it feels like to be truly ancient, to survive all of one’s siblings and friends, to be the last one standing: a role someone must fulfil. It makes me laugh at myself for feeling old at 22, for feeling wise at 32, for cheering as my silver hairs grow in.
And yet I do. I feel grateful to be able to age. As the first whisper of lines around my eyes appear, as my body softens and thickens, as the silvers multiply, the person looking back at me looks like me: like someone who’s been through it but is still here, for as long as the world will allow. The feeling that bubbles up in the mirror every morning is one I haven’t been able to name. Perhaps it is the sensation of finally being in-time.
Relatability to the moon.
My goatee used to have red in it, now those hairs are all gray. But I never was a have-fun young person. Appearing older doesn't feel unfamiliar at all.