The Five-Pound Weight

A guest post from writer Barrington Smith-Seetachitt

A meditation on grief, gray hair, and who gets to feel old first.

Dear New Friends,

When the extraordinary Ellen invited me to write on a topic related to aging, I thought it would be easy, because I think about aging a lot… I mean a lot, a lot.

First, I, myself, am aging. I’m in a phase where awareness of my own aging is pervasive and lurks over almost everything. The algorithms also know I’m aging, so in the instances that I start to forget, they send targeted ads designed to remind me. And I’m in the midst of producing a short sci-fi film I wrote that deals with ageism, which means filling out dozens of funding applications, all of which entail discussing the impacts of ageism at myriad levels.

All of which is to say, I thought writing this would be easy, because I have a lot to say, but it has actually been not-easy, because I have a lot to say, and I’m guessing you come here primed for a blog post, not a longread in The Atlantic.

So here is one small incident that happened quite recently: My husband, Paul, dyed his hair for the first time.

For years, Paul has coasted on his boyish looks, but in the last year or so, his dark hair has been going gray. We were preparing for a trip to the Cannes Film Market. Such a trip entails a fair amount of expense, so we wanted to make our investment worth it. We decided that, along with revamping our company logo and website, we should also attempt to streamline our personal looks to be more Cannes-worthy. For Paul, this meant sacrificing his typical humorous graphic Tees and cargo shorts in favor of shirts with buttons, a loose-fitting blazer and linen pants. He borrowed a distinctive Tiffany-blue faced watch from one of our younger friends who assured him this is what kids are wearing these days, and finally, after much deliberation and procrastination, he visited a salon in K-town where the stylist gave him a less mad-scientist looking haircut — and dyed his grays back to black.

On the drive home, a few hundred dollars later, he looked in our car’s rearview and said, “I think I look younger than I have in the last decade… but I feel older.”

He continued, “And I feel sad — like a chapter is closing. I used to be an age where I didn’t care how old I looked, and now that’s over.”

He told me how, at the age of eight, he saw his dad’s hair dye under the sink. “I promised myself I’d never dye my hair. Now it feels heavy — and not in a way that’s metaphorical. It’s in my chest. It’s like a five-pound weight on my lung. It gives me more empathy for my dad, and for myself.”

I empathized — because I know that heaviness. I know it is grief – a mourning for things that are lost, and things you’re starting to understand you will keep losing.

But then (and this is maybe because a recent, sudden decline in my estrogen levels has made me a less generous person) it occurred to me to think: Hey, wait, where’s the empathy for ME?

Or his mom. Or my mom. But, you know, mostly ME. Paul has witnessed me dyeing my hair for the last two decades. He’s been right there, eating ice cream while I skip desserts for weeks on end in order to lose a pound and a half, only to gain back two overnight after eating a piece of birthday cake. And he’s heard me mention, more than once, the sadness and crushing weight of hurtling toward decay and mortality with no way to jump tracks.

(To be clear. I did NOT say these things out loud to him at his vulnerable moment. I am not that monster… I am the monster who thinks things and does not say them but later writes about it in a public forum like this.)

It’s not that his skills of empathy are so much worse than mine. When I had youth privilege, I was likely just as oblivious to — or uninterested in — the pain of older people around me. I just happened, because of my gender, to lose that privilege before he did. As a woman, the effects of cultural and institutional ageism came into play sooner for me, and so I internalized them earlier in life. As an Asian man, he’s had other “isms” that have impacted him more than ageism—at least up until now.

There’s also the fact that ageism + lookism for women is so built into our culture that acts of preserving youth are generally supported and are considered rituals of social bonding. The beauty parlor, the nail salon, getting facials at the spa, facelift support groups on Facebook. We can talk about these things, even do them, with friends. Whereas for men—for straight men at least—chasing after youth is something pursued in secret, that still carries shame — as Paul intuited at the age of eight.

That could be a wider discussion, but for now I’ll just say that moments like these—when I don’t feel I’m getting proper credit for my pain—are instructive— or I try to make them so by using them as a reminder that 1) Whatever I have to whine about at the age I’m at now, there are people who are ten, twenty or thirty years down the line dealing with merde that hasn’t even crossed my mind yet. 2) My past failure to empathize with my future self should tell me that I’m likely falling short on a number of vectors — as someone straight and white and abled and conventionally attractive, it shouldn’t take ceasing to be any of these things to heighten my awareness of what other people are going through.

So I guess an upside to aging is that we get to evolve?

Looking forward to your thoughts below.

Warmly,

Barrington

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Follow Barrington on her Substack, LETTER FROM A VAGABOND MIND.

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