Lily Haight

And not worrying about it…

This was originally posted on Substack as part of a new writing project I am taking on with my two dear friends Judy & Matthew, as a way to help us keep in touch with each other even though we live very far apart. Subscribe to it!

Dear Judy & Matthew,

Judy’s last letter has me wondering why we have this instinct to document and preserve our youth. Because I don’t think you are alone in this Judy – it makes sense to me that you would want to look back at pictures of you on your wedding day and remember how you were glowing.

At first your letter sent me down a spiral of thinking about how maybe our desire to preserve our youth stems from living in a patriarchal society that devalues women as they age. Maybe the reason we post cute photos of ourselves on Instagram is because of this subconscious social pressure to show the world how young and beautiful and happy we are. And that the instinct to say, “No, I’m posting this for me,” is just us fooling ourselves into thinking we have control when we don’t. This train of thought led me into a bit of hopeless despair.

But then, this past weekend, when Libby and I were cleaning out a bunch of old papers and documents in our hallway closet, I found a stack of photos, including a couple Polaroids of myself I had taken between 2016 and 2018. I remember taking these specifically as a marker – so I could look at them later and remember how I looked in my early 20s. I never did anything with them, but I also never threw them away. 

It reminded me of a scene from Schitt’s Creek when Moira tells Stevie to take nude pictures of herself now, because, “one day you will look at those photos with much kinder eyes and say, ‘Dear god, I was a beautiful thing.’” 

I’ve always liked this scene because when I find myself criticizing a current photo of myself, thinking I look weird or ugly, it helps me feel better to imagine myself as a 60-year-old version of me, one with gray hair and wrinkles and saggy boobs who will probably look at the photo and feel nostalgia for a time when I was young and beautiful. And I think it’s a sweet scene between Moira and Stevie – it feels like a moment where Moira is passing down this golden nugget of feminine knowledge.

But there is also something heartbreaking about the idea of being older and wishing our bodies were still young. I’d like to think my older self will like the way that she looks, and instead of being wistful for a youthful body, will instead feel both nostalgia for a past era of life and appreciation for who she has become. Like, “Oh, that’s when I lived in Paris and wore pink tights and sparkly shoes, I was so silly and knew so little but was having fun.” Not, “Oh my skin used to be so smooth and glowy.” (Although to be fair, I never have had glowy skin, unless by glowy you mean greasy). 

Thinking about eras of life (thanks Taylor Swift and the Tiktok era girlies) has actually been helping my mental health a lot lately. In one way, it’s helping me stave off the fear of turning 30. I’ve never felt like an adult – in fact, I’ve been spending time this summer unpacking deeply buried feelings about my teenage-hood, and how going through puberty and being told that I am a woman without ever questioning whether I wanted to be a woman has affected my own understanding of self. Maybe I’ll write more on that later, but my thoughts are too jumbled currently. Thirty feels like such an adult number, and I’ve been fearing its arrival. So I’m softening that fear by thinking of the impending 30 as just another era of my life. 

I truly haven’t been alive that long, but I have had many different eras already: the time I prayed to God every single day; the time I liked boys; the time I would only wear pink; the time I switched to wearing only black; the time I decided to wear jeans after the long period of time where I only wore skirts and dresses; the time I realized I liked girls instead of boys; the time I started to worry I didn’t dress “gay enough”; and the time I stopped caring how I expressed myself because I was overworked and tired and it rained every day anyway. To name just a few. 

I’m enjoying thinking of these moments in my past as “eras” because it stills the anxiety I have about being so different now than I used to be. Sometimes I read my old journals and don’t recognize the person who wrote them. I don’t know if I would be friends with my past self, but I do know that she was working with the knowledge she had available to her at the time. 

The other reason thinking about eras of life has been helpful to me is that I have a tendency to experience what I have dubbed “time scarcity.” It hits hardest in the summer, when I feel the need to fill every sunny day with as many outdoor experiences as possible. I end up scheduling so many compulsory fun days that I exhaust myself and the people around me. 

I’m trying to change this mentality – to stop desperately holding onto my days and instead letting them slide by and remembering that each season can be its own era worth celebrating.

Perhaps this mental effort is working because this is the first time in a while where I remember being excited for the coming of fall. As the weather started to change, I made a conscious effort to write a list of things I wanted to do to soak in the new season instead of mourning all the things I didn’t have a chance to do in the summer. After all, the way that time moves so quickly as you get older, I’ll probably blink and it will be summer once more. And maybe instead of being afraid of the way time continuously marches forward, I can be relaxed by the fact that summer is guaranteed to come back around again, year after year. 

If I place myself and my own eras in this cyclical pattern of time, I imagine myself like a cross-pollinated annual. I’m taking in everything that is going on around me, pollinated by what I’m learning, reading, doing, and who I’m talking to. I’m enriched by the soil and rain and decay of fall and winter. And when I bloom the next summer, my petals might be a different color than they ever were before. Or they will be the same. There’s no way to know.

xo Lily