My Jowls, My Jewels
I’m waiting for my daughter to brush her teeth when a text arrives from a friend. “Just pulled my neck while putting anti-wrinkle oil on my face.”
I cackle, then sigh. After we exchange a series of gifs about this tragedy and I survive the usual nighttime kid dramas, I’m at the bathroom mirror washing my face when I notice tiny hills of skin puffing out under each corner of my mouth. Little hype men propping up the things I say or don’t say.
What are these? Jowls? I thought the term jowls was reserved for old men who resembled bloodhounds. I’m no spring chicken, but at 46, I should be safe from jowl territory, right?
I slather a little extra age-defying cream on my jowls and call it a night. I do this every night for the next few weeks. No change. Maybe it even accentuates them a bit?
I google “jowl” to see if this is the correct term. Jowls are “the lower part of a person's or animal's cheek, especially when it is fleshy or drooping.” Maybe these pockets of skin aren’t technically jowls. They’re in jowl territory—jowl cousins, you might say—and they’re drooping because my skin is losing elasticity, like so many other parts of my body.
When did they arrive? I look at a picture of myself from last year and yep, there they were unbeknownst to me. Now, I can’t unsee them. Every time I look in the mirror, they’re waving at me, saying, “Heyyy, you’re getting older!”
I start studying them and notice that they only show up when my face is at rest. When I smile, they disappear. Most of the time, I must have Resting Jowl Face (RJF). I think of all the men over the years who’ve yelled out, “You should smile!” when walking past me on the street. I wish I could go back and shake my jowls at them now.
The other morning, I was caressing my jowls with my thumb and pointer finger when a card from Beth Pickens’ new Artist Deck arrived in Ann Friedman’s newsletter:
“I’m Too Old. A classic piece of capitalist detritus! You are never too old to have the creative life you imagine or something even bigger and better. Friends, give me a world filled with old women, old queers, old sluts, and old freaks making all the art, community, and culture. Go listen to Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Yoko Ono. Read Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. Divest from internalized ageism. We have the power to do this.”
I text my neck-pulling anti-wrinkle oil friend in all caps: “DIVEST FROM INTERNALIZED AGEISM!”
She cheers. I feel uplifted and go about my day.
But when I’m back at the mirror again later, I feel disgust over these pesky pockets of loose skin.
I think back to the word “animal” in the definition of jowl. I remember that I’m an animal and so am as vulnerable to the laws of gravity as any mortal being. And aging is a kind of gravity, isn’t it? We keep falling into a new state again and again. Until we can’t get up.
I decide not to punish myself for putting on an imperfect performance of feminine youth when I know the femininity-youth cocktail I’ve been handed my whole life is such bullshit.
Then at school pick-up later, ready to be upbeat and vital and alive despite gravity, I notice the other moms really are jowl-less. Perky and smooth-chinned. Are they a decade younger than me, or can they afford the one magical serum that dissolves jowls in an instant?
When the bell rings, I ask my kids about their days and try to be present, but I’m still thinking about my face, how it can never go back to how it was. Soon, my neck folds will be a-flapping, my skin will be a-sagging all over, and I’ll be officially invisible, even more invisible than I am now. Fading into a wrinkly, saggy oblivion.
My feminism is not so brittle that I don’t realize what I’m doing—hating myself. I decide to call these sagging skin-hills “my jewels” instead.
Maybe they aren’t precious to anyone else, but they carry the record of the life I’ve lived, which is precious to me even on the hard days. My skin carries the marks of the laughs that have surprised me. My frowns when my kids are suffering. My intense glare when I’m writing and searching for the right word. My skepticism knotting up my chin and furrowing my brow when I’m listening politely to someone I disagree with, but my face is broadcasting the truth.
All those uncountable moments in which an emotion has translated onto my face as I feel something or try to connect with others. I wear the marks. But they didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They’ve been here bubbling under the surface, quietly gathering force. It took time and repetition for them to be sculpted into these shapes, ornaments of how many years I’ve lived on this earth with this particular face. The face I’ve been wearing since I was a baby and was born with smooth buttery skin.
Maybe these jewels are where I store my power. The power that grows more potent with each day that I live according to my own vision. Each time I work to divest from internalized ageism and invest instead in wisdom gathered through experience over time. In the rich soil of actual, breathing, ever-changing life. In the way my jowls are not something to loathe or fear (as Instagram ads would have me think, with their peptides and botox injections) but rather something to revere.
I mention this draft in my writing meet-up and Violeta says that dogs’ jowls are for scenting in many breeds. They are of use. Callie mentions a certain kind of pancetta, guanciale, that comes from the cheek of a pig and has a higher fat ratio than pancetta. It is delicious and desirable.
We joke that maybe these will help me in the apocalypse…extra fat pockets to survive the long winter.
Last week, I visited the Grand Canyon with my family for my 46th birthday. It was my first time there and I’m one of those nerds who reads all the plaques like someone’s gonna hand out a quiz later. Each plaque kept announcing the story of this stunning beauty as the product of erosion over millennia. Water and wind and animals whittled away at the earth until it formed these shapes. We spent a lot of time just staring at the beauty and admiring the layers that were uncovered from the process of erosion. My kids searched for seashells baked into the earth, and I tried to name the colors of the different rock layers, once buried, now shining in the Arizona sun.
I stood on the south rim of the canyon, caressed my jowls, and thought, I’m just a little baby canyon. 46 years to the grand canyon’s 6 million, but on the same path.
In Easy Beauty, Chloé Cooper Jones writes, “Beauty is what we're told is beautiful and what we're told becomes the truth.”
The Grand Canyon calls bullshit on our limited human perspective on beauty. And damn if I’m not becoming more beautiful with the whittling away, if you look from a certain angle.
You can see the physical marks of where the water has rushed by. Where stones fell and formed distinct shapes where they happened to land. Where shadows dissolved and the light shone through.
I’m lucky to have a lot of older women friends. Brilliant, soulful women in their 50s up to their 90s. I have never once noticed their wrinkles or sagging chins. I’m sitting here trying to conjure in my mind who has jowls or sagging neck skin, and I truly couldn’t tell you. I just love them and their presence. The shapes of their smiles, their energy, their jokes, their questions, their stories.
Thinking of my older friends reminds me of the bell hooks quotation about love and power: “To know perfect love, we surrender the will to power. It is this revelation that makes the scriptures on perfect love so prophetic and revolutionary for our times. We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power.”
Maybe that is what it’s all about: power. Or rather, a misunderstanding of power. A clinging to the past and a frozen version of feminine power. Botox and eye serums are human-made inventions to attempt to erase or cover over what we actually are. To stop ourselves from becoming.
And, although these products may be billed as self-care and self-love, they are born of a well of suspicion and a hatred of what is real. From a desire to prey on the self-hatred that society hands us as teens and keeps watering and tending so that we gladly fork over our money, time, and confidence to feed this fruitless battle. When we consider canyons, we understand it’s pointless to fight the natural elements and their flow. Why can’t we see that when it comes to our own bodies?
To be able to love our aging jowls and bellies and thighs and liver spots, we need to give up our power.
I hear myself telling my kids, “Listen to your body. How do you feel? What do you need?” I struggle to say this to myself. I have a relationship with my body and it is often no less dynamic than my relationship with the other humans in my life. And, to be in relationship, to actually connect, I have to give up my power, or at least my attachment to it. As bell hooks says, I cannot really love if I am unable to surrender my attachment to power.
To be a good partner, I have to surrender to listen to my partner’s thoughts when I just want to talk about my own. I have to surrender to being interrupted when my kid needs something (although sometimes I also have to ignore it). To surrender to listen rather than giving advice when my friend just needs to have her pain acknowledged. I need to surrender my time and sleep and space to attend to the people I love.
To love is to surrender our power. And, what we gain is ultimately greater than what we give up. We know this, but we forget.
I need to build my own definition of beauty, one that’s closer to a canyon than anything human-made. I need to surrender my well-worn false narratives about myself to actually love myself and my aging body. One that’s rooted in loving what is, in the real power that comes, ironically, from surrender.
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I loved this piece, Emily! As the Quakers say, "my friend speaks my condition."
Your writing in this piece is gorgeous. Thank you for your vulnerability and wisdom.