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There is something strange about ageing. It’s a natural, objective process that doesn’t seem to follow the logic of any other observable phenomenon. We age on the outside, but our brain refuses to register it. In my mind, I’m 28. When I feel old, I’m 38 and a half. But then I accidentally turn on my phone’s front facing camera while looking down and I nearly go into cardiac arrest. What I think I look like and what is reflected back to me, like a gut punch from the universe, are two very different things.
I have been on camera as an anchor and a reporter my entire adult life, so I see myself on screen a lot more often than most people, watching myself age while documenting how the world destroys itself. It’s strange, and a bit shameful, that vanity still finds a way in. Shouldn’t I be above this? Turns out, I’m not. And I’ll let you in on a secret: neither are most of the women (and men) you see on the news every.
More and more often, a viewer will tell me they “grew up watching me” and that’s when it hits home: I am someone’s childhood TV personality. The people who tell me this are most often in their thirties. How did time pass so quickly? Wasn’t I thirty just a few years ago?
It's a period that often coincides with the misery that is menopause, this tedious ageing business. That hormonal adolescence-in-reverse where everything that society has told us makes women desirable – fertility, youth, thick hair, a waistline – either slowly disappear or require Olympic discipline to maintain. I would want nothing more than to have J Lo’s body at 55 but, let’s face it, I’d rather watch Netflix while eating a bowl of pasta when she’s probably in the gym burning off a skinless chicken thigh.
Sure, there are ways to slow the whole process down. But as my friend Nico, who refuses any kind of cosmetic procedures once told me: “After a certain age, you either look old or you look weird.”
Now everyone isn’t as bothered as I am. There are the women who have decided that enough is enough. They are going grey, forgoing Botox and facelifts and telling the world that they won’t be made slaves to beauty standards designed to keep women forever young. Actress Ashley Judd, whose beauty I’ve long admired, has recently been posting videos of herself splashing around in the sea in a bathing suit announcing that she is now a member of the “WE DON’T CARE CLUB,” a tongue and cheek “club” for women surviving perimenopause and menopause founded by the US-based influencer Melani Sanders. Like me, Judd is in her fifties but, I’m sorry to say I haven’t reached that level of self-acceptance yet. I’m still a card-carrying member of the “WE CARE CLUB” and I am still buying the creams, getting the tweakments and paying ridiculous sums of money to get highlights in my hair.
One great thing about my home life is that my neighbors on either side of me in London are 89 and 84 years old. Gill and Val have lived on my street since the 1960s, when a Victorian terrace traded hands for $15,000. They often ask me over and I visit with pleasure. Val sometimes needs me to help when her remote control stops working or when she needs a hand setting up a new landline telephone (remember those?). “You are so clever,” she told me the last time I helped her. “Young people are brought up with this technology. I’m hopeless!” My heart leapt at the words “young people.” I felt like a child patted on the head.
I told my fifty-something friend Stephanie about how Val’s words made me feel like a spring chicken and she mused about how that might be the answer. “Let’s just hang out with women in their 80s,” she told me over lunch in Chelsea. “We can just be graded on an age curve. The older the people around us, the younger we become.” Perhaps we should spend more time in retirement homes, I told her while eating my superfood salad topped with grilled chicken.
“Let’s have dessert!” Stephanie suddenly said after we were done eating our sensible meal. “You pick,” she ordered. So I chose the most fattening option on the menu, a creamy, tiered millefeuille. And we ate the whole thing.
Hala Gorani is an award-winning anchor and correspondent with over 25 years of experience. She has covered history-defining stories and events as a primetime anchor for her show Hala Gorani Tonight on CNN, and is one of the most internationally recognised names in journalism. Gorani is also the recipient of several Emmy awards and other notable industry journalism recognitions.
