Shall I compare thee to a … buffalo…?

We are none of us what we were. Sometimes that’s the hardest part of all this. I mean, yes, I woke up three times last night to take the covers off and three more times to put them back on again, and I’m feeling particularly crabby this morning. But the bags under my eyes are not just about that… they’re about my skin changing.

I am growing older. It is hard to put aside youthful things. I’d like to look better in Lycra. I miss the time when men craned their necks on escalators going the other way to look at my face a little longer — even though I thought they were creeps at the time. I’d like to have the energy I had a few years ago. I’d like to go to all night parties and dance on roof gardens and not be paying the price for a week.

I am not that person any more. It’s hard not to be young any more in a society that values women for their youth and beauty and is often contemptuous about older women.

But have a new place in the world. I demand different things. I offer different things. I am tougher, wiser, clearer. I know what matters to me. And (as you see by the watercolour) I am learning new skills.

When I first came across Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 4 stages of adult life in The Circle of Life, I was not impressed by being compared to a buffalo. I can’t say I identified with it much — except perhaps…