I Never Understood Oil of Olay. Until Now...

I remember the small pink bottle of Oil of Olay that sat on the counter in my grandmother’s bathroom. It was buried amidst her other makeup, & when I opened the container, I was reminded of the calamine lotion I’d been slathered in to prevent the itching from chicken pox.

As a six or seven years old, Oil of Olay seemed like one of those far off things that I might understand one day in the future. Kind of like cover-up or lipstick. (Though I never really came around on either of those...)

That day came a few weeks ago when, dreading my upcoming professional photoshoot, I looked at my crow’s feet and thought, not for the first time in recent months, that maybe it was time for some Oil of Olay in my life.

Most women I know hate to have their photo taken. I’ve written before about how few photos I have of my grandmother, the one mentioned above, and even photos of my mom when I was younger. I don’t have any photos of just me with either of my grandmothers, and none of my grandma, mom and myself. (Though I suspect in this age of selfies and phone cameras, we may have snagged more pics of both of my grandmothers...)

And I get it. The older I get, the more I get it.

We look at ourselves in the mirror, and instead of appreciating the laugh lines that are a result of enjoying moments with loved ones, we’re mortified at the wrinkles. Instead of admiring a chin that we’ve had to pick up off of the mat on more than one occasion, we see the rogue chin hairs and tug on the extra turkey skin on our neck.

Instead of looking at the strong legs that have carried us and all of our burdens and often the burdens of others over so many years, we pick on our varicose veins and thick tree trunk legs.

Instead of appreciating the scars on our bodies - the ones that we have earned and learned to live with and worked so hard to heal, we lament that our bodies have become so flawed. We want to go back to a time when they felt more perfect. And yet, I'd challenge any of you that if you went back to your twenties or thirties or even teen years, you probably were still picking apart your body. I know I was.

You know what bothered me most about my body when I was a teenager? My uneven tan. I had a farmer's tan because back then, softball uniforms had sleeves, and we work shorts with socks that came up to our knees instead of pants. I also thought I was getting heavy at 115 pounds.

Which is more a reflection of our society than anything else.

I wasn’t prepared for all of the feelings I had around having a photoshoot done at 45 years old. It was harder than I thought it would be. More uncomfortable than I thought it would be. The challenge for me, and for many of the women I work with, is to work through the negative self-talk that bombards us when we see photos and images of ourselves. When we look at ourselves in the mirror.

So when I got the images back last week, it was hard, because I reacted just like most of the women I know and work with. But, because I write, I shared the above thoughts on social media, along with some images from the shoot.

And I'm sharing them with you now, because if we want to think differently, if we want our daughters and nieces (and sons and nephews) to grow up in a different world, we need to work on interacting differently with the world.

Listen, I'm not going to pretend the next time I find a gray chin hair I won't lose my sh** and wonder how my ancestors got by without tweezers. I can't promise that I won't look at my arms and wish they were more muscular, more toned.

But I can promise that I'll spend an extra few seconds every time I think those things on flipping the script. We're not going to magically feel better about how we look in the mirror or in a picture without a little effort.

I encourage many of my clients to make a "to done" list at the end of each day, so that they can flip the script from what they didn't do, to all that they did do.

I think the same kind of work applies when we look in the mirror or at a photo of ourselves.

Spend an extra minute looking at what you do like.

And for the love of all things holy, get in those photos with friends and family members.