Bold Glamour. It’s a new beauty filter on TikTok. Using it instantly gives people smoother, dewier skin, darker eyebrows, longer, thicker lashes, contoured features and plumper lips. My timeline is packed with TikTokers trying it out, marveling at their manipulated faces. 

One night, a few weeks before my forty-second birthday, I used it. I’d been lying in bed, hands folded stiffly over my belly, jaw clenched, thinking about how quickly I’ve begun to look old and how suddenly I’ve become aware of my aging.  

My husband is star-fished across the better part of our king-sized mattress, my youngest son’s head burrowed into his side and little heels on my chest. I lift my head to check the time on the bedside clock. 1:39 a.m. I drop my head back and throw an arm over my eyes—a comforting position carried over from my childhood; the pressure and added darkness helping me drift into sleep.  But then I remember an article I read somewhere that said the stress of my arm on my face could cause wrinkles. More wrinkles. I let my arm flop to my side. 

Earlier that day I caught sight of myself in the car window while loading the kids into the car and was stunned breathless by my reflection. I’d been laughing—my daughter had made a humorous observation about something; I can’t remember now—and lines burst from the corners of my eyes. There was a deep, dark trench forming between my eyebrows.

I’d spun away from my reflection.

“Momma?” My daughter’s small, worried voice behind me. 

I choked down a sob and reapplied the smile to my face.

Turning around, “Yes, joonam. I’m fine.”

*

I lift my son’s feet gently off my chest, slide out of bed and pad into the kitchen where my phone is charging. I type 2017, 2018, 2019 into my photo app and scroll through hundreds of pictures of myself. I notice, with some relief, that the lines and crepey skin I’d just been agonizing about aren’t really that new. Look at this picture of me at my family’s Nowruz party in 2019—I’ve had those smile lines for years. And the wiry tinsel shooting through my hair? There, in a picture of me with my youngest when he was just a baby at Santa’s Village. You can see it clearly. And I was only 37. I put my phone down on the counter and took a deep breath. 

I’ve always been aware of aging. Even as a young child, I was constantly, debilitatingly aware of time passing. On the eve of my tenth birthday, I realized I was heading into the double digits. My childhood was lost. I was inconsolable for months. 

It wasn’t until my early teens that I was diagnosed with OCD and, later on, existential OCD, which is characterized by intrusive, repetitive, anxiety-inducing questions about existence and reality. Existential OCD is rarely discussed and is often misdiagnosed as Generalized Anxiety Disorder. 

I’ve only known one other person diagnosed with this kind of OCD. Like me, he was unable to control or contain his all-consuming and frightening ruminations about mortality. A few years ago, he died by suicide. I understand this: the fear and overwhelming desire to make the fear stop.  

I waterboarded my thoughts with alcohol for over a decade. Suicide was never far from my mind. I needed to know why: why are we here? What is real? How does it end? What happens when it ends? When I end? (When I end. What a roundabout way to say what I mean. But I can’t write the word I want to use. My disease tells me writing out the word will summon it: for me, for the people I love). I’ve spent much of my life asking myself impossible questions I often can’t articulate out loud and living with the quickening terror that comes with knowing I have no way of changing anything. 

*

My face. The scant beginning of jowls and a turkey wattle.

My body. My husband and I were half-heartedly trying for another child—our fifth—up until just recently. My body, it seems, is finished with housing new life. A realization that leaves me shaking with sadness and rage. Another chapter of my life done; one step closer to…

Well, you know.

I flick on the small light over the kitchen sink, pick my phone back up and open TikTok. I find the Bold Glamour filter and raise my phone screen to my face. My first startled reaction is that I look masculine, my already dark, strong features becoming more pronounced. But then I’m absorbed by my skin, a flawless desert scape from the sky. My eyebrows, which I plucked within an inch of their lives in the 1990s, are fuller. My lips are smackably plump. The whites of my eyes glisten. I marveled at this alternate version of me as I pretended to talk, turning my face from side to side, tilting my chin up and down. I don’t know how long I stood there, but, at some point, the overhead light turned on and there was my husband at the other end of the kitchen, bleary-eyed. 

“What are you doing?” he whispers, rubbing an eye. “Is everything okay?”

I turn the filter off and drop my phone to my side. 

“Nothing.” I say quickly, almost hissing. I soften my tone. “I mean, just turning off my notifications. They woke me up. Coming back to bed in a sec.”

We’ve been together 14 years and he knows I’m lying but has the grace to leave the room without comment. 

I look back down at my phone, directly into the screen. This would be a bad angle even with the best beauty filter but now, in the middle of the night under the intense glare of the overhead light and my sleep-deprived face, the juxtaposition between what I just looked like and what I look like now is devastating. 

Hands shaking, I raise the phone so it’s level with my face. My complexion is blotchy. There are ashy smudges under my eyes. My skin looks so thin I’m afraid if I touch it, it will pull away in flakes on my fingertips. 

Standing there on the cold vinyl floor, I become keenly aware of my feet and how one day the skin will rot off from the rest of my body. Or be burned away. I gulp air deep into my diaphragm, like my therapist taught me, and remind myself I’m alive. I’m well. 

I’m alive. I’m well. 

I’m alive. 

*

I remember now; at the grocery store, my daughter made me laugh by doing an impression of a man we encountered when we entered the store. 

My kids had bolted through the automatic doors and were arguing over who was going to push the cart by the time I stepped through the entrance. 

“Hey,” a man called, walking into the store from the entrance on the other side. He lifted his hand and pointed at me. “Yeah you. You’re beautiful.”

My children stopped arguing and were looking at me. My oldest son and daughter instinctively grabbed the hands of their younger siblings. 

“Uh, thanks.” I said, walking quickly to my children and depositing the two youngest in the cart. 

“No, I mean it,” he continued, following us into the store, voice booming. “You’re really gorgeous. What are you? Indian? Italian? Are you Mexican?” 

I secured my facemask, made sure my kids all had their masks on correctly, then nodded in his direction, and sped off. 

“That was aggressive,” my eldest son said, looking back over his shoulder to see if the man was still following us.

“Creepy,” my daughter added, hooking her arm around my waist and pulling us close together.

Still by the time we were leaving—and especially because the man hadn’t unsettled us with his attention during the rest of our time in the store—the kids had begun to feel distanced enough from the incident to joke about it.

“Hey,” my daughter had said in a low, husky voice. I had just finished buckling her little brother in his booster seat. “Hey lady, you are really beautiful. What are you, Mexican?”

Then she winked at me and I joined her in laughter. I threw my head back and, for a moment, I laughed at the cold absurdity of it all.

*

An older woman friend once told me that the best thing about getting older is being spared unwanted attention from aggressive young men. I think of the man in the grocery store, his dark blonde hair curling out from under his toque, his stubbled jaw, and large pale eyes searching my face for a response to his come-on. The intensity of that look; of what he thought he was owed from me. I try to remember the last time a man approached me like that. There have been a few in the last year or so. But not near as many as there used to be. There’s a moment of relief. Maybe aging out of society’s spotlight won’t be so bad. 

The problem is it’s not societal pressure that worries me these days. It did when I was younger. When I had a nose job to downplay my Iranian features so that I could blend in to predominantly white, small-town Ontario. (Although it’s interesting to note that Iran has the highest rate of nose surgeries in the world, so having the nose job was probably the most Persian thing I could have done). 

Societal expectations were certainly a force behind the eating disorder I battled for over a decade. That I continue to live with today. Overall, I worry less about living up to beauty standards imposed by the world at large—a confidence that’s come with age and the knowledge that this sort of beauty is a beast that is only full when you are empty. Now, I worry more about being able to live in my own head and with my mental illness, which—with the bouncy cheeked firmness of my youth gone and my filter-free face staring back from my phone screen—has become frantic. Louder. 

I feel my guts go cold. Wind whistling through the empty cage of my ribs. 

Right then and there, I started to compose an email to a local skincare clinic that offers Botox. I’d been to the clinic before to have sun damage assessed by the dermatologist. And, as I am typed, the tight coil of my obsession started to relax. I was solving a problem and it made my insides purr. Made me giddy. Botox! I won’t have to watch my body fall apart. And after the injections, maybe lip fillers, a face lift, and neck tightening. 

I’m quivering with excitement as I inquire to the soonest date they can accommodate me, but before I can finish the email, in the midst of the chaotic rush of relief, comes a small, whispering revelation: Botox. It isn’t going to solve my particular problem. As young as I may look, I’ll still be my age. I’ll still be getting older.

My face may look smoother but inside, my body is aging; my eggs are less fertile, the cell regeneration in my organs is slowing, and my bone density is declining. The majority of my bodily functions peaked just before thirty and have been going downhill since. This is another characteristic of OCD: you stumble on an answer and it will do for just a little while before the disease dismantles that, too. There are no permanent comforts. 

While Botox might make me feel better about my face short-term, it’s not a permanent answer.  It won’t actually make me younger. It won’t stop me from…

Well, you know.

And this is what my disease demands: the white-noise hum of assured permanence, not just the Bold Glamour appearance of it. 

*

I put my phone back on the counter top, turn off the lights, and feel my back back to the bedroom in the dark, stumbling over a sleeping dog and laundry basket on the way. 

The questions, like the lines and wrinkles and crepe-paper skin, are going to keep coming. There are any number of Band-Aids I can put on them, like booze or Botox, but perhaps the boldest measure I can take—the only one with any guarantee of longevity—is to try harder to learn to live with the uncertainty. To stop chasing solutions where there are none and seek to find comfort in letting go. To climb into bed with my husband and son, throw my arm over my eyes, and just let it rest there.