And just like that, I see myself aging

I was reminded of the marionette lines around my mouth while watching Carrie Bradshaw shuffle down the runway. She had fallen from the stage and, in true Carrie fashion, picked herself back up, tossed her hair, and laughed. At that moment, I caught my own reflection on the screen. It had been over 20 years since I first watched Sex and The City, and this time I wasn’t watching for the clothes or the drama. I was studying the women and what time had done to them—and to me.

Let’s face it—no pun intended—we live in a world where everything and everyone aspires to be perfect. It’s the one thing we can all agree on: Beauty is in the eye of the iPhone holder. But more and more, I find I’m not looking at the phone as often. Probably because I don’t like what I see in its reflection.

By rewatching Sex and the City, I wanted to summon a particular memory: being young in New York, on the cusp of something important, even if it never really happened.

When I moved to the city in the early 2000s, it was still very much Carrie’s New York: rent-stabilised walk-ups, cigarettes on stoops, cash-only bodegas, barred dancing in bars, the negotiation of ambition in every conversation. I was underage when I ordered my first cosmopolitan at a bar on the Lower East Side. I was in heels, wearing something probably too short and probably thrifted, flushed with the sense that I had arrived. That drink wasn’t just a drink; it was permission. I wasn’t just living in New York. I was a New Yorker, or so I told myself.

Like any woman who watched too much of that show, I arrived hoping to meet my Mr Big. I thought I might find him at a loft party in Brooklyn, or across the Great Lawn in Central Park, or even maybe in bed the next morning. I went through a lot of men in those years; sex was part of the search, part of my story.

Two decades later, I decided to revisit the show. All six seasons. This time, not from a fourth-floor Carroll Gardens walk-up but from a four-poster bed in a farmhouse upstate, two and a half hours north of the city, with three kids, two cars, an aging Lab, and an alley cat. My husband lay next to me, our laptop nudged between us. The same man who, when we first dated, mocked the show mercilessly. “It flattens women into maniac shoppers with sex addictions,” he once said. Or maybe I’m paraphrasing. And yet, there he was, chuckling at Samantha’s puns, asking which one was Miranda. I watched the show the way one watches old black-and-white films, partly because I wanted to go back in time, but also because I wanted to remember what it felt like when everything was still ahead of me. And then the final episode came. Carrie finally wins Mr. Big. And all of a sudden, all is well in the kingdom. Yet, despite getting what I wanted, I still had to have more.

Naturally, I immediately binged the movies. The first one was fine. Predictable. Glossy. They get married. Big deal. The second was something else entirely—a weak copy of a story that once understood modern womanhood. Watching it, I felt the way one feels after gorging on Halloween candy past midnight: bloated, regretful, and a little ashamed.

I turned to And Just Like That..., the much-hyped reboot. Maybe, I thought, watching the first and second seasons again would cleanse my palate. Maybe I could return to something resembling what the show once meant to me. But then Mr. Big died. It made narrative sense, sure. Carrie needed to be single. Otherwise, what would we watch her do?

But I realised I wasn’t paying attention to the plot anymore. What I was really watching was their faces.

Charlotte, once all fresh cheeks and pearls, now looked somewhat unfamiliar. (Kristin Davis has since dissolved her fillers, after constant ridicule, she says.) Miranda’s fiery red had gone soft gray. (She dyes it to red in the final episode of the first season.) Carrie’s skin was softer. (Sarah Jessica Parker has said she feels like she “missed out” on a facelift.) Then there was Samantha, completely absent, which might be the most realistic portrayal of life, since I myself, being of mid-age, have experienced my fair share of friendship breakups. And yet it wasn’t the change in them that unsettled me; it was what their aging reflected back to me. The truth was, they were older now, and so was I.

I am 46 years old. I am in perimenopause. I take estrogen. My hair is thinning, so I ingest oral minoxidil nightly. I’m gaining weight, so I’m considering Wegovy. I use retinol religiously. I own two red-light-therapy masks—one for me, one for my husband. I touch my face constantly in the mornings, lightly pulling at the skin, wondering what a mini facelift might cost. I skipped my annual filler appointment this year out of fear of looking fake and overdone. And now, as I stare in the mirror, I wonder if that was a mistake.

Recently, my sister bought a ticket to Asia for an eye lift without me. “I couldn’t wait for you,” she texted. I felt left out but also relieved. (I wasn’t ready.) My niece, at my daughter’s graduation, told me my other sister had some “light work” done. “They look great,” she added gleefully. Everyone’s doing something, I suppose. Everyone’s trying not to disappear in old age, even as we hide away (or filter) ourselves from our screens.

There is no wisdom here, only the brutal fact of time. I toggle between two aging archetypes. On one hand, there’s Cameron Diaz, aging “gracefully” (or perhaps selectively). On the other, there’s Demi Moore, who is doing everything it takes and then some. Just last month, the internet applauded Lindsay Lohan for appearing “fresh.” Last week, Kris Jenner debuted a new face and looked, frankly, 20 years younger.

So I ask myself: Can I forgive Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda for getting older? And can I forgive myself? Or maybe more importantly, can I separate what I once loved about the show from what I now project onto it?

I realize, as I binge these newer episodes, that I am no longer watching for the drama. I am watching to see how they’ve aged. What’s shifted in their bodies, their faces, their confidence. This is not schadenfreude. I don’t take pleasure in this. It’s solidarity. It’s curiosity. It’s my own fear. There’s something tender, even brave, in how the show continues to portray them. Carrie gets hip surgery. Miranda faces alcoholism and a sexual identity crisis. Charlotte has to come to terms with her daughter’s gender identity. It’s messy and sometimes silly and sometimes very, very cringe. But at least it’s trying.

Meanwhile, I am here. No longer young or “in it.” I don’t go to parties. I don’t do bar crawls or go to gallery openings or wear heels to dinner. I barely wear mascara. My children are grown. My body is changing, and I know that I am not who I once was.

Yet, every so often, I flip through old photos from that era. A Polaroid with a celebrity outside Bungalow 8. A table full of drinks and cigarettes at Beatrice Inn. A SoHo brunch at La Esquina in low-rise jeans. And I remember what it felt like to be 24, invincible, and under the illusion that life would always be like that.

The third season of And Just Like That… is out now, and I’m racing through the old episodes so I can be caught up. I don’t know why I rush. I have time now. Endless time, it sometimes seems. No one is waiting for me at an underground party. There are no velvet ropes. No bouncers I need to charm with the owner’s name. No 3 a.m. taxis I need to beg to take me to Brooklyn. Just me. Sans sex. Sans city.

Lead image: Harold Julian/ Nhi Mundy

This article originally appeared on Harper'sBazaar.com

 

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