Finding myself or at least my glasses

The notion of finding oneself always seemed funny to me as a child.  Why don’t people just look in a mirror?, I thought.  Not such a bizarre idea. How can you find yourself when  you are always there, inside the body, the vessel that holds together your innards? At mid-life, the vessel I call my body doesn’t look so familiar. I don’t take very long looks like I once did.  As a child I spent hours making faces or practicing hairstyles or glopping green eye shadow and mascara to try to look older. There’s a foreign concept.. trying to look older.  

I need glasses now to read and I rarely have them on when I am getting ready for the day. In fact, right now I can’t locate any of the four pair that I own...

I get a shock now and then when I do have them on and really see the crevasses forming on my face and the drooping of the skin on my neck. Then I take them off and feel and look better..  I don’t worry about it too much and I’ve never been a very fussy person about my appearance (except in high school when I HAD to have the Calvin Klein jeans and wore giant rollers in my hair for an hour at a time to straighten my hair.)

Luckily, my husband’s eyesight is much worse than mine and I feel that this works dramatically in my favor. I had thought about asking Santa for one of those light--up, magnifying mirrors for Christmas, but after testing a few at the mall recently, I decided I like the fuzzy, unlit version of me way better.

Maybe nature’s weakening of the eyesight works on other levels, too. Maybe I see more gray now and a little less black and white.  I like the perspective that aging gives me.  It was fun being young and stupid, but I like getting older and wiser. When I ‘find myself’ in the mirror I see a person that likes to laugh, loves her family and friends and wishes all people had a more blurry view of life.