I am not sure when it happened. The change crept in so slowly and stealthily that I didn’t even notice it at first. But I caught glimpses of it here and there.
I would catch myself in the reflection of a plate glass window while out and about running some errands, unaware and unsmiling, my face wearing a look of mild irritability in the most unflattering way.
I would see it in unexpected photos, candid shots posted online by a friend in which they caught my side profile mid-turn, rolls of fat bulging around my bra straps in the back.
I would notice it when I tried to use my phone’s camera to take a photo and accidentally toggled it to selfie view by mistake, in all my concentrating, double-chinned glory.
I spot a glimpse of it when I step on the bathroom scale in the morning, convinced that there must be some sort of technical glitch causing an error with the numbers on the screen.
And again when I sidle up to the bar to order a drink, fumbling to remove my driver’s license from my wallet, and the bartender pours my drink and waves away my ID, telling me “not to worry about it.” He doesn’t realize that his confident insistence that I must be over the age of 21 is the very thing that has me worried.
It feels like a form of Body Dysmorphia, which is defined as a “disabling preoccupation with perceived defects or flaws in appearance” (according to the BDD Foundation website). Someone with Body Dysmorphia looks in the mirror and is only capable of seeing how unattractive they are. This person could be a runway supermodel, but she mistakenly sees herself as the ugliest person in the room.
However, my misperception of myself feels like the opposite of that.
As I get ready to go to work each morning in front of my bathroom mirror, I feel confident about my appearance. I feel like I fit right in among my Gen Z colleagues, young and fit and ready to take the day by storm! It’s only in those small glimpses that I get throughout the day that my positive self-perception falters. Why is my outward appearance and age so different from the way I feel on the inside?
I’m not sure what the name for this phenomenon should be. Reverse Body Dysmorphia is likely an actual clinical diagnosis, and not a title I’d like to hijack to label these jarring collisions with reality that I keep facing. It’s more just a startling incongruency between the way that I feel that I look and the way that I actually am.
Chalk it up to bingeing one too many episodes of the series Younger on Netflix, but I think my misperception of myself has continued edging farther and farther from reality now that I’ve reached age 40. I watch Sutton Foster pretending to be 20 years younger than she is, and I cringe at what a terrible job she does with faking the role sometimes. Yet I walk around my day-to-day life convincing myself that I am just the same as the young, fit 20-somethings that I mingle with every day. I wear all the same clothes as they do. I can curl my hair into the same tousled beach waves (parted down the middle, of course) and wear minimalist makeup, too. I am the picture of Dorian Gray, aging in reverse.
But then why does the waitress never ask me for my ID anymore when I order a glass of wine with my dinner? And why are all of my favorite songs from the early 2000s being categorized as “throwbacks”? Why do my knees feel so janky when I get out of bed in the morning, causing me to once again choose the comfortable shoes rather than the fashionable ones? Who is this woman that I’m seeing in the mirror every morning who looks so tired, and who could probably benefit from using an under-eye cream at night?
