All of It by Brooke Boney Extract

Read an extract from All of It by Brooke Boney.

Drink the Good Wine

On ageing, friendship and the passage of time

I’m obsessed with the future at the moment. I’m constantly ruminating on what my health will be like, if the climate in Sydney will continue to be unbearably humid, whether I should buy a house here, if I’ll get fat, if my skin will look good as I get older, what job I might do next, if I’d be able to afford an apartment in Sydney, who will look after my mum, who will look after me, whether I’ll find a suitable partner, if I should have children, if I want to have children. All of this, all the time. I feel a bit exhausted even just writing this down to be honest.

Right now, for the first time in 22 years, I’m not smoking or vaping. This is for a lot of reasons, one of them being that cigarettes smell bad to most people, and also vapes are kind of illegal now so I won’t be able to get them as easily. But another reason is that I don’t want to get prematurely sick and lose any of my good years for no good reason. The good years are the ones where you wake up and jump out of bed without thinking too much about where you’re aching and why. You go about your days not wondering about how many days you and the people you love have left.

A couple of years ago, I was very lucky to do a bit of work that involved interviewing a lady who was about to die. She had ovarian cancer, and it seemed like she had just accepted her fate with grace and dignity. She had a warm smile that didn’t betray any particular regret or sadness, and she engaged with everyone wholeheartedly and with a genuine interest in what they were saying. It seemed as though she wanted the opportunity to laugh; like a toddler who over-eggs their chuckle to delight their parents, she was eager to giggle and share moments with the women on set. There was no bitterness or sorrow or lamenting what she had missed out on or would miss out on. If that’s not grace, I don’t know what is.

As I worked with her, I couldn’t stop studying her face for some sort of evidence of bargaining or wishing that something was different. But even though I looked at her for a really long time—maybe too much—it just wasn’t there. The most special part was that she had vowed to spend the last of her days trying to save other women from a similar fate. It made me think that maybe that’s what most people are searching for in life anyway: some way to help people understand themselves. Some kind of meaning.

One of the many benefits of having friends from different generations is that, if they’re older, you get to reap the benefit of their wisdom, and if they’re younger, you get some of their optimism. I’ve been interrogating if optimism and wisdom are mutually exclusive and where they’d sit as dot points on a graph with youth and experience on either axis, but I can’t decide. It is harder to be more optimistic the more you learn about the worst of things. That’s why practising gratitude is more important as you get older. It’s easy to be grateful when you’re a babe—and I mean that in the multiple senses of the word.

I do think we trade exuberance for experience as we get older. But I guess it’s worth it.

Recently, I watched an old video of myself. And after reading that sentence back, I know it’s self-indulgent. I some­times say things and then regret them as soon as they come out of my mouth. Self-referencing is almost always one of those times. But no matter how embarrassing that phrase is, it happened. I watched an old video of myself. It’s akin to the self-flagellating exercise of looking at photos on Instagram that you know aren’t real.

Watching the video, I felt a bit of grief for having lost that version of myself. No matter how much I wanted it or how far modern medicine and cosmetic procedures and creams have come, there is no way I could be or look like that again. That little ten-second snapshot was dust in the wind. Gone forever, existing only in that place at that time.

So yes, there’s no way I’ll ever look like that girl again, but I’m not sure I would even want to. I know there are people who try to freeze their youth, but they always end up looking a certain kind of way, and it’s not how they used to look. It’s more like a new, weird version of their old self, but still not quite what might’ve been their older self had they just let themselves age.

I also don’t even know if it was the way I looked in the video that made me feel like that or the way I appeared. I seemed kind of carefree and maybe not quite full of confidence, but full of something. Bravery, perhaps.

Am I lamenting, then, the fact that I’m not as brave as I once was? Or that I’m now more aware of the consequences of being brave so I’m more measured? Is that what wisdom is? Is it the case that I’m not jealous of my own youth but the naivety that it’s intertwined with?

Youth, beauty and naivety. Time, age and wisdom. Now I know too much, and maybe I wear that on my face. I know for sure that I feel it in my aching bones when I wake up and I hear it in my thoughts before I go to sleep.

One of my wisest and most optimistic friends is Fumi Yamamoto, a person who is an expert at faces and intrinsic beauty. She also dispenses wisdom like medicine, delivering perfect phrases and anecdotes. Despite its penchant for incred­ible anti-ageing products, Japanese culture has a particularly useful perspective in digesting some of the more uncomfortable parts of the passing of time:

You’re moving into womanhood. There’s a word in Japanese: kao tsuki. Kao is the face and tsuki is the intention. Your intentional being actually does show on your face. So maybe until you were 25, you would wear this face that was given, and after 25, you start to really earn how you are and how you look through your existence. So by 40, you have earned your face. When people see or feel things, it’s actually not ageing—it’s responsibilities. Because with ageing comes also the privilege of taking on responsibilities and, with women, the care for others. So, when we actually don’t get to replen­ish or restore, then yes, it’s on all of that level. With trauma, there’s now more awareness that through the fascia, it gets trapped. We have all this tightness or heaviness. Some­times a physical adjustment may not release it. Proper rest and relaxation, being in alignment and feeling renewed is what will replenish you.

I guess life, you know, it’s a journey. So if you have some­thing to look back at, you can feel joyful about it, but at the same time, you can actually see that was that face, and that was one of the chapters that brought you to who you are today. It’s a lovely, lovely thing to look back to.

If someone looks good for their age, does that just mean they’re unaffected by the world? If someone looks bad for their age, does that mean they’ve seen the worst the world has to offer, and that’s why they can’t pretend that it’s okay to prioritise sleep, facials and expensive creams?

It is a luxury to have time and money to look after yourself. It’s why women who spend so much time looking after small babies go and get their hair and nails done to feel more like themselves.

I think part of Fumi’s perspective is that beauty doesn’t diminish with these responsibilities or the way we wear them on our faces.

Extracted from All of It by Brooke Boney. Available in all formats.

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All of It

by Brooke Boney

A collection of witty and heartfelt essays about love, loss and ambition, from journalist and proud Gamilaroi woman Brooke Boney.

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