And honestly? To think Madonna gives a single fuck what anyone thinks about her choices is to fundamentally misunderstand who she is or has ever been. The same week that op-ed ran, it was announced that her latest album, Confessions II, will debut at number one on the Billboard 200. That is not the manifestation of "some enhanced mirage of her younger self." That album is the rawest, most honest, most authentic document of a woman with nearly seventy years of lived experience behind her, who knows that she still has something to say.
Almost poetically, days later I caught the Rolling Stones on the Today Show talking about their new album and tour. These men were joyfully, visibly living their lives — enjoying their art, clearly having the time of their lives. It wasn't until the cameras cut back to the other co-anchors that one of them even said, "Isn't Mick Jagger in his 80s?" Willie Geist, who conducted the interview, confirmed in fact, Mick is turning 82 this month, with the rest of the band close behind him. That was it. That was the entire acknowledgment. Nobody wrote a think-piece asking if Mick Jagger has become a symbol of our collective terror of death. But a 67-year-old woman tops the charts and suddenly she's a cultural referendum on whether aging itself is embarrassing.
I recognized the mechanism the op-ed writer was reaching for instantly, because I've lived inside a version of it my whole life — and it turns out it has nothing to do with aging either. It has to do with being told, over and over, to make yourself smaller so other people stay comfortable. That's a different fear filling the same botox syringe as the fear of aging. It's the fear of not living fully, just aimed at someone else first.
People assume that fear is what's hiding underneath a milestone birthday — the ending, the clock, the countdown running the wrong direction. It isn't, not for me. I don't lie awake worrying about the day it stops. What's actually kept me up, the only thing that's ever really scared me, is the thought of getting to any day — 50, 35, 80 — and realizing I spent it small on purpose. Performing a smaller version of myself because it was easier for everyone else in the room. That's the fear. Not the end of my life. A life half-lived while I'm still very much in it.
In the 90s, when I was starting out as an actor, agents and casting directors — most of them gay themselves, which is its own special flavor of betrayal — used to tell me I had "a big personality." Translation: you're too much, tone it down, make yourself digestible. I took that note and ran with it for way too many years. I got extremely good at shrinking. I shrank in rooms, in relationships, around people I didn't want to threaten. I turned somebody else's discomfort into my permanent posture. Every time I did it, I was quietly choosing the smaller life over the true one.
A few weeks ago I ran into an old friend from over 25+ years back — I'll call him Lukas. Back in the day, Lukas was the main character. Gorgeous, magnetic, walked into every room like he owned the deed to it, walked up to the front of every velvet rope in NYC, and without fail the red sea parted — and luckily enough for me as his friend, I trailed two steps behind, grateful for the reflected light. We hadn't spoken in probably fifteen years, hadn't seen each other longer than that. His 50th lands a week before mine. When I saw him this time, while it was still impossible to miss his Frank Sinatra-esque baby blue eyes, he was nearly unrecognizable. He gave me a huge hug and smiled from ear to ear and said, "Bobby, you look better than you've ever looked, how do you do that? You were always 'cute' but... wow?" He continued self-deprecatingly "I look like I should be sitting poolside on a carnival cruise with an umbrella drink. What happened?"
I can't pretend his acknowledgment didn't feel good. I won't sand that down to make it more palatable, or blame my ego for the inflation. And within about ninety seconds I was already trying to help him — "I've been on a healing journey for the last ten years that has opened up new possibilities for me. I help others, if you want... whatever you need..." Blah blah blah. Again, I couldn't just let the moment be mine. I had to hand pieces of it away before anyone could accuse me of being "too much." That reflex — that's the tell, babe. Not aging. That.
An old example? Back when I was acting, if someone wanted a role I booked, I'd immediately try to pass it off as "no big deal" or offer to coach them for the next one, as if my achievement needed an apology stapled to it. I finally said out loud this week: "If I'm too successful, it makes other people feel bad. My success diminishes others." That comes with a punch, let me tell you. I have spent decades quietly managing everyone else's feelings about my own life going well — and every time I did, I was choosing to live smaller than I actually am, or ever wanted to.
To many of us, getting older is one day closer to "the end." What is death anyway? Nobody knows for sure, and that uncertainty is what has most people holding on to not getting older, so they can delay finding out as long as they possibly can. Fifty isn't a threshold I'm nervous to cross — it's the first birthday I'm arriving at without negotiating myself down to fit through the door. As authentic as I always thought I was, I'm learning that perhaps I haven't even scratched the surface yet.
Death, or "the end," is something I have never feared. What I do fear, however, is not living fully — living the version of my life where I stayed small enough not to "be a bother" to anyone, and then called that peace.
