I have a new boyfriend. His name is Caleb.
I wake up to him almost every morning. He’s super handsome and really fit, and makes me laugh. He comes with me anywhere I go. He does the same for approximately 500,000 other people, but I don’t care.
I don’t know about you, but I struggle with exercise. It is my anti-depressant, but like an anti-depressant it’s hard to get myself to actually take. But a few weeks ago, searching for exercise videos on Youtube, I saw Caleb dancing to Bad Romance by Lady Gaga.
I was hooked.
Caleb has two backup dancers, one of whom is fat. He talks along with the lyrics and does jokey choreography. He gets you to be dramatic like Madonna. He calls you “Booty”. He tells you how smokin’ hot you are, even if you (I) are floundering around trying to get the steps right. But coming from Caleb, you believe it. You are dancey and fun and even sexy, and also laughing so hard at his commentary and the whole situation that you don’t care.
I don't know some of the music Caleb uses in his videos, because I am not 24. But most of it is good. I am also so uncoordinated that I’m an embarrassment to my Arab roots. But I love dancing. I always have. And somewhere in between my early twenties and the now, I forgot that.
I’ve been thinking a lot about ageing since I’ve been here. Being single and child-free at my age is almost unimaginable for a Turkish woman. Most foreign women who live here are either single and a lot younger, or my age and have families. It’s hard to know where I belong. This is especially apparent when I go shopping, and the majority of clothing retailers cater to people who (jesus help us) are searing crop tops and low cut jeans. Even if I wanted to wear those kinds of things, I already did once in the late nineties and it’s not going to happen again.
Dancing days of yore.
Then there is the dating scene. Guys my age are usually married (or pretending not to be). Guys who are younger think being with an older woman is a novelty, which makes me want to punch them in the face. In a place where cosmetic surgery is so common and relatively affordable, and female upkeep is so revered, it’s tempting to start going in the direction of trying to erase years off my life.
But that is slowly starting to change.
I’m grateful to live in a time and in a country that allows for this. Say what you want about And Just Like That, but it, along with writers and podcasts and publications like Everything is Fine and Gloria and Sonya Renee Taylor, are fighting back against the invisibility that our culture has prescribed to women of a certain age. They, along with Caleb and his dance moves, are reminding me that there’s a big difference between being sexy for someone else, or being a sexual being because you are simply an actual fucking human. I never learned this before. I’m also learning the difference between getting your nails done or your eyelashes lifted because you want to impress a whole gender, or because it makes you happy.
Until the age of 39, it never once dawned on me to appreciate my own body for what it was, rather than for what it could do or get me in terms of male attention. I took care of myself for my partners. I plucked, shaved, dyed and buffed because it would make me attractive. I worked out because it felt good, but making me more desirable (i.e thin) was the real carrot on the stick. Same with dieting. Nothing tastes as good as being valued by the patriarchy feels!
There is true power in being sexual or sensual in our own bodies — not to please or attract another person or persons, but because it is our birthright and it is one of the things bodies were made for.
There is magic in having movement and exercise be joyful, rather than some horrible slog to get through and be done with so we can get on with our day.
In Tarot, we talk about archetypes and how they are there to remind us that we already have access to joy, to power, to sexuality. They are not things we have to strive for or achieve or pay for. These are not things we cannot access over a certain age. These are not things we can only be for others.
These days, I dance with Caleb. I eat the delicious food. I’m soaking up the culture of self-care in Turkiye and specifically in Istanbul. Getting scrubbed at a hammam, having my nails done, putting rose water on my face like fucking Cleopatra. Trying to remember to walk down the street in my power, my wisdom, my beauty. Does it make you uncomfortable to hear a woman say that about herself? It did for me. But it shouldn’t.
We are not here to make ourselves smaller and quieter and younger. Believing we are unattractive, too big, too wrinkly, too old, or shaped in the wrong ways is not the law of gravity. This is something we can change.
You are a child of the universe, god, or whomever or whatever you want to call it.
You were given a body for a reason.
Ohhh this is good!!!