The Contest We Never Entered

I started modelling at sixteen, and one of the first things I was taught in that world had nothing to do with posture or light.

It was a warning. Women will be vicious to you if you're beautiful. It was said kindly, like you'd tell a girl to watch her purse on a crowded train—as if it were simply a fact about the weather. Other women were the hazard. They came for your face.

I didn't believe it. I still don't. But I saw what it looked like when someone did.

I was working in a boutique at the time, and a strikingly beautiful woman came in to shop. She was polite, unhurried, doing nothing more than browsing the rails. When she left, the older woman I worked alongside watched her go and called her a b*tch. Not loudly. Almost to herself. The woman had not said a single unkind word to anyone.

I remember the feeling more than the words. It was a kind of sinking — something close to shame, though none of it was mine. I was young enough to be standing at the start of the same line that woman had just been measured on, and I understood, in my stomach before my head, that one day the measuring would be turned on me, and then by me, if I let it.

I have been turning that moment over all month, because I don't think the woman behind the counter was cruel. I think she had been handed a contest a long time before I met her, and told it was the natural order of things.

We have spent three Sundays on ageism — as the great leveller, in the workplace, and in the doors I eventually built for myself. I want to end somewhere a little more tender, and I think a little more honest: the way women of different ages get set against each other, and what it costs us at both ends.

Here is what I notice. Long before anybody tells a woman she is too old, she has been taught that her worth sits on a single line, ranked by how young she seems — and that the front of the line only has room for so many. We have an entire industry called anti-ageing, which is an extraordinary phrase when you sit with it: a whole economy organised against something that happens to every living person, every single day. Then there is the advertising, the casting, the quiet arithmetic of whose face goes on the poster. None of it ever says compete with her. It doesn't need to. It just keeps showing you one chair.

And the younger woman is not sitting comfortably in that chair. I want to be careful here, because from where I stand it is very easy to imagine that she has it easy.

In June, the Australian Human Rights Commission and Diversity Council Australia published a study of three thousand Australian workers, called Age, Assumptions and Access at Work. Among workers aged eighteen to twenty-nine, thirty-nine per cent had experienced discrimination or harassment at work in the past year. Thirty-six per cent had been sexually harassed. At the other end, fewer than one in five older workers had a mentor. The researchers noted, almost in passing, that age and gender together change the picture — which every woman reading this already knew in her body.

Put those findings side by side and look at what they share.

The young woman is looked at too much, and in the wrong way. The older woman is looked at too little. It is the same eye.

The eye that decides a woman's value by whether she is being watched — and that, either way, forgets to ask her what she can actually do. Researchers in the United States who interviewed women leaders found that many had been told they were too young, and then, with barely a breath in between, too old. Hardly anyone could remember a year in which she had been the right age.

So I find myself curious, rather than cross, about where the friction between us comes from.

When you are told there is only one chair, the woman sitting in it starts to look like a rival. Rivalry with younger women has never been my way — I have always found them more interesting than threatening — but I have seen it in others often enough, beginning with that afternoon in the boutique, to want to understand it rather than condemn it. And I am sure younger women have their own version: a story about us that is less about who we are and more about what they have been warned to fear becoming.

Ten-odd years in the therapy room have taught me that sharpness of this kind is rarely what it looks like. Very often it is grief wearing armour. Sometimes it is envy, and envy, handled kindly, is just information — it points at something we were told we could no longer have. None of that is shameful. It is what happens to people who have been handed a contest and told it is the natural order of things.

But what if none of us ever entered it? What if the rivalry is something we were given, like that warning at sixteen — and we can simply, quietly, decline it?

I keep coming back to how strange the arrangement really is. The twenty-five-year-old across the table is not my competition. She is me, at a point on the shore I have already walked past. And I am her, at a point she has not reached yet. She knows things about the world as it is now that I do not; I know things about surviving it that she has not had to learn. The culture that sells us the race profits from keeping those two halves of the same woman from comparing notes.

This is where I am landing, at the end of an argumentative month, and I offer it as a practice rather than a prescription. Noticing when a compliment arrives with someone else's defeat folded inside it — you don't look your age is always measuring you against somebody who isn't in the room. Saying you look wonderful and leaving off for your age. Asking a younger woman what she thinks — and then actually being changed by her answer. Offering the mentoring that, in Australian workplaces at least, so few older women ever received. Letting her teach me something in return, without needing it to cost me anything.

She is not my replacement, and I am not her warning. We are the same woman, met at different tides.

Thank you for coming through this month with me. It asked more of me than I expected — and, I suspect, of some of you too.

With love,

Faith

Routines and Rituals That Held Me This Week

The couch that asked nothing of me.

I came home from Namibia with a suitcase full of red dust, a heart full of the women I travelled with, and a bug I picked up somewhere between Cape Town and Sydney. So this week the ritual chose me. The couch, a blanket, a glass of Hydralyte within arm’s reach, and a pot of warm soup that I made once and ate for days.

I would love to tell you I surrendered to it gracefully. I did not. On the first morning, I mentally drafted emails, counted the days I had already been away, and told myself that a woman who'd just spent three weeks talking about elderhood on another continent didn't have time to lie down. Just push through. You’re fine. That old chestnut.

I was not fine. And nothing I had to do was more urgent than letting my body catch up with where I had taken it.

So I let the week be small. Sip, sleep, soup, repeat. A short walk to the end of the street on Sunday, then a slightly longer one on Monday. Open the laptop for twenty minutes, then close it again without guilt. Coming back to my routine the way you come back into cold water. Slowly, and on my own terms.

Rest is not the price I pay for the journey. It is part of the journey. The retreat does not end when the plane lands. It ends when I have landed too.