how to dress around a melting neck

grief and death and styling hacks

I can always tell when I feel out of control because I start to overanalyze every strange thing that’s happening in my body, Google my symptoms obsessively and fixate on frivolous things — like my aging neck — that I can’t control but that are less overwhelming to fixate on than other things I cannot control, like, say, World War III.

I interviewed a dermatologist/plastic surgeon this week about necks and jawlines and, in the course of this interview, learned about “jecks,” the slang term derms use for when your jaw droops into your neck, a word I wish I’d never heard. I also discovered that the jeck issue is not only due to sagging skin or a loss of collagen but the actual fact that our skeletons are shrinking and our chins are receding and so eventually there’s simply less “scaffolding” to hold up our faces. The idea of my face melting into a mushy puddle-bag of wizened skin is so weird and sad and ridiculous to me, I’m both chuckling as I type this and also wanting to cry.

Most of my current vanity and aging-face panic is of course tied up in both grief for the life that’s behind me and fear about the decline to come. Who wants to die? What will it be like to live? Small stuff, obviously.

Beyond the world’s horrors, I’ve been feeling real sandwich-y lately, navigating the challenges of supporting a teen who’s grappling with the beginning of adult life and trying to show up for my parents as they struggle with what’s happening on … the other end.

“What am I even doing? What am I supposed to be doing?” I keep wondering in therapy. The middle-aged path often feels murky, simultaneously internally chaotic and staid.

But back to the neck issue or should I say jeck. When this whole situation began around seven years ago, I responded the way I imagine a Victorian lady forced to cover her ankles would — I swaddled my under-chin skin in enough opaque fabric it looked as if I was keeping it sacred for God. I wore ascots and jaunty scarves and turtlenecks, even in summer. I was so self conscious about what amounted to a few tech-neck lines, I often appeared as if I was in disguise.

me at 47

But lately I’ve been trying a new “styling my neck” tack.