After years of looking at every opportunity as a chance to fall flat on her face, Valerie Monroe learns to grab life by the banister.

As a French major in college, I had the opportunity to work as a nanny for a wealthy French family. I don't remember the details exactly, but I do remember that they lived in what seemed like a palatial townhouse in Manhattan, had several homes in Europe, and planned to spend the summer traveling, child—and nanny—in tow. Whatever the difficulties or challenges of accompanying this particular family might have been, the chance to travel widely throughout Europe was not only exciting but also unavailable to me any other way at the time. Plus I adored kids, and was planning to teach. It seemed a great fit. And yet I was afraid to take the job, afraid the family wouldn't like me, afraid I would be lonely, afraid I wouldn't be able to care for the child well, afraid I'd miss my boyfriend and my family. So I stayed home that summer, living in my parents' house and working in an office at a perfectly nice, decently paying, perfectly boring job. To keep myself amused, I read novels set in Paris and Venice, wondering what it would be like to go there. Time after time in the years that followed, various opportunities shined on me, lighting the way to potential adventure, but my fearfulness stretched out before me like a shadow, dimming the prospects. 

The strange thing is, if I were thrown into a situation in which there might actually be something to be afraid of—a sinking canoe, to choose a random example, or a building fire—I know that I would deal with it well, not lose my head or become paralyzed with anxiety but take care of business, be effective in the moment. I've handled things that prompted people to say, "That must have been incredibly scary," though I didn't feel overwhelmingly afraid at all. What, then, is the nature of my fearfulness? If I had to give it a name, I would call it "What if...," because it derives all its power from the possibilities of what might happen at some point in the future and not what's happening right now. 

I can see how What if... might have been more useful a long time ago. In fact, I remember considering the idea of sliding down a banister in the house where I grew up—I must've been around 3, because the banister seemed very high off the ground—and thinking, "Fun! Long ride! Fast! New!" Then: "But what if when I get to the bottom, I fall off the end?" Which I certainly would have done had I followed through, with painful and injurious results. The trouble is that somehow as I matured, asking What if... became a way of introducing every possible disaster that could happen, no matter how unlikely. Falling off the end became, in my mind, a probable result even when it wasn't. And thinking about that, I began to want to avoid asking the question because it evoked so much anxiety. So I sought the comfortable and the familiar rather than the exciting and the exotic. It was easy, it was even joyful and delightful (as the comfortable and familiar can be), but it was rarely challenging in a way that leads you to live your fullest life. 

A while back, I was offered a job. Supported contentedly by my freelance writing work, very cozily ensconced in my flexible schedule, I didn't think I'd be interested in a full-time position that would require me to show up at an office every day. But: I was an avid reader of the magazine (the one you're reading) where the position was available; I had deeply admired the talent and integrity of the staff; and the job required that I learn about a field—the beauty industry—about which I knew very little. All positives. And yet. I was afraid to take it, afraid the staff wouldn't like me, afraid I would be lonely, afraid I wouldn't be able to do the job well, afraid I'd miss the ease and familiarity of my freelance life. I recognized it as the same fearfulness I'd felt more than 50 years ago, playing out in a different way. When I thought of the possibilities that might come with the job—Fun! A long ride! Fast-paced! New!—my heart leapt. But of course, then: What if...? The leaping turned to pounding. This time, through the racket, I simply said yes, I'll do it. It finally seemed more painful not to take the risk than to take it. If I fell off the end? I'm a big girl now; I thought I could handle it. I imagined my fearfulness as a scrim fluttering between me and the unknown. I would try walking through it. 

On my first day at the office (after a sleepless night), I expressed my anxiety to one of my new colleagues. "I'm really scared I'm not going to be able to do this job," I told her. "I feel as if I don't know anything about anything." 

"And if you can't do it?" she said. 

"Then," I said, "I guess I'll slink out of here in shame." She seemed to understand the depth of my unease without making me feel that it was justified. Then she patted me on the arm. "It's always good to have a plan," she said. 

When I submitted my first shot at a photo caption (just a caption!), it was quickly returned to me with "cliché" scrawled across the top of the page. Yikes! I had my plan, of course. But slink out in shame? I didn't think so. At least not without another try. And—damn!—another. Finally: "perfect." In 30 years, I've never had a job I've enjoyed more, that has pushed me more or offered richer opportunity. The possibilities I thought might materialize are even more interesting, more exciting than I'd imagined. I'm still butting up against fearfulness at almost every turn. But now, when it feels right, to the din of my pounding heart, I walk through it.

After years of judging her looks, Valerie Monroe finally figures out a way to end the competition.

I grew up with a Barbie doll. Not a toy—a mother. She was a model, raven-haired, green-eyed, statuesque, with unrealistically perfect proportions, but there they were. Like the doll, my mother had an extensive wardrobe; Mom's even included a couple of mother-daughter outfits. Were they fetching? I don't remember. I do remember gazing at the two of us dressed alike: one, a full-blown goddess, larger-than-life, a voluptuous Renoir; the other, a skinny, freckle-faced tadpole, an anonymous, unfinished pencil sketch. It was in the shifting of that gaze—Mom, me, me, Mom—that my comparing mind was born. As far as my appearance was concerned, I was undefined except in relation to another woman. Whereas my mother was full and round and complete, I was thin, angular, inchoate. My mother's hair was wavy and thick, always perfectly coiffed. Mine was straight and fine, my bangs always uneven. Clothes clung languidly to my mother's curves like an exhausted lover. My clothes, like worn-out Colorforms, refused to stick to me; elastic waistbands were sewn into my skirts to keep them from falling down. 

Though today I'm no Renoir, neither do I have trouble keeping my skirts up: It's a 51-year-old body I live in. I've finally matured. But my comparing mind has not. It's stubbornly stuck at 6, and if I were to follow its voice, I would feel once again like a tadpole among women. Though I'm full-grown, in my comparing mind I almost always come up short. So when it clamors to be heard, I listen as I would to a recalcitrant child, and then quiet it. 

Here's what I mean: As I'm walking down a crowded city street, a gorgeous young creature in her thirties, sleek and glossy as a black cat, crosses my path. "Bad luck for you!" cries my comparing mind. "You'll never look like that again! You're old and invisible!" The woman and I are stopped at a curb. Her beauty imbues her with a mild haughtiness. In a regal kind of way, she turns her head in my direction. I catch her eye. 

"You," I say, "are simply magnificent."

The haughtiness vanishes instantly. She's a bit taken aback, momentarily scrutinizes me for motive, sees none apparent, and then smiles her wide (magnificent) smile. "Why, thank you," she says. 

"It's my pleasure to tell you," I say, and it is. Because I not only remember how happy I have felt as the recipient of an authentic compliment, but now I have enjoyed the additional gratification of being able to give one. Though my comparing mind wants to nullify my power and kick me off the playing field because I can no longer compete, the power I have today is irrevocable. After years of passively accepting a definition of beauty other than my own, of striving to be a noticeable object, I've now assumed an active role, too: Appreciator of All Things Beautiful. 

There are several things that recommend the role of appreciator. It's easy to be very busy—at least as busy as one can be striving to be among the appreciated. I've discovered what the smartest men have always known: that women can be lovely in many ways—as many ways, it seems, as there are women. It's easy to be very happy, noticing things to admire rather than looking only for ways to be admired. You know that feeling you get when you see a lush summer garden, abundantly green and fragrant and riotous with blossoms? Does it bother you that you're not as beautiful as it is? No, of course not; it's a garden. Its beauty has nothing to do with you, takes nothing away from yours. In fact, standing in the middle of a flourishing garden, filling your eyes with the deep and impossibly delicate colors, inhaling the odors, sweet and complex, you might feel more beautiful, more precious yourself, marveling at your own ability to perceive it all. That's the way I feel about those women I used to think of as competitors: Their beauty is one more avenue for a rich enjoyment of the world. 

But maybe most important as an appreciator, I'm setting my own standards. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? No, I won't. I won't compare you—or myself—to anything, not the weather, not our mothers, not that gorgeous creature crossing our paths. Because a thing of beauty needs no comparison, only an eye to behold it. 

The mirror reflected a face Valerie Monroe could love—her own.

My mother will vociferously disagree, and I am happy to let her, but: I am not a beautiful woman. I won't bother to bore you with the details, though I can give you an idea of what I mean. Recently I had the experience of being photographed next to the model Iman, arguably one of the most gorgeous women in the world and certainly the most gorgeous woman who has ever stood next to me in a picture. When a friend kindly (or unkindly, I'm not sure) sent me a print, I was struck by how different we looked. We're about the same size, she and I, not too far apart in age, and it was a close shot of the two of us talking, face-to-face. As I stared at the photo, I saw two flowers: Iman, an exquisite hothouse orchid, her exotic beauty in full, outrageous bloom; and me, a parking-lot daisy, still standing, firm but a little faded, late on a warm afternoon. I got a slightly disappointed feeling, looking at that photo, like the feeling you might get opening an unexpected bouquet to discover that the flowers are a day old. So I went over to the mirror to check in with myself. I took a good, long look. Then, "Hi, sweetie," I said. I felt enormously better. Because even though there are many women in the world much more beautiful than I, I love my face.

It wasn't always so. If you had asked me 20 years ago what I thought of my face, I would've said, "It's fine," in the same way you answer someone you don't know very well who asks how you are. Nothing to complain about. But the whole truth was, when I looked in the mirror, I saw someone who was most of all not-quite-as-pretty-as.

Then I got married, and then my husband began to have some serious problems that resulted in both of us reexamining our lives. For several years I worked hard with a therapist to come to an understanding about how I had grown into the person I was, and how I might recapture the parts of myself that I had once loved and lost.

One day, after I was being particularly self-critical, my therapist suggested that I spend some time—as much as I could take—looking in the mirror, not the usual way, but looking into my eyes in the way I might look into the eyes of someone I cared deeply about. Have you ever tried this? It isn't easy. It feels creepy at first, as if you're putting the make on yourself. But I diligently watched as I laughed (out of nervousness). I got teary-eyed (fear, I think). And then I saw myself. Standing at the mirror, looking into my own eyes, I finally saw the human being who looked out of them.

I recognized her, of course. Because I knew her intimately, knew everything about her struggles and her achievements, her aspirations and her disappointments, because I knew that she was, above all, well-intentioned and kind, I loved her. And seeing her face—my face—like that of a beloved friend's, always reminds me of that.

Would you come here for a second? A little closer. Closer. Okay, I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer honestly. Don't try to be kind; I can take it. Can you see my mustache? No? You're sure? That's probably because I shaved this morning. Not with a real razor; I used one of those little femmy things that looks like an eyeliner pencil, except on one end there's a blade which, if you hold the handle right, slices off hair. Egad, now you know.

If, like me, one of your aspirations is to one day be, by any measure or evaluation, really, really old, you're most likely going to have to deal with more than a mustache. You will probably get a full coat of down on your face, and a long stray hair here and there on your chin. The hair on your head will probably get thin, as will your eyebrows and eyelashes. (Oh, I nearly forgot—your pubic hair, too.) You'll get spots on your hands and bunions on your feet. Your nose and ears may appear to have grown out of proportion to your face. And that expression "long in the tooth" will endearingly apply to you: A receding gum line will make your teeth look bigger...I still can't believe you're reading this. There's a lovely picture of a young woman posing in a pretty suit on page 322; wouldn't you rather go there? Okay, as long as you're staying, I'll tell you how you can look beautiful as you age. Or at least how not to look like a man.

1. You Start to See More Hair on Your Face

Here's why you have more of it than you did when you were 20: hormones. Though a significant minority of women of all ages have coarse dark hair growing on their chin and upper lip because of a genetic predisposition, most women who have excess facial hair have an underlying hormonal issue, says Doris J. Day, MD, clinical assistant professor of dermatology at New York University Medical Center. As we age, our bodies lose estrogen; testosterone, unopposed, causes us to grow more hair where men have it, on our faces (and to grow less on our heads). 

If you occasionally have several dark (or white) hairs on your lip or chin, it's fine to whack them off with a razor; plucking isn't the best option, because the force of the pluck can irritate and leave a bump, says Day. A couple of staffers here at O have female relatives who shave their faces; most dermatologists don't recommend this for several reasons, among them the fact that the down on your face feels soft because it's been there for a long time; shave it off, and it's going to grow back stiff or coarse (though no thicker than before). Laser hair removal works only in certain situations, says Loretta Ciraldo, MD, clinical professor of dermatology at the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami. It's not effective on white hair, and if your skin is olive or darker, laser can cause postinflammatory hyperpigmentation, which looks like a dark stain, so it could leave you with something like a mustache even though there's no hair on your lip. Electrolysis—a procedure in which the follicle is destroyed by heat through an electrical current—is a good solution for stray hairs, says Ciraldo, but it's not good for large areas. The prescription cream Vaniqa inhibits the enzyme that hair follicles need to grow. Ciraldo advises applying it twice a day at first; if the hair stops growing within three months, she then suggests application once a day, followed by every other day, to determine the minimum amount needed to prevent recurrence of growth. She says that most of her patients find that Vaniqa gets rid of all visible hairs.

Ciraldo also points out that she can't see the facial hair on 75 percent of the women who complain to her until she's within a few inches of their faces. She attributes their concern—and I'd say, considering personal experience, that she's right—to magnifying mirrors. In an unlucky confluence of events, just as our eyes start to go and we need a magnifier to apply makeup, we start getting more facial hair. So stand at arm's length in front of a regular mirror, she says. If you can't see the hair on your face, you don't need to do anything about it. (Gosh, I hope I'm right that you can't see the hair on my face from arm's length, but I get rid of it anyhow in case I want to encourage someone to come in for a close-up. That seems reasonable, doesn't it?)

Being downier can present an unattractive problem with makeup. "Peach fuzz on the face can 'grab' powder and foundation," says Maria Verel, celebrity makeup artist. There are a couple of tricks to prevent that. Apply foundation the way you apply moisturizer: Rub it in and let it set (or dry), says Verel. Then buff it off with a cloth or a clean, slightly damp sponge. If you also wear powder (or a powder foundation), after application, lightly mist your face with water to settle the powder. You can just let that be, or pat it dry. 

2. The Hair on Your Head Starts to Thin

Hold on to your hat before you read this disheartening statistic: Fifty percent of postmenopausal women have noticeable thinning of the hair on their scalp. After age 50, approximately the same number of men and women suffer from thinning, says Ken Washenik, MD, PhD, medical director at Bosley, a surgical hair restoration medical practice, and clinical assistant professor of dermatology at New York University School of Medicine. The reason, again, is most likely loss of estrogen, which is protective of hair. You shed some hair naturally every day, but the loss is considered significant if you start to see thinning behind the hairline or your part is widening. 

Washenik says the first thing to do if you notice thinning is to see a doctor, who can determine whether it's the result of a correctable condition (an overactive or underactive thyroid or low iron levels, for example) or medication (such as for high blood pressure or depression). If there's no underlying cause except age, Washenik recommends minoxidil (Rogaine) 2 percent. (Rogaine is available at 5 percent for men only; the FDA hasn't tested it or approved it at that strength for women.) Thinning hair has a shorter anagen (growth) phase than normal; that phase typically shortens as we get older. Minoxidil extends the growth phase. Apply it to the scalp at least once a day; if in three months you see no difference in thickness, it's not going to be effective. Minoxidil is a chronic maintenance therapy, which means that if you stop using it, it stops working. 

As for styling, don't overload hair with product, because that will weigh it down, says Stephen Knoll, owner of the Stephen Knoll Salon in New York City. Overcompensating with too much volume results in thinner-looking, cotton candy hair, so go for a sleek style, he says. And avoid parting your hair in the center; an uneven side part will make your hair look fuller. Thickening shampoos can also make hair appear fuller. 

3. Your Eyebrows Become Sparse

Are your eyebrows getting patchy? Perhaps you'd like to consider an eyebrow transplant. Or perhaps you wouldn't: In the restoration procedure—which takes two to three hours in a doctor's office—individual hair follicles from the back or side of the head (where they aren't noticeable) are removed and placed into the brow area to re-create whatever density you like, says Washenik. But wait a minute: Why wouldn't the hair grow as long as it would if it were still on your scalp? It does, says Washenik. The transplanted follicles don't know that they've been moved, so you get something like bangs growing from your browbone. To avoid this potentially tragic state of affairs, forget transplants and try an eyebrow pencil or powder. Choose one that's a shade lighter than your haircolor, and with feathery strokes, fill in the patchy areas, says brow expert Sania Vucetaj. Brows grow a little longer as we age; brush them upward and trim. 

4. Your Nose and Ears Seem to Be Growing

Looking in the mirror one morning, I noticed this unpleasant surprise: My ears seemed to be larger than they used to be; not a lot, but definitely bigger. Then I started discreetly examining my friends and other older women. Slightly bigger ears on most of them. Was I imagining it? Evidently not. Though our ears are 90 percent grown by age 6, and our noses are almost fully grown by the time we're teens, both do change shape and appear to enlarge as we age. One theory about the nose is that it has a large number of sebaceous glands, which have a high cell turnover rate and therefore growth potential, says Neil Sadick, MD, clinical professor of dermatology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City. But both the ears and nose droop as soft tissue (skin, fat, and muscle) relaxes and structural support changes (bone recedes with time, so there's less foundation to hold the skin and cartilage up), says Alan Matarasso, MD, clinical professor of plastic surgery at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City. Plus, loss of elasticity and collagen in the skin causes sagging. He's seeing increasing requests for rhinoplasty and earlobe surgery among patients having facelifts. Heavy earrings can stretch the soft tissue of your earlobes; wear light ones. But if you've been hanging major bling from your ears, there's earlobe reduction, an in-office procedure that takes about 15 minutes per ear, requires a local anesthetic, and heals well, says Robert Klausner, MD, medical director at the Center for Cosmetic Surgery in Bonita Springs, Florida. 

You can't entirely prevent your nose and ears from drooping, but you can minimize it by following Matarasso's advice: Avoid the sun, smoking, and weight fluctuation, and start using prescription-strength skincare products, including retinoids (which help preserve and regenerate collagen), in your 20s.

5. Your Teeth Become More Prominent

If you're long in the tooth, it's because your gums are deteriorating and have begun to shrink away from the crown portion of your teeth, exposing some of the root, says New York City dentist Marc Lowenberg. The length of the average front tooth is ten to 12 millimeters; with recession, including root exposure, it can become as long as 15 to 17 millimeters. In the same way that our skin loses collagen fibers, our gum tissue loses mass. The best preventive measure is to keep your gums free of bacteria—by brushing and flossing twice a day—because bacteria cause gum disease, which worsens recession. Also, overly vigorous brushing can scrub away gum tissue, so avoid it.

6. Your Hands Are Veiny and Spotted

I love old, veiny, spotted hands. There's something beautiful, very wabi-sabi (the Japanese appreciation of transience) about them. Especially with a big, chunky, burnished pink-gold ring or some other imposing adornment, old hands look to me as if they've earned the right to carry heavy, important jewelry. But if you prefer the soft, plump, unmarked hands of youth, use the same antiaging products you use on your face, says Matarasso. That should include a retinoid, an AHA moisturizer, and—this is critical—sunblock. If you haven't been good about sunblock, you can have hyperpigmentation spots lightened with laser; veiny hands can be plumped up with Restylane, collagen, Sculptra, and fat injections. I'd rather use the money I could spend on rejuvenation on a cocktail ring. 

7. Your Feet Are Gnarly

I never tried polish on my toenails till after college—too busy before then rejecting feminine convention—but once I did, looking down at my brightly or delicately painted toes became one of the great little pedestrian pleasures of my life. I try not to wear shoes that strangle my feet, and you should, too, because your feet, breathing easier, will manifest your kindness in their pretty appearance. Eventually, though, we're all going to lose some elasticity and flexibility in the soft tissues—the tendons and ligaments—of our feet, which can lead to increased stress on the bones, potentially causing them to change shape. And when the bones start to change shape, you're looking at hammertoes and bunions. (All right, don't look at them, but there they are.) A tight Achilles tendon from years of wearing high heels can predispose you to such foot problems, says John Giurini, DPM, associate clinical professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. So don't wear heels when you don't have to, he says. Also, stretch your Achilles tendon and the plantar fascia (the ligament that runs from your heel to the ball of your foot), wear supportive shoes, and if your feet are hurting, consider getting a doctor's evaluation—orthotics can prevent ugly problems from worsening. Orthotics? Take my hand. It won't be easy, but we'll hobble through this together. 

Are those leopard spots on your face? Why does your hair suddenly feel so brittle? ...And is that a turkey wattle? O's beauty director makes sense of it all.

Several years ago I wrote a story called 7 Things Nobody Ever Tells You About Aging. Lots of you commented on it. So the editors at Oprah.com thought it would be a good idea for me to write a kind of addendum to it. Something like "6 More Things Nobody Ever Tells You." "It'll be easy," they told me. "You won't even have to do any research." By which they meant that I could look back into the beauty story archives and pull out those pieces that had to do with specific challenges to your looks as you age. (And by which they didn't mean, as I immediately thought, that all I would have to do is to gaze down at my 60-year-old body to discover "6 More Things Nobody Ever Tells You." They didn't mean that. They swear it.) So here are six more decrepitudinous things you either have to look forward to if you're lucky enough to make it into your fourth, fifth, and sixth decades and beyond, or, well, if, like me, a glance in your mirror tells you unequivocally that things they are a-changing.

1. You may develop "turkey neck"

Why: The skin around the neck is particularly prone to the wear and tear of aging because it's thinner than facial skin and has a different collagen content, says Alan Matarasso, MD, clinical professor of plastic surgery at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. Plus, it's one of the most sun-exposed parts of the body, making it especially vulnerable to UVA/UVB damage. 

What to do about it: You can take preventative measures by using the same prescription or prescription-strength products on your neck that you apply on your face, including retinoids (such as Retin-A, Renova, or Tazorac), and, of course, sunscreen every day. 

But the problem with turkey neck is that once you have one, you can't get dramatically improved results without taking dramatic action. Think of your neck as a skirt that needs hemming, suggests the metaphorically gifted Matarasso. You can iron the skirt (meaning treat it with various lasers, which can help smooth the skin) and reinforce the fabric of the skirt (meaning apply creams like retinoids that will encourage production of collagen and elastin), but unless you hem the skirt, you won't lose the excess fabric. What does "hemming" entail? An incision behind the earlobes, suctioned fat, lifted and tightened muscles, and a small scar from behind the ears into the hairline. (Not to mention a recovery time of 10 to 14 days, and a cost of about $10,000.) 

Bottom line: If your turkey neck is in full swing, neither lasers nor creams will make an appreciable difference. However, before you send your neck to the tailor, think long and hard about what people see when they look at you. Your magnificent eyes and delicious smile may render your neck way less noticeable than you think. 

2. Your hair gets frizzier and more brittle

Why: As we age, our scalp can become drier, which can make the hair drier, too; and when hair loses its pigment, turning gray or white, its texture often becomes frizzier, says David H. Kingsley, PhD, a board-certified trichologist. 

What to do about it: Your hair needs moisture, and the best way to restore it is with a moisturizing shampoo and conditioning treatments. Use a leave-in conditioner daily and a deep-conditioner or a thick hair mask once a week (Oprah's longtime stylist, Andre Walker, launched a Keratin Mask and Treatment Pak that you can leave on for five minutes in the shower). Make sure you also eat well and regularly; include enough protein in your diet; exercise; drink enough water (so that you're not thirsty); and to hedge your bets, take a multivitamin, says Kingsley. 

Bottom line: Maintaining a healthy diet and keeping your hair well moisturized will make it look healthier and shinier no matter what your age. 

3. You're more prone to facial redness

Why: Those great beach vacations you took in your teens are showing up on your face: You're beginning to see cumulative sun damage in the form of blotchiness, red spots, and ruddiness. Menopause can also cause a multitude of skin problems, including extreme dryness and rosacea. 

What to do about it: To tone down the pink with makeup, start by applying a lightweight moisturizer with sunblock. On top of that, apply a silicone gel primer over your entire face, says Tim Quinn, Giorgio Armani Beauty makeup artist. (The primer creates a smooth surface for foundation.) Then blend a very small amount of green—yes, green—concealer over the areas that are most pink (try Physicians Formula Mineral Wear Concealer Stick). Finally, with a brush—because it gives you the best coverage—apply a yellow-based, long-wearing foundation. (Quinn says Giorgio Armani UV Lasting Silk Foundation in shade 4.5 flatters almost any skin tone.) 

Rosacea can be treated with topical antibiotics—such as MetroGel and Rosac, oral antibiotics and lasers. If your biggest problem is broken blood vessels, usually two to three treatments with either the KTP, pulsed-dye, or diode laser will zap your veins, says Roy G. Geronemus, MD, clinical professor of dermatology at the New York University Medical Center. But, if you have rosacea, remember to avoid triggers that induce flare-ups, including the sun, stress, alcohol (especially red wine), spicy or thermally hot foods and drinks, and even exercise, says Jeanine Downie, MD, coauthor of Beautiful Skin of Color. (She advises patients to drink ice water when they work out, to cool the face.) It also helps to use gentle products and to avoid irritating your skin by scrubbing. 

Bottom line: You can tone down the redness with a mix of lasers, oral and topical treatments and makeup, but if you have rosacea, avoiding your triggers is a must. 

4. You may start to see spots

Why: Age spots can be either light (hypopigmentation) or dark (hyperpigmentation), says Wendy E. Roberts, MD, assistant clinical professor of medicine at Loma Linda University, and both are caused by sun damage and excess melanin in the skin. 

What to do about it: To prevent age spots in the first place, wear an SPF of at least 15 every day. If you already have hypopigmentation, a self-tanner can help blend the spot into your complexion. If you've got hyperpigmentation, apply a topical prescription bleaching agent like Solagé (2 percent mequinol) directly to the spots, which will fade them gradually. A hydroquinone cream also inhibits melanin production—at prescription-strength (4 percent), it should fade darkness in four to eight weeks. An over-the-counter (2 percent) cream takes at least eight to 12 weeks. However, the most effective way to get rid of them is with a laser treatment—either the Q-switched ruby or alexandrite, says Anne Chapas, MD, clinical assistant professor of dermatology at NYU School of Medicine. It leaves a small scab where the spot was, but this disappears in a couple of weeks. Generally one or two treatments are needed, at $400 to $700 per session. If your spots are diffuse (like a Milky Way splash across your cheeks or chest), Chapas recommends the new Fraxel dual laser. One or two treatments, at $750 to $1,500 each, should do the trick. (And for that kind of money, let's hope so.) 

Bottom line: Unless you wear a broad spectrum sunscreen every day, rain or shine, you'll be looking at new age spots no matter how often you visit the dermatologist. 

5. Your legs start to resemble a roadmap

Why: Maybe you noticed a couple of faint squiggles around your ankles a few years back. Now you see blue lines, like kudzu gone wild, creeping behind your knees, over your thighs. Though no one knows exactly what causes them, visible veins are probably influenced by genetics and hormones. Obesity and standing or sitting for long periods may also exacerbate blood pooling in the legs, which can cause some veins to swell and rise toward the surface of the skin. 

What to do about it: If the squiggles are relatively light, a coat of self-tanner will be enough to camouflage them. A leg bronzer will also mask veins or broken capillaries—and wash off at the end of the day. (Yves Saint Laurent Make-Up Leg Mousse imparts both a veil of color and a cooling sensation.) When you want more serious coverage, makeup artist Mally Roncal recommends blending a concealer on top of veins, painting the makeup on with a brush, and then distributing it evenly with your fingers. (Choose something pretty heavy, like Dermablend Leg & Body Cover Creme.) A few pats of translucent powder will set the color, but you'll still want to avoid water sports and games of footsie for the rest of the day. 

Want to dissolve that roadmap altogether? The tiniest veins can be zapped with a Vbeam, YAG, or diode laser. The beam destroys the walls of the veins (it will feel like a few quick rubber-band snaps), causing them to disappear within about two weeks. You'll need about three treatments. If the veins are large enough to be threaded with a tiny needle, sclerotherapy—the injection of various solutions into the blood vessels—is the best option, says Tina Alster, MD, clinical professor of dermatology at the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The solution irritates the vein's lining and the resulting tissue inflammation causes the blood vessel to collapse and fade. The treatment takes 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the number of veins, and is nearly painless, but you may experience mild redness and swelling along the course of the treated veins. (Avoid sclerotherapy immediately before or during menstruation because of heightened sensitivity.) Expect to pay about $300 to $500 per treatment. Hate needles? You could try vascular laser treatments instead, which are a little more uncomfortable because they zap the veins with heat, says Dr. Alster. 

Bottom line: The best time to have treatments for spider veins is in the winter, when your legs are covered and more easily protected from the sun. Tanned skin reduces visibility of the veins during the procedures and increases the risk of post-treatment hyperpigmentation. Be forewarned: You won't be vein-free forever; after a couple of years, new ones will probably form. 

6. Your lipstick starts to bleed into the lines around your mouth

Why: I have those lines, and they're called perioral rhytids. And because when I develop something—especially something undesirable—I'm always curious about how it got there, I asked Stuart H. Kaplan, MD, assistant clinical professor of dermatology at UCLA Medical Center, what causes them. He told me: repeated pursing of the lips; sun exposure; loss of subcutaneous fat, collagen, and elastin, which form the structural support of the skin, and of hyaluronic acid, which moisturizes; and genetic predisposition. 

What to do about it: As for getting rid of these annoying lines, if you're a smoker, forget it. You don't smoke? Good! But if, like me, some of your favorite ways to pass the time include sucking a thick chocolate malted through a straw, kissing, slurping martinis, and kissing—oh, the louche life of the beauty editor!—you may be fighting a losing battle. On the other hand, you can prevent the lines from getting worse by applying sunscreen to the area between your lip and nose and using a topical retinoid, like Retin-A, Renova, Avage, or Tazorac, which helps build collagen and thicken the skin. If you believe you need the help of a power tool, then an ablative laser treatment, which resurfaces the skin, might be the ticket, says Kaplan. He also suggests injections of small amounts of Botox to prevent pursing, but warns of the risk of losing the ability to enunciate certain consonants. (That's all I needed to hear to reject that option.) Finally, Kaplan suggests the filler Restylane to plump up the creases. Results generally last up to six months. 

Bottom line: A good offense is the best defense, so use sunscreen and a retinoid to prevent the lines from getting deeper. 

Dear readers, this month the "Ask Val" page might better be called "You Didn't Ask Val, but She's Going to Tell You Anyway." Or, more pointedly, "Holy Crow's-feet, I'm Turning 60." 

Yes, in a few weeks, I become a sexagenarian—and despite my optimistic nature, I suspect that sounds a lot more promising than it is. 

Not long ago, I was trying to explain to a 45-year-old friend what it feels like to be my age. "It's like this," I said. "I'm going to tell you something about yourself that you don't know, and it's incontrovertibly true no matter what else you believe." 

"Okay," she said. 

I looked at her hard. "You were born in 1950," I said. "You're actually 60." My friend gave me the kind of blank stare you get when something does not compute. "Well, that just doesn't make any sense," she said. 

Exactly. The age I am is not the age I feel. And I'm pretty sure that if you're close to 60 or older, you understand the disconnect. It's not uncommon. In a 1995 study of Americans between 55 and 74, most of them felt 12 years younger than they actually were. Studies in Germany and China have yielded similar results. 

As you might guess, one of the most important factors in feeling youthful is good health, or at least a sense of control over your health. If you can exercise and generally kick up your heels without throwing out your back or breaking your legs, naturally, you feel more vigorous than your neighbor who has trouble hauling himself out of a chair. It also helps if you spend your days among younger people. 

In many ways, feeling younger than your age is a good thing. Research shows that it can have a positive effect on confidence about cognitive abilities (the sort of confidence I could use the next time I search for my glasses and find them on my nose). And people who feel younger than they are, are less likely to die than same-age peers who actually feel that age. 

But there's a wrinkle below the surface of this encouraging news. 

If you're a woman, when you get to be 60 (or almost) and begin noticing the disconnect between how old you feel and how old you look, you start to think differently about your face. And by "differently" I mean that you suddenly have to make now-or-never decisions about how much control you want to exert over it. You can decide that you want to try to hold on to your youth by any means possible (in which case surgery will be involved). You can decide that you'll only tinker with the aging process, feeling your way day by day (there are copious options, from microdermabrasion to fillers, and Botox). You can decide to say the hell with it, and watch with brave astonishment as a mustache darkly embellishes your upper lip, your eyebrows gradually vanish, and you develop the jowls you fondly remember on your favorite uncle. Whichever route you follow, you have to take responsibility in a new way for your looks. 

Did you know that some of the earliest plastic surgery was the reversal of circumcision on Jewish men who wanted to pass for gentile in Roman times? Plastic surgery in this country, too, was often originally about "passing," with immigrants wanting to change their features to conform to the status quo. And isn't it still often about passing? Older women (and men) yearning to pass for younger? 

It's lovely if someone thinks I'm not yet 60 (which is happening less often; I appear to be gaining momentum on a downhill run). But I expect that as the body I live in continues to mature, I'll come to accept the duality of looking one age and feeling another—just as I have come to accept other strange and poignant aspects of the human condition, like our awareness of the raw irrefutability of death. It is what it is. 

As for my face: I doubt I'll choose to do more than a bit of Botox and a regular flash of skin-toning laser. I've always wanted to look pretty, and I still want to, but age-appropriately pretty. So I'm not going to try to remodel my outside to correspond with how I feel inside. Because, bottom line, I don't really want to pass for anything but what I am. 

Has it happened to you yet? Because it will. You wake up one morning, rested and calm and deliciously comfortable, and then, as you open your eyes, raising your arms for one last, deep, luxurious stretch, you notice—what? what’s that? what?— the skin on the insides of your elbows looks frighteningly...loose. Blinking hard, you’ll look again: Damn, loose! Waaait a minute, you’ll want to say, as if Mother Nature, sly girl, has pulled a fast one on you. But the hand on your alarm clock will tick inexorably from 8:04 to 8:05, and when you arise from your bed, it will be in a different body from the one you went to sleep in. It sounds a little like a horror movie, doesn’t it? That’s because in some ways, it is. The sagging skin, the thinning hair and bones, the decrepitude—what one friend calls the ick factor—it’s hard to believe that’s ever going to happen to robust, fructiferous you. Until it does. Then: Booga! Booga! You’re old.

Or at least getting there. And there’s no going back; not ever. Maybe that’s the scariest part, abandoning the hope that you can stop the aging process, reverse it, avoid it. But that abandonment is exactly where the happy ending lies. In her book When Things Fall Apart, Buddhist nun Pema Chodron quotes one of her teacher’s remarks about life: It’s like getting into a boat that’s just about to sail out to sea and sink. There are no life rafts, no floats; no one gets out alive. Rather than try to ward off the inevitable, why not accept it and enjoy the trip?

Easier said than done, you say? Maybe, but it’s more possible now than ever. Both physical and social science studies show that aging is not simply a process of decay but also one of growth. For example, though it was once believed the brain was incapable of generating new cells throughout life, researchers have recently found that, at least in some areas, regeneration does occur; and that staying mentally active can cause the brain to sprout new connections between nerve cells. George Vaillant, MD, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, reports in his book Aging Well that studies using brain imaging techniques of healthy octogenarians and nonagenarians suggest that normal brain shrinkage is less than originally thought, and that much of cell loss is a kind of selective “pruning.”

In researching wisdom at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Ber­lin, Paul Baltes, PhD, codirector of the institute, found that people can gain wis­dom as they age if they think about the how and why of events (understanding them in context rather than thinking of them as good or bad) and remain open to new experiences. And studies of cogni­tive functioning among older people have found differences in fluid intelligence (the ability to quickly use new informa­tion) and crystallized intelligence (the ability to use information accumulated from past experience). Fluid intelligence declines with age, but crystallized intel­ligence increases into your 60s; Vaillant believes it can often be as sharp at 80 as at 30. (That’s why it might be easier as you get older to finish a crossword puzzle than to figure out how to use a new cell phone.) Then, of course, there’s always the misperception that the older you get, the frailer and sicker you get, but think about that: The older you get, obviously the healthier you’ve been.

A cornerstone of aging brilliantly is “generativity,” the term psychologist Erik Erikson used to describe a solution to the adult crisis in middle age. It means, basically, continuing to be productive and creative, and passing along what you’ve learned in a way that supports the generation following you. Though having children is perhaps the most fundamental way to ensure generativity, it’s also available through meaningful work. Work keeps you socially connected, and a study from the Harvard School of Public Health indicates that staying connected may be as powerful a link to healthy aging as exercise.

The best news of all is that how we age is largely in our control, less a product of our genes than of how we take care of ourselves. Vaillant names seven predictors of healthy aging: being a nonsmoker or stopping young, not abusing alcohol (defined as a dependence on alcohol), a stable marriage, more than 12 years of education, healthy weight, regular exercise, and mature defenses (practical coping strategies). Also critical are a network of intimate friends, healing relationships, knowing how to play, and subjective good health (meaning that you may have an illness or a potentially debilitating condition, but you don’t actually feel sick). The six things that—surprisingly—do not predict healthy aging are ancestral longevity, parental characteristics, childhood temperament, sociability, cholesterol levels, and stress. It might also surprise you to know that the old are less depressed than the general population, Vaillant reports, and the majority don’t suffer from incapacitating illness till the one that gets them for good.

That boat can give you a devastatingly beautiful trip on exquisite and enchant­ing seas. Age brilliantly? Yes! Let the band play on, with vigor and alacrity and joy, till the whole thing goes under with a shudder and a sigh, slipping valiantly into the deep.

There are about 35 of us beauty editors at a presentation of a company's new product. I'm new, too, new to the job of beauty editor, just learning the ropes. Most of the women are lovely, sparkling, and girlish; only a few of us have seen 40 (and fewer yet, like me, are peering fondly back). A convivial young man standing at a wooden podium welcomes us. "Thank you all for coming," he says, sparkling a little himself. "I have a question for you," he says. He leans against the podium professorially: "Can anyone tell me, what are the four signs of aging?"

I generally do well in classroom situations, and greenhorn though l am, l know the answer he's looking for: fine lines, sagging skin, excessive dryness, etc. But I'm reluctant to raise my hand. Because if l do, and l give him the answer I believe is true. I'm afraid l might put a blight on the magazine l love and now represent. What if the young man is offended because I'm not playing along? So l sit on my hands and regretting, regretting, bite my tongue.

Today, however—two years of experience and a lifetime of antiaging presentations later— is a different story. Ask the question again; in fact, I dare you to ask the question. Because now l am very sure there is only one right answer, and it is my happy responsibility to give it.

What are the four signs of aging?

They are Wisdom, Confidence, Character, and Strength.

Look for them not with dismay, but with hope.

Valerie Monroe was used to being seen—and appreciated. Until she reached an age when the glances stopped. Then what? An invisible woman begins her search for a new identity.

A few months ago, I spent an afternoon helping out an art dealer friend at a print fair. At a table in front of his display, I sat on one side of him while his assistant sat on the other; we greeted prospective buyers as they walked by. "Hi there!" I would say with warmth and (what I thought was) a touch of modest charm when I saw one coming. Time and again, from the men, I got a limp, dismissive "hi" in response, occasionally a nod. It wasn't the Whistlers or the Chagalls that were diverting the art lovers' attention; it was my friend's lovely assistant. She wasn't flashy or glamorous; but she had a smooth, milky, 20-something complexion and the sweet, expectant, wide-eyed look of youth. Thirty years ago, I might have been her. 

Today, however, I'm 58 and I look it, by which I mean that I haven't had any work done to make me appear younger. I'm trying to get down with the aging thing, to accept it—at least till I've decided that I can't. Almost every morning I discover some other small reminder that I am growing older: an age spot, another wrinkle or wisp of gray in my (thinning) brows.

If you're going through this, you already know that watching your face mature is not the most gratifying spectator sport—because no matter how constantly or enthusiastically you root for the home team, eventually age will win the game. Which is a good way to think about it, because the bottom line is that the process of aging involves a certain amount of loss. And what I discovered at that art fair is that if you have benefited from the currency of your looks, when that currency loses its value, you can end up feeling pretty bankrupt. Entering a room of mixed company—a meeting, a party—or walking down a crowded street, I've learned to expect that I'll attract a little attention. I don't mean that people stop in their tracks, open-mouthed, and stare (as they have when I've walked down the street with my 6 2, striking young niece), but I've been banking on appreciative glances for a long time. They make me feel pretty, which makes me feel happy. Not in the way, certainly, that motherhood has made me happy, or my work, but there is a small feeling of satisfaction attached to receiving these looks; it's as if, at least on the face of it, I know how to do this female thing well.

So I guess it shouldn't have been shocking to me how difficult it was to be distinctly ignored. I hadn't been aware that the glances I'd been accustomed to had been falling off. That afternoon, I felt as if I had been stripped of all color and was the only gray-and-white figure in a richly tinted painting. I was Marion Kerby, one of the ghosts in Topper, all dressed up and nowhere to...be seen. 

Becoming invisible is disconcerting enough. But I am beginning to feel obsolete differently, too, maybe more profoundly. I'm almost embarrassed to admit how much I still miss the fundamental, quotidian tug of a child's needs, the grounding responsibilities of parenthood. When I was actively child-rearing, my life had a purposefulness I grieve to this day. My son, at 25, now lives away from my home and is stunningly, happily independent. Which is exactly what I'd always aimed for in raising him, so I am deeply grateful. I just didn't know that along with a joyful sense of accomplishment, I would feel, in some persistent, incontrovertible way, useless. Not pandemically useless; I work, I'm productive in the ways one has to be in order to fall into the category of functioning adult, but the comforting sense of knowing my purpose from the moment I open my eyes in the morning has been replaced with a kind of disquiet. I have, if I'm lucky, a third of my life left. How am I going to spend it so that I feel the fulfillment I felt in the previous third? What can I do that matters?

And here is where the issues of being ignored and feeling obsolete converge. The art fair men—unconsciously, surely—disregarded me in part because I'm no longer fertile, unable to provide them with proof that they are still capable of reproducing. The emotional impact of having it so ungraciously pointed out that I have outlived my reproductive value was like having a bucket of cold water thrown at my face—or, rather, a cold grave opened before me. Because that means, in a Darwinian sense at least, I'm over. 

Gentlemen, I feel your pain. 

The thing is, though my production line has shut down, the factory is still very much open. And I believe there is more work to be done before it closes for good.

The psychologist Erik Erikson suggests that there are many ways to express what he calls "generativity"—the need to produce something that contributes to the betterment of society, which not only helps others but makes us feel more content as we get older. That will be my focus as I march, largely invisible, into my future. 

I can tell you this: Even if you don't see me, you will know that I am here. 

You know that little voice that relentlessly berates you whenever you look in the mirror, the one that makes you wince every time your appearance falls short of some impossible ideal? Enough! Valerie Monroe cuts a tyrant down to size.

“My God, you are beautiful.” Has anyone ever said that to you? Yes? No? Whatever: Imagine it now. Imagine someone looking into your eyes and saying, “My God, my God, you are beautiful.” What would it mean to hear that? Would it mean that you had the face of the Madonna? The body of Madonna? Would it mean that the person who was saying it was delusional? Or in love?

One morning not long ago at the O magazine offices, 14 of us sat around the heavy conference room table, another 12 of us in a second circle of chairs behind the first. The subject was beauty. We’re a pretty vocal group, mostly outspoken and forthright, and by anyone’s standards, we are also a pretty pretty group—even (I think) a pretty beautiful group. To wit, Beauty A: luxuriously thick, dark curls; a clear, pink complexion; deep chocolate brown eyes; delicate nose; full, generous mouth. Beauty B: a towhead; fair, poreless skin; sky blue eyes; Cupid’s bow, ruby lips. Beauty C: a life-size Barbie doll, hour­glass figure; huge brown eyes; ski-jump nose; perfect teeth. Beauty D...well, you get the idea. Each of these women is asked whether, in her heart, she knows she’s beautiful. And beauty after beauty reveals her secret: Me, beautiful? Never! I’m plain! Even, sometimes, ugly! Don’t look at me without makeup! One of the women, with creamy skin, wild dark hair, blue eyes, an athletic build, and ajo March personality—which is to say she plunges ahead in most endeavors with great, aston­ishing aplomb—claps her hands smartly over her ears at the mere suggestion that she might be even the slightest, tiniest bit attractive.

And so there we all were, staring at one another, stupefied, and asking, “How can you not see how beautiful you are? Where is your critical voice coming from?”

We got an answer of downright mythical proportion from Beauty A, who long considered her luxuriously thick, dark curls the bane of her existence, a glaring, unfortunate beacon of her awkward unruliness, her inability to fit in with the prevailing ideal of womanhood. She traces her discomfort to her grandmother, a grande dame whose rigid notions about beauty were deeply entrenched in Southern tradition. There was only one way for a woman to look—discreet, well groomed, polished, ladylike. Stray from it in anyway (which included wild curls) and you became a kind of pariah, judged to be unmannered, slothful, poorly raised, and maybe loose; conforming was away to hide anything that might threaten your station in society.

Her grandmother was a forceful woman whose notions snaked perniciously through the generations, gripping Beauty A and her sisters. It was only recently that they discovered the root of her abnegation and, consequently, their own. As a young woman, their grandmother, considered quite a beauty in her day, had descended the staircase in her family home dressed and made-up for a big dance, only to be met by her own grandmother in the parlor. “Go back upstairs and fix yourself!” her grandmother had cried. “You look awful!” Bad enough. How had she transgressed? Makeup overdone? Dress too revealing? A hair out of place? She could have asked her grandmother. But how would the old woman have known? Her grandmother was blind. Which begs the question, What was she reacting to? What deep, unsettling fear could have inspired such an outburst? Whatever it was, the fact remains that five generations later Beauty A still struggles over her lovely mess of curls.

Shaking our heads, we asked ourselves the most important question: How can we end this deadening, compulsive self-criticism and begin to talk to ourselves about beauty in a kinder, more compassionate and appreciative, less punishing way?

If you stop to think about it—and let’s do that, right now—you’ll realize that most of the messages we get about the way we look have to do with denial and withholding (avoid looking older, eat less) and imperfection and loss (conceal your flaws, regain your firm complexion). Can you recall the last thing you read or heard that suggested you celebrate or even acknowledge the positive aspects of the way you look? (I can; it’s “Here’s Looking at You, Kid!” by Martha Beck, on page 266, but stay with me for a minute.) Instead, we’re bombarded with images of the young, the skinny, the oversexualized, the computer idealized. The effect on our self-image and self-esteem is even deeper than you might imagine. Psychologists call it normative discontent: It’s considered normal for women to be unhappy with the way we look. Follow this line of thinking: If it’s normal, then for us to fulfill our role as women, we’re supposed to be displeased with our appearance. Does this resonate with you? Are you afraid to admit that—one day, for a few minutes, stepping out of the shower or into the bath—you actually do look okay, or maybe even (God forbid) pretty good?

From the moment we appear in the mirror in the morning, we are face-to-face with our inner critic—call her Judge Beauty—the one who presides over the viciously unforgiving Court of Egregious Imperfections. The interrogation begins: Are you thin enough? Is your complexion bright enough? Your bottom firm enough? Smile white enough? Flair shiny enough? Are your lips too thin or too full? Your eyes too small? Your nose too big? And what’s your defense? Haven’t been taking care of yourself? Not paying attention? Or saddest of all, were you simply born that way? This line of questioning is supported by a constant stream of messages nearly everywhere we look that we could be more attractive if only we wore this or drove that, ate this and not that. In ways subtle and not so subtle, culture teaches us to look cruelly upon ourselves. We’re raised to pay attention to these messages—improvement being an essential element of the American dream— and to take them to heart. Ask yourself: Do you equate being pretty with being happy? Have you ever thought that if you were prettier, you might be happier?

In case you’re thinking that this kind of severe self-judgment isn’t all that common, here is a first peek at some interesting statistics from a soon-to-be released global study commissioned by Dove, the company that created a sensation with photographs of real women of different sizes in its Campaign for Real Beauty:

■ Only 7 percent of American women (15 to 64) have never been concerned about their overall physical appearance.

■ Ninety-two percent of American women (15 to 64) want to change some aspect of their physical appearance, mostly body weight and shape.

■ Almost two-thirds of American women agree that when they feel bad about themselves, it usually has to do with their looks or weight.

■ Living with beauty ideals leads almost seven in ten women globally to withdraw from important, self-actualizing activities, such as going to school or work or a job interview, because they feel bad about their looks.

These feelings of inadequacy, the striving for perfection, the competing, the comparing—with others or with younger versions of ourselves—is all a fool’s game. No one ever wins, not even the most conventionally beautiful. As Rita Freedman, PhD, clinical psychologist and author of Bodylove, points out, if you think you’re not pretty, you spend your life regretting that, and if you think you are, you spend your life in fear of losing your looks. Then one day, you do lose them. (You want something to cry about? We’ll give you something to cry about!)

We’re not supposed to be excessively concerned with the way we look; it’s unseemly, prideful, immodest, vain. Vanity stems from competitiveness, says Freedman; it even suggests evil impulses (Mirror, mirror, on the wall...). But here’s the rub: As women our sense of self is inextricably bound up in our appearance, and so we tread a very fine line between concern and overconcern or obsession. Freedman reports that in a classic research study, psychotherapists were asked to rate the personality traits of a healthy woman, a healthy man, and a healthy person. “Preoccupation with appearance” (vanity) was rated normal for a healthy woman but abnormal for a healthy man and for healthy people. That leaves us stuck in a damned if we do, damned if we don’t dilemma, she points out: aware that we’re judged by our attractiveness but ashamed to admit how deeply we value looking good, because that would mean we’re...vain.

That seems like a lot of bad news. But there is a slight trend toward a more forgiving attitude: the Dove advertisements, showing robust women comfortable in their bodies; Nike ads suggesting that we focus on what our bodies can do rather than on how they look. These messages can remind us that we need to see ourselves through kinder eyes. Maybe you’ve already learned how to do that, if you’ve been looked at kindly—by a parent, a friend, or a lover. If not, you can learn it now. A while ago I discovered a photo of a little girl at age 5 or 6, not at all a pretty child. Her demeanor is more Alfred E. Neuman than anything else. Her smile is wide and real, but what you notice most—after her seismic optimism—is that she has only one tooth on the top, one huge, white tooth, and it’s taking a detour, too, a hard right when it should be going straight. Even so, she thinks she is a fine-looking child, and who (she wonders) in their right mind wouldn’t agree? She’s vulnerable, open, engaged with the world, a lively (if ingenuous) presence. When I catch a glimpse of myself on a bad day, not looking the way I wish, rather than turn away from my reflection in disappointment or even disgust, I keep looking till I can see that child, that happy girl who knew that, in spite of her freckles and skinny arms and foolish, scrappy smile, she was beautiful enough. Can you see that innocent kid in yourself? Once you do, you will see her in everyone. Because real beauty isn’t about symmetry or weight or makeup; it’s about looking life right in the face and seeing all its magnificence reflected in your own.

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Inner Beauty: The Shining

You know it when you see it, but it's difficult to describe: inner beauty. It transcends the impression of a woman's physical traits. Feature by feature there may be nothing special about her—she may even be plain—but something about her attracts you in the most profound way. Something radiates from within.

What is it?

"You're responding to empathy, compassion, an openness to others," says Matthieu Ricard, former genetic researcher, now Buddhist monk and author of Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most important Skill (noted in Reading Room, page 218). "You see it on someone's face when she feels in harmony with our deepest nature as human beings, which is basically peaceful and loving."

But how does that harmony manifest itself physically? Through subtle expressions, says Ricard, which we pick up both consciously and unconsciously. Hundreds of almost imperceptible muscular movements constantly communicate our feelings. Think of how a classically beautiful face changes when it's transformed by contempt; less beautiful, right? Maybe even ugly? Unconditional love transforms a face, too, says Ricard. We identify with that look, it brings up in us a yearning to be loved and to be loving; and it reminds us of the best we can be, which we may have forgotten or sublimated. And so, inspired, we wind up looking out at the world through more loving eyes, passing the harmony along. That's the thing about inner beauty: Unlike physical beauty, which grabs the spotlight for itself, inner beauty shines on everyone, catching them, holding them in its embrace, making them more beautiful, too.

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Stop Right There!

Five Things You Should Never Do If You Want to Feel Beautiful

1. Don't use a magnifying mirror, except for tweezing your brows. If you've ever studied your face in one, you probably don't need an explanation as to why it's not a great idea. But Francesca Fusco, MD, assistant clinical professor of dermatology at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York City, offers a few good reasons. A magnifier will make you focus on things that can't be seen with the naked eye, so what's the point of knowing they're there? Also, because everything on your face looks wildly out of proportion in a magnifying mirror, you may get inappropriate ideas about what you actually need. For example, a woman focusing on the little lines above her upper lip might say "Supersize me" to the doctor holding the collagen. (And that, O Best Beloved, is how the lady got her trout lips.)

2. Don't use fluorescent lightbulbs around the bathroom mirror. They emit a flat, white, harsh light that makes everyone look as if she were sick. Better: halogen bulbs with a glass frost filter—MR16 are good ones, says New York City lighting designer Ira Levy, because they emit a clean, even light. In general, the prettiest, most flattering light is warm, incandescent, and dimmable.

3. Don't participate in any kind of skin analysis that involves a machine. By using a probe on your face, these devices (often found in department stores) measure pore size, oil levels, dryness, the number and depth of wrinkles, etc., and give you a printed readout, including bar graphs, on the condition of your skin. For some reason—could it have to do with marketing?—the news is never "Nothing could possibly enhance your flawless complexion."

4. Avoid being lit from below—unless you want to scare the heck out of your kids. You know those little canisters of lights that sit on the floor and shine up into a room? Move away from them. Light, in nature, comes from above, and so we're accustomed to seeing the world this way, points out Stephen Dantzig, author of Lighting Techniques for Fashion and Glamour Photography. But light that's shining directly down on your face can be equally unflattering (which is why it's imperative to inform the paparazzi that you must not be photographed outside at high noon on a sunny day). Balanced lighting—for example, one ceiling light directly centered over the bathroom sink and one on either side—will eliminate unflattering shadows, says Levy.

5. Don't compare yourself to women you see in magazines or movies. If you had 15 handlers making sure your hair and makeup were perfect, you'd look pretty glamorous, too.

Everywhere we turn, there are images of gorgeous women, constant reproaches to the reality of us, with our real bodies and un-Photoshoppedflaws. We’re not buying it anymore. We’re tackling the critics—from the parents and teachers who favor the prettiest children to look-ist employers to the most hurtful of all, that nasty, catty girl who lives right behind our eyes.

Not long ago, I sat in my office, chatting with a friend. “I want to talk to you about your face,” I said. “Oh my God,” she said, looking stricken. “Do I need a facelift?” (I forget that people think I have a right to be openly critical of their appearance because I’m a beauty editor.) No, no, I said; I only wanted to know what she saw when she looked in the mirror.

“I like my face now,” said this woman, a classically beautiful 38-year-old, very polished and buttoned-up, as neat and perfectly composed as a Modigliani painting. “But I was adopted from Korea when I was 3, and I grew up in a predominantly white community in a small Midwestern city, where there weren’t many other people who looked like me. I was teased, called names; I basically spent my entire childhood being made fun of because of my face.” She said this calmly and, recollecting, was silent for a moment. I waited for her to go on. But when she tried to speak again, she burst into tears. And there she sat in the chair across from my desk, crying hard for several minutes. I offered her a handful of tissues while she apologized for breaking down. This woman is so self-controlled, I’ve never even seen her yawn. Finally, she said, “I didn’t realize how fragile I still am about this. I wanted to do anything I could not to look Asian, because it set me apart,” said my friend. “You know, I had some really bad perms. But when I got to college, where there were a mix of ethnicities, the stigma of my face just disappeared. There were people who appreciated my beauty, and so I began to see myself the way they did.” In other words, she made the liberating discovery that there was nothing wrong with her face, and something wrong with the culture of her hometown.

Though race hadn’t been an issue for me, I, too, was teased and called names because of my appearance (suffice it to say I spent several difficult years as a grasshopper before slowly metamorphosing into a normal-looking teenager). And I, too, did everything I could to try to fit in with my peers, including dying my dark hair blonde and tweezing my brows into a shape that might generously be called unnatural. In away, we’re all trying to “pass,” minimizing with cosmetics (or, in the extreme, surgery) what deviates from the cultural ideal, playing up what conforms, says Rita Freedman, PhD, a clinical psychologist and author of the 1986 book Beauty Bound. “It’s what you project onto the reflection in the mirror that determines how you evaluate it,” she says.

I spoke to several other women I had assumed—because they are all accomplished and beautiful—felt fine about their face. One, thinking of a photograph of herself as a 13-year-old, teared up as she remembered the depth of her self-revulsion. (This time I was ready with the tissues.) Another tried determinedly to convince me that she was a truly ugly person till her 20s, at which point, she said, she was briefly attractive before becoming merely plain in her 30s. A third told me she couldn’t wait to get glasses so that she could hide the gigantic bump on her nose (a gigantic bump that was invisible to me). And a fourth—stunning, without a stitch of makeup—said that she knew she wasn’t horribly disfigured, but avoided looking at her face in the mirror whenever possible (as if she were...horribly disfigured).

Though the cultural ideal has broadened to include more diversity, it remains an ideal, setting an unrealistic standard by which we all, consciously or not, judge and are judged.

The painful truth is that physically attractive people get rewarded in all kinds of ways: As children they’re usually disciplined less harshly and favored in the classroom; as adults they tend to have better-paying jobs in higher-level positions than their less attractive counterparts, writes Gordon L. Patzer, PhD, in his recently published book, Looks: Why They Matter More Than Ton Ever Imagined. Which, frankly, stinks.

It stinks even if you’re gorgeous, by cultural standards. Valuable as it is, gorgeous is not a good stock to invest in. It has a completely predictable payout. No matter what you do, how well you take care of yourself, how much surgery you submit to, one day you are going to lose everything on your investment. You know this, I know this. Even so, we buy into the beauty rules, colluding with a culture that makes us feel inadequate, whipping ourselves when we come up short. Which makes us—come to think of it—part of the problem.

What if, instead of colluding, we traded cruelty for kindness? What if we started a revolution, if each one of us took a vow to catch ourselves scowling or sneering at our imperfections—and simply stop? If we noticed every time we had a nasty, hostile response to someone else’s appearance—and simply stopped? Think about who your inner critic is: She’s the mean girl who doesn’t want you in her club, the one who takes pleasure in pointing out all the ways you don’t measure up. Her trump card is your fear, fear that you will never measure up, that you are, bottom line, unlovable. Every moment you spend calculating your imperfections (or anyone else’s), you are taking her side.

This is a call to arms. A call to be gentle, to be forgiving, to be generous with yourself. The next time you look into the mirror, try to let go of the story line that says you’re too fat or too sallow, too ashy or too old, your eyes are too small or your nose too big; just look into the mirror and see your face. When the criticism drops away, what you will see then is just you, without judgment, and that is the first step toward transforming your experience of the world.

Who wants to look like a pincushion? Not me, but I agreed to let certified MeiZen acupuncture practitioner Melinda Mingus, MD, give me a cosmetic acupuncture treatment in her New York City office because she spoke so knowledgeably about the effects. (Though Mingus suggests a series of ten treatments, I had time for only one.)

The sterilized, stainless steel acupuncture needles, as thin as a human hair, cause microtrauma in the skin, which increases blood flow and the production of collagen and elastin, says Mingus. She believes that the treatments can result in firmer skin, a reduction of wrinkles, and a tightening of the jowls. Her patients have reported healthy side effects, such as improved digestion, better-quality sleep, increased energy, and a sense of overall well-being. Hey, doc, sign me up! Stick a thousand needles in my face! 

Well, not just my face. Mingus needled  other body parts as well (my hands, legs, feet, ears, and scalp) in order to stimulate various nerves. She's an extremely skilled acupuncturist; I couldn't feel the needles going in. I lay still for about a half hour, deeply relaxed. After I had been successfully de-needled, I examined my face in a 7X magnifying mirror for holes or red dots—I couldn't find a single one. And my skin was glowing. But I'd have to take it on faith that my improved complexion had anything to do with the treatment; there's no scientific evidence that cosmetic acupuncture works. 

A facial that really gets under your skin.

When you tell people you’re going to have your face poked all over with tiny needles, you get two responses: “Yech!” and then, “Why?” 

I’ll tell you why. I want the smoothest, freshest-looking, glowiest skin—and to that end, many dermatologists suggest microneedling, a process in which a small device embedded with a cluster of sterile, retractable needles is pressed all over the face, causing “micro-injuries.” The skin rushes to heal those injuries with new collagen and elastin, which, if you’re my age (66), are literally face-saving; they help keep it from looking like all the stuffing’s been pulled out of it. 

There are at-home kits, but doctors aren’t fond of them because they say the needling typically doesn’t go deep enough to get appreciable results—and because infection is possible. So I made an appointment with New York City dermatologist Cheryl Karcher, MD, who uses the EndyMed Intensif microneedle device. The Intensif also emits pulses of radio-frequency energy to further tighten skin and minimize pores. In the equivalent of a skincare trifecta, Karcher suggested I increase the benefits by rubbing into the “micro-injuries” 6 milliliters of my own platelet-rich plasma, which she extracted from a vial of my blood drawn just before the Intensif procedure. (If you’ve read about the “vampire facial,” you’ve probably seen photos of famous faces smeared with blood. On me, Karcher used only the yellowish plasma because it contains beneficial growth factors.) Numbing cream is applied pre-procedure; still, I have two words for you: staple gun. Karcher moved the device over my face in increments of about an inch as she released the needles. It really hurt, especially around my lips and eyes. The plasma, warm and sticky, is mostly absorbed during the minutes after the needling, and though Karcher said I could rinse it off, for good measure I left it on all day. 

For about 24 hours, I was very pink, with one small red dot on my forehead, and for several days, my skin peeled a bit. By the end of the next week, my cheeks looked smoother. Over a month or so, as the collagen and elastin regeneration continues, I should see more glowiness and a little tightening, says Karcher. Which seems well worth the yech and ouch to me. 

Millions of women are looking remarkably fresh and rested thanks to tiny injections of a botulinum toxin. Why wasn’t Valerie Monroe one of them? O’s beauty director develops a few new worry lines.

It’s not like my face is that symmetrical or anything—no more symmetrical than yours, I bet—but the idea of doing something to it that even in the slightest way might increase the chance that it could become lopsided? That put the fear of God into me. So I canceled my first appointment with a New York dermatologist who had offered to shoot me up with Botox when I told her I was considering trying it for this story. I called her specifically because I know she has used Botox on herself for years, and she looks fantastic, by which I mean she can smile and frown

like a normal person and she has no issues in the facial symmetry department. The day before my rescheduled appointment, I googled Botox, hoping for motivation. I saw before and after photos of men and women who had (purportedly) had it injected into their foreheads to reduce the lines between their eyebrows. A little note underneath the photos read: “Results may vary.” And “Chances are, you’ll like what you see!” How much may the results vary, I wondered, and what, exactly, are the chances?

I was late for my appointment (snarled crosstown traffic and…ambivalence). As I sat in the calming, all-beige waiting room, I leafed through a couple of magazines—the way you do in that too-fast, aimless way when you’re anxious—thinking about why I had decided to get myself shot. Did I look in the mirror one morning and see something—a wrinkle, a crease, a spot—I couldn’t live with? Did I realize that I had lost my youthful demeanor and suddenly wish I could have frozen it in time? No. But it seemed that almost everyone around me—professionally, that is—had tried Botox, and, no doubt about it, many of them looked way more relaxed and less troubled than they probably should have. Plus, none of them were lopsided, or limping around because their legs had gone numb, and, as far as I could tell, their brain function seemed just fine. So I thought, What the heck; why not go for it?

In the treatment room, the doctor, gracious and attractive as ever, sat down with me. She handed me a mirror. “So, what do you see?” she said. I looked into the mirror. I saw a very worried face, and told her about my fears. What if my brow drooped from too much of the stuff? What if it leaked into another part of my body? “The treatment is really safe,” said the doctor. She told me that she’d been using Botox for many years, on patients and on herself, and had only had good outcomes. She stared at my forehead for a second. “I could get great results for you,” she said, and patiently showed me where she would inject me: between my brows and just above them. Four little shots. She might give me a little under the sides of my mouth, she said, where it was starting to look a bit droopy. She told me that I might be slightly red at the injection sites for about ten minutes, that I should move my forehead muscles for a half hour after the shots to distribute the Botox, and that I probably shouldn’t lie down for several hours after the treatment. Move my muscles to distribute the Botox? Don’t lie down? 

Feeling acutely anxious and at the same time oddly curious, I resorted to an impersonal, reporter-like agenda. As if we were talking about some other woman in the room, I asked the doctor, “What else might you suggest?” “A bit of filler under your eyes would soften the bags,” she said. “And your upper eyelids are beginning to sag; if you had an eye lid lift, you would look absolutely fantastic.”

I picked up the hand mirror and peered into it again. This time, I looked old, frail, and terminally exhausted.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll do the Botox.”

A nurse appeared with a consent form. I ticked off the boxes, agreeing that various unlikely mishaps, should they occur, were my responsibility. Then, feeling sad and vulnerable and somewhat feebleminded—I had given in, given up, I was damaged by the ravages of age and I needed fixing—I signed the form. I put the pen down. And in that moment, it felt as if a switch went off in my brain, or my heart. “No,” I said. “No,” I said, “no. I don’t want it.”

“That’s okay,” said the doctor, kindly. “That’s the right decision for you. Would you like something else?” she said, as if I might find another, less invasive choice from her menu of treatments more palatable. “No, thanks; I’m good,” I said. And I fled.

In the cab on the way back to the office, I was both disappointed and happy. Disappointed because I actually would like to see the lines between my brows diminished and I would like to look less tired. And happy because I felt that in a small way I had practiced a kind of acceptance I believe will be valuable to me as I get older. It’s hard to come by, this acceptance, especially in my business, and I refute it often: I’ll continue to color my hair as it grays; I’ll use a retinoid cream to keep my skin in good condition, and probably have some laser treatments. But for now, I won’t be injecting anything into my face. Not Botox. Not fillers. You have my blessing to do it if it makes you happy. Maybe it will make me happy one day, too.

But it isn’t what makes me happy today.

All I could think about was what could go wrong: a droopy eyelid, a permanent expression of extreme surprise or beetle-browed consternation. That's why I'd never tried Botox, the botulinum toxin that's used to reduce facial wrinkling. Also: I was philosophically opposed to shooting anything into my face. "I love my face," I'd declare to anyone who suggested I might enjoy a light arpeggio of cosmetic fiddling.

Then one morning I looked in the mirror and noticed (I thought) that the little lines between my eyebrows had deepened. I could see where my face was going, but I liked it where it was. So I made an appointment with New York City dermatologist Cheryl Karcher, MD, to ask her whether she thought I might benefit from just the teeniest grace note of Botox. At her office a few days later, I sat under a very bright light and pointed to my concerns. "Ha! Easy to fix," she said. Then she took a step back and looked at me studiously. "Big frown," she said, I made a doleful face. "Okay," she said. "Relax." And before I knew it, she had administered five quick shots of Botox above and between my eyebrows. "Fini!" said the doctor. A physician's assistant held an ice pack to my forehead to prevent bruising. "Bravo!" I said.

It took about a week for me to get used to not being able to wiggle my eyebrows the way I used to. ("Wiggle my eyebrows" doesn't adequately describe what I could do; if there is such a thing as double-jointed eyebrows, I had them. But I don't have them anymore, at least till the toxin wears off in a few months.) I don't like the paralyzed feeling at all; it's as if I'm wearing a cap that fits too tightly around my forehead. But recently a friend said to me, "What's going on with you? You look...bright-eyed and rested!"

So despite the unpleasantness, I'm afraid I'm hooked: An encore is definitely on the program.

Valerie Monroe stopped looking—for one very long weekend—and finally saw herself clearly.

Yearning for a change in routine but not quite able to fit a trip into my schedule, I recently decided to take a vacation from my face. After five decades, I figured I deserved a break. No peeks in the mirror, no stolen glances at reflective store windows. Even a glimpse into a handy piece of flatware would be tantamount to calling the office from a beach house in Negril. For a long weekend, I would go AWOL, facewise. 

But I wondered, without the constant companionship of my reflection, would I be lonely? Curious? Confident? Relieved?

The morning of the first day that I awoke knowing I wouldn't be seeing myself, I felt surprisingly sad, as if I were being deprived of a good friend. Or maybe just a favorite sweater. Still, a loss. That undercurrent of withdrawal would persist throughout my visual fast. For all my recent complaining about aging, I apparently get more sustenance from my reflection than I'd realized.

There were practical problems, too. Just out of bed in the morning, I had no way of knowing how sleep had rearranged my face. No use asking my husband how I looked. His response to that question is always reassuringly the same: fine. Hair wrapped in a towel, mouthful of toothpaste, fine. Perfect chignon, high-drama makeup, fine.

Reconnecting in the mirror, I discovered, is one of the ways I orient myself for the day. Unable to check my face-mail, I smoothed my index finger over my eyebrows in a futile attempt to impose order. Applying moisturizer, I was reduced to presenting my face to my 17-year-old son—not an entirely dependable critic, to judge by the things he has failed to notice about his own appearance. "Is everything blended in?" I'd ask him. "Yes, yes," he'd say, though, like any teenage boy, he never looks right at his mother's face but somewhere just above and beyond it. Because I'm not facile enough at applying makeup to be sure I wasn't coloring outside the lines, it was easier for me to leave my makeup at home while taking a vacation from my face. So I wore nothing but that old transparent staple Carmex.

For three days, I was constantly forced to turn away from self-sightings. Sometimes it seemed as if a doppelgänger were following me and I was resolutely aware of avoiding her glance. Or as if I were living in the same town as my ex, and so needed always to be conscious of avoiding an uncomfortable confrontation. There was a lot of avoiding. So I was happy to be able to look into my friend Lizzie's eyes when I met her for lunch. She stared back at me unabashedly. "What?" I asked. "I don't think I've ever seen you without lipstick," she said. She stared some more. "Hunh," she said, seeming to understand the true nature of something for the first time. Plink, plink, plink went little shards of my self-esteem, hitting the floor.

There are more mirrors at my gym than at Versailles. Could I face my reflection for an hour every day and not look? I could. And feel noble about it, too. I can't stand people preening at the gym—unless you're in the boudoir, preening is for chimps. Having made a commitment to eschew looking altogether, I felt superior to those exercising their monkey business. I didn't need the reassurance of my reflected glory.

Like the tree falling in an empty forest, not looking in mirrors suggested some existential quandaries. I quit trying to blow-dry my hair and instead made an appointment for a blow-out (feeling geisha-like as I looked modestly down and away from the mirror during the process). But when it was over, I found myself staring straight into the unfamiliar face of a perplexing question: If I can't see myself, do I still look good? And conversely, on a rainy, bad-hair day, if I can't see myself, do I still look bad? The answer, of course, is subjective. And if the subject—that would be me—is absent, there's no definitive answer. Following that thought led me out of the forest into the shimmering dazzle of a bright idea. I sat there in the salon, blinking it into focus. Except for me, then, who cares? 

In a moment, the machinery of my vanity ground to a stop. And in the stillness, less concerned about my physical presentation—or maybe, relying less on what I'd hoped was the pleasant distraction others might find in my appearance—I felt a raw, unadorned freedom.

For all of my adult life, looking in the mirror, I have objectified myself, wanting to recognize myself as the person I—somewhat literally—make myself up to be. I've then toted this image, heavy with expectation, around in my head. But I don't have similar expectations of the people I love—my friends, my husband. Some days he looks good. Some days he looks really good. But during those times when he hasn't appeared princely to me, has it made me depressed? Have I run out to buy him hair dye? Scheduled urgent appointments for eyebrow grooming or teeth whitening? I haven't. I love his face simply because it's my most vivid reminder of who he is. What if I chose to regard myself in the same way, without the burden of expectation? 

By the time I'm ready to look into the glass again, I feel sanguine. After all, for the past several days I've either thought I looked a lot worse than I did or I've looked a lot worse than I thought I did. Both perspectives have their advantages. 

I stand at the bathroom sink. I'm not wearing makeup. The light's kind of harsh. Here's what I see: a woman friendly and forgiving. And I'm plainly glad it's me. 

Q: I've been told I should have regular skin cancer checkups. Is that really necessary? 

It was late August last year. I'd recently had a skin cancer screening. Diagnosis: all clear. So when David Colbert, MD, of New York Dermatology Group (who'd invited me to his office for a facial) suggested a biopsy on a tiny, pink raised dot next to my nose, I wasn't keen on the idea. It looked like nothing and hadn't been noted at the screening. But as we were chatting, Colbert's eye kept returning to that spot. Finally, he called in an associate, Jessica Weiser, MD, for a second opinion. Worth a biopsy, she said firmly, and she assured me, as she quickly nicked off a piece, I'd hardly notice. I didn't notice, and soon forgot about it. 

She phoned me two weeks later. "It's a basal cell skin cancer," she said. "It's really small, but it has to be removed." 

At 65, with fair skin, light eyes, and many memories of summers spent slathered in baby oil on a blazing beach, I shouldn't have been surprised. Though for the past 20 years I've been diligent about wearing sunscreen, the damage was done. 

Basal cell is the most common form of skin cancer; an estimated 2.8 million cases are diagnosed annually in the U.S., according to the Skin Cancer Foundation. (The incidence of both basal cell and its sister, squamous cell, the second-most-common type, has increased 300 percent since 1994. Tanning beds and extended longevity are two likely reasons.) Fortunately, basal cell rarely spreads. When it's found on the face, scalp, hands, or feet—wherever the skin is very thin—the treatment of choice is Mohs micrographic surgery, says Deborah S. Sarnoff, MD, clinical professor of dermatology at NYU Medical School. Mohs, usually performed in a doctor's office under local anesthesia (as mine was, by Sarnoff), not only spares healthy tissue, getting the best cosmetic result, but has the highest cure rate at nearly 100 percent. Slivers of removed tissue are microscopically examined during surgery while you wait in the operating chair, fingers and toes crossed that after the initial cancerous tissue, the remaining samples come back cancer-free. 

A few days after my Mohs appointment, I posted a photo on Facebook. "Basal cell skin cancer cured," I wrote. "Vanity, too!" The spot was really small; still, the surgery required more than a dozen stitches. A black thread snaked down my cheek, ending in a little knot just above a purple bruise. As reconciled as I was to the idea that after years of unprotected sun exposure I'd wound up with skin cancer, I was profoundly unprepared for the raw-looking wound. I realized, in one gut-wrenching moment, that I hadn't really understood the consequences of my carelessness. And those consequences had been preventable! 

If you've been faithfully reading the beauty stories in this magazine, you know you need a broad-spectrum SPF 30 sunscreen every day, rain or shine. You can protect yourself further by covering up (see the cute shirt and sun hats, below) and staying in the shade between 10 A.M. and 2 P.M., when the sun is strongest. There's also promising research: Last year an Australian study found that a form of vitamin B3 taken orally significantly reduced the incidence of basal and squamous cell skin cancers in people at high risk of recurrence. 

Sarnoff has given me a couple of injections of the steroid Kenalog and a pulsed dye laser treatment to minimize my scar, and the appearance has improved remarkably. Because people who have had a basal cell are at increased risk for more, I'll have skin checks every three months for now instead of once a year. And I'll be wearing the mark on my face as a reminder to be careful in the sun. Let it remind you, too! 

How loneliness made Valerie Monroe feel a little less alone.

I had spent the summer Saturday by myself, meandering through a part of the city I was still, after 30 years here, unfamiliar with, and it had yielded up a banquet of pleasure. A small, old, redbrick church, and next to it, protected by a black wrought-iron fence, a pristine lawn dotted with pale, deep-set gravestones, tilting one way and another in the dappled late-afternoon sunlight. A hidden lane, bright green moss sprouting thickly between its cobblestones, leading down toward the riverbank and a series of playful bronze sculptures of baby animals tumbling in the grass. 

Around suppertime I realized that I wasn't far from one of my favorite restaurants. I rarely go there, because it's expensive and always packed, but I thought I might be able to sit at the bar and have a dozen of their tasty oysters and a glass of wine. After all the meandering, I was very hungry. I could see from the street that there was one seat left at the bar, already crowded with people who seemed to have recently napped and showered and spent some time figuring out what to wear and who now looked especially fine and happy to see one another. I was feeling a little bit like Pigpen, in my dusty sandals and shift. But I wanted those oysters. (And that glass of Chablis.) So I went in, navigated the crowd, excuse me'd over to the empty seat, and sat down, a bit self-consciously. I was a middle-aged woman alone at a bar among strangers. Where were my friends? Didn't I have any? My own personal bugaboo settled over me like a soggy towel, seriously dampening my pleasure: Was this experience my first step on the path that leads inexorably to rubber-soled flats, loose, tentlike garments, and an obsessive interest in public television? 

I sighed aloud. If that was my future, I might as well enjoy myself getting there. I asked the bartender to recommend a wine. He offered me a taste of something delicious. The first dozen oysters were so astoundingly good, I had to have a second. As I was savoring them—deeply savoring them—I became aware of the couple sitting next to me. He was chattering animatedly while she, half-listening, watched my every slurp and sip. Finally, she interrupted him: "I have to have what she's having," she said, pointing at my plate. 

I was completely happy. Why had I felt a need to judge or label myself? (Middle-aged woman eating and drinking alone, no friends, crazy lady.) I've been running away from being alone all my life, even though I often enjoy it. I've avoided it because Loneliness, Being Alone's ugly stepsister, is uncomfortable, sometimes painful. It's the pain that sociologist Robert S. Weiss, PhD, describes as "separation distress without an object": You're longing for connection but don't know with what or whom. Which—in me, anyway—leads to a kind of emotional chaos. Not long after my date with the oysters, I began to wonder what would happen if I could tolerate that distress without reaching out to anchor myself with a phone call or an e-mail, a book, the television, a plate of shellfish. If I could just be with the loneliness without trying to fix it. To do that, I'd have to let go of the judgments I'd attached to being alone—that it's a problem, a punishment for not being good enough in some way. 

One night alone in my apartment, I felt restless and sad. The water on the river outside my window was unusually dark, opal-black, smooth as glass. A barge sat parked just a little upriver; a string of twinkling white lights hung festively along its deck. It was too early to go to sleep—I wasn't tired anyway—but too late to go out. I didn't feel like reading. I thought about making a phone call; didn't really feel like that, either. I missed my husband. I missed my son. I even missed my mother. What to do with myself? I was staring out my window at that beautiful barge with nothing to do, no one to speak to. Just a person, staring out the window. Can you understand what I mean when I say that as I allowed the feeling of loneliness to arise in me I felt a heartbreaking compassion, recognizing that every person everywhere throughout history has been subject to the very same loneliness I was feeling in that moment? I started to weep, with sadness and awe and grief and joy. I felt connected to the world in a new, different way, admiring the capability of the heart to hold all those feelings at once. Such strong feelings! And of course because it was my heart, too, how full I felt, and complete. 

This profound loneliness was, in fact, exactly the opposite of what I'd always been afraid of. I had, I realized, once again meandered into a place that I was, after many years, still unfamiliar with. And once again, it had yielded up a banquet of pleasure, unexpected and glorious. 

From the chemical to the transcendental, Valerie Monroe counts the whys.

Why do we do it?

A young woman talks about the slow death of her mother. She has cared for her for many long months. Throughout all the arrangement making, the tension, the sorrowful, relentless accretion of evidence of the inevitable, she doesn't express her fear or her sadness or her grief. She talks about it, but her feelings sit heavily as stones on her heart, and won't be moved by words.

One night, she says, she was making love with her boyfriend, looking into his eyes.

She felt secure in his embrace, cradled in the steady, loving constancy of his touch and his gaze. The shared rhythm of their bodies both comforted and aroused her in a delicate balance of pleasure. But as he rocked with her in his arms, she began to feel a giving-way, the heaviness moving, her hold on her feelings relaxing. All of a sudden, her heart seemed to crack open and, to her deep surprise, grief poured from her in a tide of tears. "My mother!" she cried, eyes locked with her lover's. "My mother is dying!" It was the very first time she had been completely present with that fact, understanding it, accepting it, knowing it.

Her boyfriend pulled her closer, holding her tight. "I love you, l love you, l love you," he said.

I don't guess they asked each other afterward, "Was it good for you, too?" Sometimes "good" just isn't adequate to describe an experience that has been referred to as the little death. Did you know that during orgasm, most of the of satisfaction and attachment? A study has found that women who regularly receive semen vaginally are less depressed than those who don't, says Helen Fisher, PhD, author of Why We Love, The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. This could be because they really like their partners; it could also be because seminal fluid is awash not only with testosterone and estrogen but also with chemicals such as dopamine and norepinephrine, serotonin, and oxytocin, which can contribute to either elation or calm. Another recent study revealed the unsurprising result that the more often a person has sex, the happier he or she is. This could be because people who have sex often are more likely to be healthy and enjoying a good relationship. It could also be because sex exercises the muscles and the respiratory system; gets the circulatory system moving, which gives the skin a gorgeous glow; and according to Fisher's research, triggers the brain circuitry for romantic love and attachment. Why do we do it? Because it's fun. Because it can be the most powerful, concrete way to demonstrate love for ourselves and for someone else. Because sex helps us to remember. Because it helps us to forget. Because when we open ourselves to the experience completely, we become intimate with the world in a way that's otherwise inaccessible, and unique. Flooded with hormones that can release us from the moorings of self-consciousness and control, we can relax into a presence of mind that allows boundaries, momentarily, to dissolve. Sex can not only help us feel better—it can also help us to feel.

I wish I could tell you that sex gets better as we get older, l really do. But as you probably know if you're already there, the postmenopausal orgasm can be a very elusive character, ducking in and out of dark corners, impolitely and suspensefully keeping you waiting and hoping and predicting it will show up—in great frustration and sometimes, sadly, to no avail. Especially if you've treasured the straightforward, no- nonsense slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am kind of pleasure often available when you've got surging sex hormones (or even moderate levels of them), this experience can be, to say the least, deflating.

So: Better, no. Different, yes. More loving, if less urgent, yes. More complex and compassionate, yes. Why? For one thing, as we age, our ratio of sex hormones changes, and women and men become ever more similar biologically, says Helen Fisher, PhD, visiting research professor at Rutgers University and author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. In women, circulating estrogen levels drop, unmasking the effects—assertiveness, for instance—of testosterone, in men, just the opposite happens; testosterone levels drop around age 45, as estrogen levels increase. So older men, like women, usually take longer to warm up and are likely to enjoy more foreplay. And people tend to become more relaxed about sex as they age, says Fisher. She believes women hit a plateau in middle age, enjoying their sexuality without having to worry about birth control. (Fisher points out that a person who is interested in sex in her 20s and 30s is likely to continue that interest into her 40s, 50s, and beyond. At 54, I wouldn't disagree.)

But what about that elusive orgasm? what if, in spite of increased assertiveness and a positive outlook, you find your libido waning? Faint orgasms may be the result of tired, weakening muscles; Kegel exercises can help rouse that sleepy response. If you've lost interest because sex feels uncomfortable or painful, there is an excellent solution: Estrogen applied locally relieves two of the most common sore points among older women—vaginal dryness and thinning tissue. An estrogen pill inserted vaginally is very effective in restoring moisture and building tissue, says Monica Peacocke, MD, a vulvar and vaginal disease specialist. (Estrogen is also available in a vaginal ring and a cream, but Peacocke believes the pill works best because it is least systemic and least messy.) Some women have worsening vaginal pain even after they start on a local estrogen. She thinks that's due to a vitamin D deficiency, which may also have an effect on the vagina's ability to make moisture. Peacocke believes that certain medications containing alendronate sodium (for osteoporosis) or pantoprazole sodium (for treating reflux) cause a decrease in the vitamin. She runs blood tests on her patients to determine the vaginal level of vitamin D, and prescribes 2,000 to 4,000 units a day (double the Institute of Medicine's upper intake level). She warns that you should never increase your intake of the vitamin without seeing a physician; vitamin D toxicity can cause a bevy of health problems. Though Peacocke has not yet submitted her research for publication, she has seen dramatic improvement in many of her patients.

After my first exam with a new gynecologist recently, the doctor sat down with me for a chat in her office. I don't remember whether she steered the conversation toward sex or whether l did, but there it was: Sometimes it hurts. She nodded sympathetically.

"Do you moisturize your face every day?" she said.

"Of course," l said.

"That's right," she said genially, "and you should be moisturizing your vagina, too."

Her tone was so casual and matter-of-fact, she might have been talking about my hands. She prescribed an estrogen cream (Estrace), which can be used internally several times a week, and an over-the-counter vaginal moisturizer (Silk-E by K-Y) with aloe and vitamin E for every day. I've been using both religiously. You will forgive me if in my excited state I've become hyperbolic, but together, they seem to work like a fountain of youth; I'm looking forward to becoming one heck of a sexagenarian.

I've never liked bowling—the unforgiving bright lights, the thunderous rumble and headsplitting crash of the balls and pins, the sweaty fingers, the smelly shoes, the cheap beer and greasy pizza. But a few years ago it was the perfect thing for my husband and young son to do together. For some reason (involving the Y chromosome, l think), both seemed to enjoy throwing large objects. Also, they weren't bothered by loud noises, sweat, wearing other people's shoes, or lousy pizza. So almost every Sunday the two of them would go off to our neighborhood bowling alley (which sits, unattractively, above New York City’s largest bus station) to spend some quality time together.

One afternoon they invited me along. Or maybe I was lonely and invited myself. But there l was, having declined to join their game, perched on a cold, hard, orange plastic seat, sipping a Bud. I should confess here that l could watch my son do anything—trim his fingernails, stare absently into space—and feel the kind of awe one might feel looking at the Pieta. Seeing him bowl for the first time in competition with his dad was really fun. Then it was my husband's turn. He cooled his palms on the vent; picked up his ball; held it so easily in front of him that it looked as if it were nearly weightless. And in one gorgeous, graceful, fluid motion, he sent that ball spinning down the alley—the exact center of the alley—with such force that it seemed the pins flew out of the way a moment before the ball reached them, just to avoid getting hit. A strike! And then another. And another.

Something inside of me shifted. Watching my husband, I felt the way you might if you took a bite out of what appeared to be a Twinkie and discovered that it was instead the most delectable angel food cake, loaded with exquisite custard. And this Twinkie was mine. Suddenly, I remembered a postcard he'd given me, picturing a World War II battleship smoking its way across a choppy sea. On the back, he had written: I'm a hefty hunk of steamin' junk for you, baby.

What can l tell you? I wanted to bowl with him all night long.

I used to feel as if I were living in a foreign country. It was as if I were an outsider, never comfortable with the customs, never fully under-standing what was expected of me. And so I was always walking on eggshells: Did I do the right thing? Did I somehow unknowingly offend you with my last remark? Was my work not quite good enough? Were my friends, lovers acceptable? I felt as if I were being judged, and most often coming up short, like I was playing a game with a set of rules no one had bothered to explain to me.

The older I got, the more uncomfortable I became. One night I had a vivid, frightening dream. Motivated by the desire to untangle it, I began psychotherapy. In my sessions I talked about the many instances when, as a child, I felt as if I had come up short: showing a marked lack of graciousness, for example, about the arrival of my baby sister; my constant need to know my mother’s whereabouts at all times—perhaps suffocating to her. My therapist wondered aloud about how I, by then a mother myself, might feel toward any other child—my son, for instance—who demonstrated that behavior. It was a no-brainer, literally: My heart was instantly awash with compassion. As I remembered more of my childhood shortcomings, and forgave them, it became like a practice—the forgiving—and before long I was doing it with my adult self, too. Forgiving myself for past mistakes in love, in work, in the many daily interactions always open to missteps. I would forgive the mistake, learn from it, and try to do better.

Is all self-esteem nurtured by mastery? I’m not sure. But it was mastering forgiveness that nurtured mine.

Not knowing where one of you leaves off and the other begins sounds romantic, but, VALERIE MONROE asks, how do you stay true to you when you’re also half a couple?

Have you ever found it difficult to be authentic in a relationship? Have you ever wondered why?

“Well,” says Laura Kipnis, author of The Female Thing, an account of the conflicted state of the female psyche at the 21st-century point, “we are the sex that wears concealer.…” And the one that has been encouraged (historically, at least) to act weak when we feel strong, strong when we feel needy, guarding our real feelings against scrutiny in case they make us look like a harridan or a baby or a bitch. Actually, femininity and authenticity are often at cross-purposes, says Kipnis. Women have relied on artifice for centuries (and more), and it’s only a fairly recent development—which Kipnis attributes to the culture of psychotherapy—that authentic-ity has taken on value. (The Importance of Being Earnest, a celebration of artifice if ever there was one, was written only a little over a hundred years ago.) I happen to be (for better or worse) the kind of person who prides herself on straightforwardness, which is why I felt a little troubled one evening when I asked a new friend if he’d like to read a book I’d written. “I only read historical nonfiction,” he replied, at which point, with the sociable timidity of an Edith Wharton character, I demurely murmured, “Oh, I see,” rather than say what I was thinking: that he was being radically, maybe terminally rude. Why didn’t I say, “My book is a kind of historical nonfiction; give it a try?” Or “Wouldn’t you like to broaden your horizons, literature-wise?” Or even “It’s the story of my life, pal, so if you ever hope to get into my pants, you’ll buy the book on your way home and read it before you hit the sheets.” But all I could manage was “Oh, I see.” And I felt as if I’d betrayed myself.

That feeling of self-betrayal isn't uncommon among women, says Esther Perel, family therapist and author of Mating in Captivity. “Girls in our culture are socialized with a strong emphasis on connectivity—establishing and maintaining relationships—so that as women, we may find it difficult to hold on to a sense of self in the context of a relationship,” she says. A woman’s feelings of responsibility about keeping a connection going smoothly can lead her to ensure everyone else’s needs are being met, which often means that she falls short of taking care of her own. She’s the one who darns the holes and knits up the loose ends of the relationship and is most likely to feel that she’s subverted her authentic self in the service of coupledom, says Perel. Sometimes the partners polarize, each becoming frozen in their behavior, which makes it harder and harder to find a balance of responsibility.

So what’s the key to maintaining your sense of self and not getting lost? Space, says Perel. The more you can leave the relationship to explore your own interests, the more likely you’ll be to bring your authentic self back to it. She compares this exploration to the process a mother and young child go through when the child is learning how to feel safe away from her anchoring parent. “You see the child jump off her mother’s lap and run away, checking back every once in a while to be sure that her mother is still there,” says Perel. “Eventually, the child feels comfortable enough to explore for longer and longer periods because she trusts that her mother will be available to her when she returns.” It’s not so different with couples. Each “trip” away—whether it’s a hiking excursion to Hawaii or a pottery class—has the potential to strengthen the individual partner, so that he or she returns to the relationship with a greater sense of self to share. This may seem like a no-brainer, but the urge to merge can be very powerful, blurring a couple’s boundaries. The deeper the trust when partners are allowed to roam freely, says Perel, the more secure they feel to go out and explore. If partners can temporarily leave without either one feeling anxious, then they can be independent without fear. And they’re less likely to betray their partner’s trust if they don’t feel controlled, Perel says (typically, control doesn’t restrain people—it fuels their rebellion). Perel talks about a woman she met recently who had conflated her whole sense of self with her marriage; she did nothing separate from her husband. Never having given herself permission to go out on her own once in a while—even though her husband traveled extensively for business—she had begun (unsurprisingly) to feel lost and trapped by the “we-ness” she’d created. Finding a solution wasn’t complicated, says Perel; once the woman gave herself permission to basically have a life of her own, she became not only increasingly interested in the world but also increasingly interesting to herself and to her husband. For her, and for anyone—you, maybe?—looking to be happy and comfortable and fulfilled in a relationship, it’s an excellent idea to try to maintain separateness and togetherness in a way that feels flexible and balanced. Easier said than done, of course.

I gave that guy a copy of my book. I didn’t tell him that I thought his initial response was rude. But I did suggest that he might know me a little better if he read it. I’m not sure he got the double entendre, but I felt more like myself in our exchange.

Walking back to the office from an appointment on an Indian-summer day—the afternoon light already changing and the sultry air exotic with the dense odors of fall—I had a lovely choice: Either stroll along upper Madison Avenue, where the glittering shopwindows, set back from the sidewalk like bright, alluring jewels, just begged to be examined, or take instead a more direct route through Central Park. The window-shopping beckoned. Autumn and the first cold snap would soon be here, and the thought of bundling up in a soft new sweater—thick cashmere, maybe, in heather green- warmed my soul (if not my wallet). I wasn’t often in this part of town, so why not avail myself of its amusements while I was here? Then again, the trees in the park, visible down a side street, were beginning to send up their first flares of color; I knew our temperate days were numbered.

I chose the park. Though once there, I realized how much more I’d enjoy the walk if I had a small carton of popcorn, and I soon found myself winding my way toward the carousel and the popcorn man. I don’t think of buying popcorn as shopping, exactly, but the serious pleasure I took in buying it was equal to the pleasure I might have taken in buying a cashmere sweater. Why? In the moments I realized what I wanted and set out to get it, I was simply fulfilling my heart’s desire. Isn’t that why we love shopping—when we’re successful? And also why we sometimes hate it—when we don’t know what we want, or when we do and can’t have it?

Shopping is different from buying, which is only a step—and occasionally a superfluous one—in the process, says Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy. He points out that by the time we’ve actually exchanged money for something, we have already begun to possess it—examining, touching, thinking about what we’ll do with it; paying is only a technicality. Shopping is a way of examining the world, he says. (Besides shops, museums are the only places we go with the specific intention of examining objects.) Didn’t Christopher Columbus originally set out to see what he could pick up for his queen? One of the great motivators, historically, for exploring has been to buy or trade in things people didn’t have at home, says Laura Byrne Paquet, author of The Urge to Splurge. Remember the spice routes, the trades in tea and furs and gold? And on the local level, she points out, the marketplace has been one of the few venues where different classes could mix and meet, and where people from surrounding areas would convene to exchange not only goods but news and ideas.

If variety is the spice of life, shopping provides it. “You might not be willing to change your job or your religion or your friends, but shopping is a simple way to add newness to your life,” says Julie Ruth, PhD, associate professor of marketing at Rutgers University. Shopping among a group of strangers can also make you feel validated (or invalidated) about your choices. There are many reasons to shop: to keep up with the Joneses; to make a statement about what you can afford; as a response to the temptations of advertising; to avoid the twin demons of loneliness and loss. The act of shopping can deliver a messy package of complex issues: about commitment, trust, selfdoubt, identity, pride, taste. It can be compulsive, guilt inducing. No wonder it sometimes evokes anxiety.

But the best kind of shopping is as delicious and satisfying as love, and like love, it has less to do with having (and accumulating) than with thoughtful appreciation and delight.

A colleague tells us about a magic carpet. She noticed it at an estate sale and was drawn immediately to the rich and myriad colors, the fine texture, the graceful pattern. And the size: perfect for her living room. She had been looking for just this rug for two years. What a thing! She had to have it!

Then she saw the price. Well, maybe she didn’t have to have it after all. But the beautiful rug had woven itself into her thoughts...and she had carefully considered many other choices, none of which compared. Though she tried, she just couldn’t leave the sale without it. “So I paid the money, and I brought that bad boy home,” she says. And now, as the rug adorns her living room (in a perfect fit), she has gotten up in the middle of the night to admire it, turning on one lamp to appreciate its gorgeousness in a buttery light, or another to see how the colors deepen and shine in a brighter, whiter light—or sometimes to gaze at it only in the pale light of the moon. That rug is the first thing she sees when she walks in the door, and it fills her with happiness, every single time.

Yes, of course they can. Call us shallow, but we’re buying Valerie Monroe’s case for the therapeutic properties of pretty things.

My ancient Aunt Esther was often cranky, but when I was little I didn’t notice. She allowed me to sit very close, enveloped in a cloud of her powdery lilac- water scent, close enough that I could take one and then the other of her soft, perfectly manicured hands in mine, run my small fingers over her pink, slightly opalescent nails, examine her bracelets—burnished gold bangles and links laden heavily with charms, one or two from each city she had visited around the world. Her earrings—only clip-ons—were intricate: tiny, coralline Bakelite blossoms or clusters of freshwater pearls. Aunt Esther was captivating, a museum of adornment and style. Seeing her, despite her unpredictable disposition, always made me happy.

Most of us have an intrinsic interest in pretty things. Don’t you? At a work-related party the other night, I was standing around with several other beauty editors waiting somewhat impatiently for the action to begin when I suddenly noticed that the woman next to me was wearing—along with a lovely but understated skirt and sweater set—crimson pumps. “Oh, your shoes!” I said admiringly, and she smiled as she raised her foot, turning it this way and that so I could see the delicate princess heel. “They make me so happy,” she said. “All I have to do is look at them, and it lifts me right up.”

No surprise in that, says Valerie Steele, PhD, director of the Museum at the Fash­ion Institute of Technology. “Buying a new pair of shoes, or something even as small as a lipstick, resonates with the idea that we are loved, because it is a kind of gift we give to ourselves.” It may also make us feel renewed, transformed. Orna­ment yourself with a pair of sparkling ear­rings or a rope of creamy pearls, a brilliant, rich lipcolor or a quiet, delicate one, and people can see that you have made an effort, a choice to do yourself up. There is meaning in that effort, says Anne Hol­lander, historian and writer on art and dress; you are honoring and respecting your physical self and presenting it to the world. But it’s not only your intention that lifts and engages you, she says, it’s the response: Though appreciative glances may go by in a second, when we get them, they make us happy.

Adorning ourselves seems to be as profoundly human as speech, says Steele; we are the only species that does it. Even in cultures where people don’t wear clothes (or much of them), they will drape themselves in jewelry (or flowers, shells, and other nature-made treasures) or ornament their hair. It’s one of the ways we communicate, says Steele.

On a warm July day about ten years ago, I boarded a bus in a small city in India; I think I was the only Western pas­senger—I’m pretty sure I was the Western woman. I know I felt like a foreigner in my khakis, white blouse, Keds, and a head scarf I’d never wear at home. Just as the bus lurched into traffic, I found a seat next to an Indian woman wearing a sari and sandals and lots of interesting jewelry. She politely scooched over a bit to make room for me. From the moment I sat down, we began to peek at each other from the corners of our eyes. My glance fell again and again on the richly embroidered fabric of her sari, on her beautiful glass bangles and silver rings. She was glancing at my own silver bracelets, the pink-gold Deco pinkie ring my father had made for my mother in the 1940s. Finally, seeing that she was looking at my ring, I held my hand over for her to examine it. “Do you like it?” I asked, at which point she turned toward me and we began a very lively and intimate exchange about what each of us was wearing and where it all came from. I learned where she bought her sari fabric and how she came by her bracelets; I learned that she was a lawyer on her way to work and that she was planning one day to travel. I don’t remember her name. But I do remember her resplendent carnelian ring and the happiness we both had admiring it.

The theater was full of children and their parents, all clapping and stamping, yelling and whistling. Of course they believed. Tinkerbell started glowing again. And so—in a way she’ll try to explain—did Valerie Monroe.

One of my moments of deepest pleasure came in a movie theater, but it was the audience, not the movie, that precipitated it. I had accompanied my 4-year-old son in a crowd of similar couples to a showing of Peter Pan. We were a rowdy group—there was lots of running and screaming in the aisles, seat jumping, and general, expectant, disorganized glee. But once the movie began, we quickly settled into a quieter mode; many of the kids—my son among them—climbed comfortably into their parents’ laps.

So there we all were, cozy, rapt, when Tinkerbell’s light started to go out, and Peter turned toward us with his plea to save her: “Clap! Clap if you believe in fairies!” Instantly, my son and all the other children began to clap—what sweet innocence—at first in a light, helpful patter, but as Tink’s light flickered and grew, they clapped with increasing enthusiasm, and at Peter’s exhortations, they clapped more heartily with great, serious determination. Very soon we moms and dads were clapping, too, and many of us also stamping our feet and whistling till, when Tink regained her radiant spark, the whole place exploded in a triumphant, earsplitting crescendo of unanimous rejoicing.

I was embarrassed, then, that I wept at the beauty of this spectacle. But the children’s complete lack of self-consciousness had ignited my own and the other adults’ letting go, and our utterly unbridled, common engagement in the moment was wrenchingly poignant. An ordinary Saturday afternoon, a theater full of antsy kids, a story I’d heard a thousand times—who would have thought there would be opportunity for such surrender and celebration? The point is, I shouldn’t have been surprised. For the longest time, I have been falling face-first into it everywhere: puddles of awe, as I notice the intricate patterns of rain blown against my window; rivers of it, as I paddle in a kayak beside the city and turn to see a range of towering skyscrapers, peaks of sparkling glass, majestic in the brilliant autumn sun. Maybe you have these moments, too—ordinary in every way except for your active appreciation—when engagement floods your senses, drenching you in pleasure, when there’s no past to regret or future to worry over, just the shining, magnificent, awe-inspiring now. It’s living proof that pleasure is all around you, waiting to be had.

Our survival instincts say one thing (take sides! fight back! it's us against them!). Our better instincts say another (we're in this together! united we stand!). Valerie Monroe on what it takes to turn "them" into "us."

My 17-year-old son was in a high school only four blocks from the Twin Towers when they fell. The second tower collapsed as the children were being released, shaking the ground with a thunderous rumble and sending an 11-foot-high tsunami of toxic rubble roaring toward the school. My son remembers a police officer touching him lightly on the shoulder as he began to run. “Go quickly but carefully,” the officer said.

That evening, my son and his class­mates safely home, I tuned in to a national TV newscast. Toward the end of the show, there was a clip of hundreds of children running chaotically from their school; some of the girls were crying in the melee. The scene felt distant and impersonal; I was still experiencing what I was seeing on television as somehow happening to “them,” the unlucky ones who were most directly affected or hurt. Until I saw a police officer put his hand on a child’s shoulder and say something I couldn’t hear; and then saw that child as he turned toward the camera, his young face frozen in uncomprehending fear—my son, running with the others for his life.

Since that night, I’ve never looked at a newspaper photograph of a boy in Gaza, say, or Niger, or New Orleans and not thought: He is someone’s child. There is probably a woman who cares about him with the same staggering passion I have for my son. Try this: Look at a photo of a baby wailing in hunger and imagine that it is your baby. Can you feel the queasy threat of panic rise up into your throat? You will not so easily turn the page. It took a crisis for me to recognize how quickly, how consistently and deliberately, I threw up the screen that shielded me from “them”— the Suffering, the Poor, the Unlucky, the Unchic, the Unheard of, the Unfit, the Unfunny And while I’m admitting it, the Misguided, the Manipulated, and the Stupidly and Completely Wrong. All day long, I realized, I was sorting and codifying everyone I saw: us, them, us, them, us, them. If you think about it, you might notice that you do the same.

In your defense (and mine): A study from Harvard and New York universities suggests that the impulse to identify with one group or another may be innate. We’re descended from animals that lived in groups, and survival depended upon being accepted into a group that was strong and vital, says David Berreby, author of the recently published book Us and Them. It can be deeply scary when we feel we don’t fit in anywhere; we join the sorority or the country club so that we know where we stand. The sorting is partly a way for us to figure out who we belong with and to feel, on some level, safe.

Here’s the thing about it, though: The reflexive, protective behavior that ensured our safety thousands of years ago can give us a false sense of security. Because the result is a world teeming with “them.” And we often begin to feel increasingly threatened—frightened of “them,” angry at “them,” or simply, as a way of coping with our fear, dismissive of “them,” wishing they would just go away.

I might have wished the same till the night of that TV newscast, when I found the “them” in myself. Now I see “us” everywhere, often unexpectedly, always gratefully. Keep reading for other—concrete, practical—ways to lessen the gaps, heal the rifts, and get from “them” to “us.”

I loved my father so much that I couldn't understand how I would be able to survive when he died. And his death seemed to be an ever-present threat: He had had rheumatic fever as a child in the days before doctors knew that the disease could damage the heart, and as a result he had a deteriorating aortic valve. "Anything over 40 is gravy for you," one of his doctors told him. He was nearly 37 when I was born.

For as long as I can remember, on Saturday mornings as soon as the weather turned warm, my father would fling open the doors and windows of our suburban house and fill the spring air with Vivaldi or Beethoven or Haydn quartets at full volume on our living room stereo. The passion in the music pumped through him like life blood; he sang and sometimes whistled along vivaciously, conducting his imaginary orchestra with enormous gusto, flushed and lifted by the gorgeousness of it all. His face full of joy, he'd catch my eye, as I sat, at 5 or 6, cross-legged on the floor in my overalls and saddle shoes, and in his look there was the gift: See?

I did.

When my son was about to leave for college two years ago, in the course of a conversation about separating, he asked me how l felt about losing my father, who died when I was 30. It wasn't at all what l thought it would be, l told him. Every time I feel happy, l recognize Grandpa's spirit, I said. I looked at my son; he looked at me. I see, he said. He did.

O's beauty director Valerie Monroe's prescription for a youthful soul: supplement responsibility with doses of foolish fun (take as needed).

My back hurts pretty often these days. Actually, since I turned 65, many things do. I'm still active—I ride my bike 20 miles in one shot—but I know that someday things will start coming loose and falling off. (Of the bike, and also me.) 

So it was with some trepidation last winter that I joined the hordes of kids sledding down the steep hill in my neighborhood. I hadn't been on a sled in 25 years. But the sledders—toddlers to teenagers—seemed hysterically happy. I remembered that sled-happiness. I wanted it again. The problem was, I had no sled. But I did have the lid of a metal hamper. I went home for it, then hurried back. 

I guess I have mild body dysmorphia: When I tried to sit on the lid, I found it was too small for my butt. I was too excited to care, though. "If I fall off," I thought, "I'll be falling into fresh snow, unlikely to break my neck. Works for me!" 

I positioned myself at the hill's peak. "Need a shove?" someone asked. "I do!" I said, and I was off. Off the lid, that is—but not before I'd enjoyed 20 feet of bliss. I was so happy with myself, the kids, the world. 

It was good to remember that doing something inadvisable—flying down a hill, eating French fries five nights in a row, strolling alone through the park on a balmy summer night—keeps my outlook fresh, as if I were seeing through the eyes of a child.

How our dance-phobic beauty director went from I’ll-look-ridiculous to “Ay, chica!” Rule #1: Don’t “think.” Valerie Monroe sheds her last inhibition.

Just over a year ago, I wrote a story here examining how it felt to go out in public wearing the kind of extremely revealing clothing that was being touted as the height of fashion (and why a woman might choose to expose herself in it). For a week, I wore a lot of almost nothing: a scrap of black fabric only very generously called a dress, another dress, transparent, revealing my underwear as if behind a pale violet scrim, a pair of bloomers—yes, bloomers—so abbreviated they were interrupted almost before they bloomed. After the story came out, a number of people congratulated me on my courage. The thing is, I didn’t feel courageous at all. I could walk down the street in a bra and panties and feel pretty comfortable (if I didn’t think I’d be arrested). Nude beaches? Hand me the sunscreen and point the way. I’m just not very inhibited about my body.

But I have a secret: I won’t dance. Don’t ask me.

That wouldn’t be a problem, necessarily, except that I want to dance. Especially at parties and weddings and bar mitzvahs and any-where else I hear music that beats out a deep, pulsing rhythm that gets into the blood. I’m just too inhibited to take the floor; I’m afraid the moment I get out there, I won’t know what to do. I’m even—and I hate, especially, to admit this—afraid to try.

That’s why I decided to take a hip-hop class. And who wanted to join me but Gayle King, O editor at large, who claimed that she’d been using the same dance moves since seventh grade and desperately needed an upgrade.

We decided on one of the Ailey Extension dance and fitness classes at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Manhattan. It’s called Hip-Hop for the Absolute Beginner. If there were a class called Not Even Anywhere Near Approaching Absolute Beginner, we’d have preferred that. But this is the best we can do. We’re late to the first class, on a Monday evening after work. More than 20 people of all shapes and sizes are doing stretching exercises in a large room with a wall of mirrors and a cement floor. The class is led by Tweetie, a small, muscular, wildly energetic, fast-talking young woman. Gayle and I rush to a corner in the back of the class, where Gayle drops her stuff (she came in sweats) and I change from my heels into sneakers. As I’m tying my shoe, I get a terrific cramp in my side. (Not a good sign.) Neither Gayle nor I can do most of the stretches, and I notice that when we’re asked to lie down on the floor, we both hold our heads up uncomfortably because we don’t want to mess up our hair. (Another bad sign.) Tweetie starts the class by showing us in slow motion a simple kind of shuffle-off-to-Buffalo routine, and I’m thinking that if I have enough practice, I’ll be able to get it. Things are looking up. Funky step, step, step, forward, slide, hop, slide, hop. “I don’t know,” says Gayle as she shuffles and hops along beside me, “this seems very vaudeville.…” She does indeed look as if she could use a top hat and a cane. But we keep at it, as Tweetie, talking at warp speed and with a kind of hip-hop inflection I have to squint to understand, tells us we need some attitude, which she then demonstrates with a move, and another, and another, till it’s obvious the hip-hop train has left the station while I’m still standing on the platform awkwardly juggling my bags.

There’s a person in the class—gender unclear to me—who is doing a butt jiggling move in such a way that every-thing seems to be going in a different direction at once. It’s completely fascinating; I can’t take my eyes off it. Which might be why I keep losing my balance and can’t keep up. (Imagine the Queen Mother at her 100th birthday party. Now imagine her trying to do the chicken noodle. That’s me.) Gayle, ever curious and friendly, asks Butt Jiggler for advice about how to do the moves. BJ doesn’t waste a second: “Get grimy,” he/she says. At that moment, I know I’m never going to succeed at hip-hop. Though I think I know what grimy is—it’s the hip-hop equivalent of dirty dancing—I have no idea how to get there. It’s a state of being, a state of being for which I have enormous respect and admiration, but not one I will ever enter. I don’t have the con stitution for it. What I need is a dance that can be done with or without griminess. Like salsa.    

Despite having failed utterly at hip-hop, I have learned a helpful lesson. A private class is more my style; for someone as hopelessly self-conscious as I, learning to dance in a room full of strangers is just too hard. (Every single time Tweetie had said, “Whatever you do, don’t do this,” and then demonstrated with great flair a move exactly, and I mean exactly, the way I had done it, all the lucky grimy people in the class burst out laughing and nodded at one another. Really, I just couldn’t handle the humiliation.) So I sign up for a lesson at Dance New York with Jose, a competitive Latin dancer recommended by a friend. She said he’d be great, and he is. He’s tightly wound, graceful, a sleek young Latin cat, and remarkably patient. He introduces me to the basic steps, going over and over them till I can master them. Even with the endless repetitions, I make lots of mistakes. But I hardly mind at all. Because whenever I mess up, Jose, with the kind of loving, indulgent laugh a parent has for his child when she does something adorably wrong, tells me it’s okay. He calls me lover and mamasita and baby, and, if I make a really egregious move, baby lover. So I’m pretty fine with egregious. “Bup, bup, bup, mamasita, do it this way!” he says as he shows me a new step. With his hand lightly touching my back, he guides me, not quite pushing me along but suggesting. He shows me how to do a turn, and when I finally get it right, he murmurs, “Gorgeous, lover.” He gives no indication of how bored he is till the end of the first lesson, when he starts a crazy, loose, kicking and scooping thing all around me, like he’s street fighting with a little person, and I abruptly stop my back-and-forth to ask him what he’s doing. “Don’t mind me, lover,” he says, fondly, “I’m trying not to get bored. Keep dancing.” And I do.

As I’m slipping on my jacket after the lesson, I ask Jose brightly, “Should I practice at home?” A cloud passes over his face. “No,” he says, “I don’t think so.” Why not? He stares off into the distance behind me, as if he were visualizing something. Something unpleasant. Finally he says, “You might do something wrong, again and again, and then I’ll have to teach it out of you.”

But later that evening, I can’t resist trying out the steps. And someone at the office has given me a salsa exercise DVD, which promises not only a tighter “core,” which I could probably use, but a few good moves. One Saturday morning before I start cleaning my apartment, I remember the DVD and put down the vacuum. A minute later, I’m standing in front of my computer, trying to follow the hip swiveling and grinding. I add a couple of Jose’s moves. This scene, ridiculous as it is—and, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I see that it is very ridiculous—is also a breakthrough. I’ve never been able to dance, even alone, in the privacy of my home.

At my second class, we take up our positions—Jose, with his right arm around my back and his left hand holding my right— and, surprising myself, I immediately assume the correct stance. “Okay, baby, let’s go!” says Jose, and we’re off. We practice the old steps and then we start on some turns. There is a waltz playing in the background: Other couples are swirling gracefully around the dance floor to the three-quarter beat. Trying to keep to a salsa rhythm isn’t easy. I’m about to give up, when the music changes. Now it’s a tango. I notice a couple to my right: I can’t tear my eyes away, they’re so magnetic. “Don’t look at them,” says Jose, compassionately, but with some urgency. “You’ll lose your focus and your place.” It makes me feel as if he understands my shyness; I realize that I trust him, even after only two lessons. Why? For one thing, he hasn’t once asked me to do something I couldn’t do. Though he’s obviously a very skilled and talented dancer, he seems to want to share his skill with me, rather than use it to show me how good he is.

When I get home, I’m so jazzed that I search for some salsa sites on the Net, and watch a few competitions on YouTube. Then I find myself trying to imitate the salsa stance, keeping the upper body still while moving the hips and legs and feet. I even look in the mirror while I do it. (This would have been excruciating a month ago. Today it makes me laugh, and reflecting on my progress gives me a small sense of accomplishment. Very small, but still.) I start thinking about parallels to my work: How did I learn to write? By reading other writers, trying to figure out how they did it, and by writing myself. The more I wrote, the more comfortable at it I became. Dancing isn’t very different. The more I do it, the more comfortable it feels. It requires trust (in my teacher) and focus. I notice that whenever I lose focus on what Jose and I are doing, by looking at other (far more experienced and graceful) dancers in the room, not only do I forget my place but my self-esteem slips and falters. Then my inhibition, returning in full force, gives it a nasty shove, and I might as well just take a chair. Jose keeps telling me to stop thinking, to simply follow his lead, and when I do, finally, it’s smooth sailing: He navigates me breezily through turns we haven’t even practiced yet. There is magic to the letting go. Every time I become less a spectator and more engaged, my dancing improves. My engagement with Jose helps, too. You might have thought I knew this before I tried it, but I discovered that hip-hop is more about performance, while salsa—though it can also be about performance—thrives on the connection between the partners. I guess I’m more comfortable sharing responsibility on the dance floor; I know I’m comfortable when I’m relating to a guy (even, I find, a sleek Latin cat a couple of decades younger than I). A woman dancing salsa, Jose tells me, can be kind of low-key if she chooses, letting her partner show off all around her. I’m happy to let Jose do that (as I’m still more Queen Mother than Rita Moreno), but step-by-step, I hope I can learn to do some showing off myself.

go out in those Dame Edna glasses...that alien haircolor...those stripes! Okay, sometimes they do. When is telling the truth a favor and when should you just zip it? O’s beauty director, VALERIE MONROE, sorts it out.

It was my first (and come to think of it, last) time as a guest on the Oprah show. Put yourself in my place. Would you be nervous? Even if you knew Oprah a little and she had always been unfailingly kind and supportive? I’ll answer for you: Yes. You’d be tired, too, because the night before the show you’d have been up very late in your hotel room, lying in your unfamiliar bed, counting not sheep but the innumerable ways available for you to humiliate yourself. At some point, I must have received a wake-up call, because the next thing I knew I was wearing what seemed like a couple of bottles of foundation and squinting into very bright lights. Oprah introduced me as the beauty director of her magazine. And, could it be? Yes, it was true! I appeared to be a genius: People applauded every time I opened my mouth. (Sometimes, confusingly, even before I opened my mouth, but so what?) It was going swell until an audience member asked, “What should I say to a friend who has dyed her hair a wildly unattractive color?” I turned to Oprah and said that if she, for example, were to make an unfortunate choice, I would try to think of every kind thing I could say before I told her what I really thought. To my surprise—followed swiftly by my alarm— Oprah disagreed. A real friend, she said with great conviction, will always tell you the bald, unvarnished truth. That’s what a good friend does, she said; in fact, that’s what her best friend, Gayle King, does. About one particularly electrifying hairstyle, for example, Gayle remembers telling Oprah that she looked as if she’d stuck her finger in a socket. (Oprah remembers, too.)

But while this kind of honesty works for them, it’s shocking, unthinkable, to others—me, for instance, and I’m not alone. “I’m a total sissy when it comes to telling my friends something dicey about the way they look,” says Rachel Simmons, Rhodes scholar and author of Odd Girl Out, in which she examines the subject of girls and aggression. “I get nauseated just thinking about it.” The roots of her reluctance to criticize are deeper than simple queasiness about confrontation. “Women tend to take criticism very personally,” she says. “They often feel responsible for and ashamed of their mistakes. A lot of women see it as criticism not of a discrete choice they’ve made but of who they are as a person. So their feelings may spiral downward from ‘I made the wrong choice’ to ‘I’m a bad person’ to ‘No one will love me.’”

With the stakes that high, you might want to ask yourself what your motives are in sharing your thoughts, Simmons suggests. David Berreby, author of Us and Them, an exploration of how and why people split off into groups, agrees. In telling someone what we don’t like about the way she looks, we may also be sending a signal that she’s pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable for our social group, warning her that she’s not looking like “our kind of people.” An acquaintance of mine invited a friend to a fancy dinner party and was horrified when her friend showed up in a tight, garish dress and “hooker” heels. She didn’t say anything—what was the point?—but was deeply embarrassed. Her friend’s appearance suggested that she, by association, had bad taste, says Berreby. We’re constantly (often unconsciously) classifying people based on the way they look. So when a friend makes an aesthetic choice that suggests vulgarity or coarseness, our investment in telling her what we think might be anchored in our own need to be well regarded. To paraphrase Aristotle, we see ourselves in our friends. And if our friends look like hookers? Our selves might not be comfortable with that.

A Boston woman I’ll call B., who (wisely) declines to be identified, says, “Most of my friends dress badly, wear the wrong makeup, and have terrible haircolor.” B. would readily admit that she’s no style maven, but she tries to cultivate a look that communicates a certain thoughtfulness about the way she puts herself together. She wishes her friends shared this thoughtfulness—they’d look so much better!—and doesn’t understand why they don’t. So she’s motivated to give them a little style assist.

“I close my eyes and see a huge gallery of faces of women I’d like to help,” she says. When one of her particularly dowdy friends said she was going shopping to buy a dress for her daughter’s wedding, B. jumped at the opportunity. “I’m going with you,” she said, and both B. and her friend were delighted with the results. (Though the dress was a success, the friend did wear hideous shoes to the wedding, B. sadly reports.) “I’ll never make a suggestion unless there’s an opening,” she says. “But if a friend who typically wears awful, clunky flats happens to say that she likes my shoes, I’ll say, ‘Thank you. You wouldn’t believe how incredibly comfortable they are. I was surprised that you can actually find stylish shoes that are comfortable, but it’s entirely possible!’” B. also advocates giving gift certificates to a good salon for friends who could use hair help.

On the other hand, Gayle’s more direct modus operandi does work fine for a few bold people. “The best advice I ever got was from a close friend I hadn’t seen in several years,” says one woman. “The first thing she said when she saw me was, ‘Darlin’, I adore you, but you’ve got to do something about that awful, flat haircolor.’ Then she proceeded to send me to her colorist, who did a beautiful job. I was enormously grateful.”

“It’s nice to have a friend who can speak honestly but tactfully to you,” says Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. But it’s wise to lay down the ground rules of your friendship before a situation like an unlovely dress or a towering hairdo arises. Say you and your sartorially unpredictable friend are having a drink. You enjoy her company and you want to invite her along to cocktail parties and picnics. But you’d also like to feel confident that she won’t show up in something that might get you both arrested. With the diplomatic skills of Talleyrand, you say, “Honey, will you tell me the truth when you think I’m wearing too much eyeshadow or the wrong color lipstick or my skirt’s too short? Sometimes I wonder whether I’m overdoing it with the blush.” If you’re lucky, she responds, “Well, of course, it’s only my opinion, but yes, I will, and won’t you please do the same for me?” Then at the next opportunity you can graciously get down to the business of telling her what not to wear. But what if she stares at you, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as if you were speaking an obscure Turkish dialect? Take a deep breath, pray that she doesn’t show up at the company softball game looking like Dame Edna, and release yourself from the responsibility of setting her straight.

Too bad her son, poised to costar with world-famous thespians, lacks motivation.

The casting agent spotted my 11-year-old son at his gymnastics class.

"Would you like to read for a part in a movie?" she asked him. Reid shrugged. "Here, take my number," she said. "Ask your mom to call first thing in the morning to set up an appointment."

Before I called, I asked my son, "Are you sure you want to do this, honey?" Secretly I hoped he would tell me that he'd always wanted to act. When I played Helen Keller in a junior high school production of "The Miracle Worker," I vowed that acting would be my life. It was only years later, after grueling repeat performances of "The Fantasticks" and "Arsenic and Old Lace" -- and especially after playing the lead in a college production of "Antigone," grim even in French -- that I recognized the main reason I'd been smitten with my first role: Only one speaking line. But still I'd been seriously seduced by the mystery and the glamour of acting. Spotted by a casting agent!

My son, not seduced, was at least game. "Why not?" he said. "It might be a good experience."

The T-shirt Reid happened to be wearing when I picked him up after school on the way to the casting director's was white once. It hung almost to his knees, so that just the hem of his shorts -- which were dark and very large -- peeked out, like a droopy black slip, underneath. In the cab on the way uptown, I watched him consume an entire pack of red licorice; a light stain extended from the corners of his lips, encircling his mouth in a soft halo. He turned to me and knocked his baseball cap up off his face with the back of his wrist.

"Think they'll like me?" he asked. He smiled his huge, beautiful, megawatt smile. His teeth were pink.

There were already four boys with their sitters or moms slouched around the heavy wood table in the conference room when we arrived at the casting director's. They all gave my son and me the once-over as we walked in. We sat. I read the paper. Reid studied for his math test. I wondered if the other boys were invited here, too. They were swapping stories about their agents. One of the kids, who claimed to be 12, looked as if he could have used a shave.

A chipper young blond woman popped into the room. "Is everybody here?" she asked brightly. She spotted my son. "Reid!" she said. "I remember you!" She gave him a copy of a short script.

"Does everyone know the story?" she asked.

My son and I were the only two who shook our heads. "OK," she said. "Ohh-kay. So the story is ... " And she went on to weave a confusing and disheartening tale, dropping the names of two famous actresses and a very famous actor like breadcrumbs along the way. Everyone in the room seemed to get the story but me. The characters wandered around in my head like lost children.

"But then ... why is Grandpa in the hospital?" I asked dimly.

"He's not in the hospital," the chipper woman said. "The sister is in the hospital."

"Uh, well, skip it," I said.

A moment later, my son left to read. I gravely slipped on my reading glasses and pretended to study an editorial about budget cuts while I fantasized about the intimacies I would soon be sharing with actress No. 1.

"This dialogue seems stilted," she confides. "Will you help me fix it?"

"Your son is so intelligent and well-behaved," says actress No. 2. "So beautifully brought up."

I hadn't even really looked at the page when Reid stood before me, pleased. "We'd like him to come for a callback," Chipper said, "or you can stay for another half hour and we'll see him again." I glanced at Reid, who nodded.

We stayed. As I stared at the editorial page, the famous actor and I relaxed in his trailer. "I think I'm falling in love with you," he says.

After the second reading, the casting director called me out of the conference room. "I'd like him to meet the [prominent and distinguished] director," she said.

I had resolved to remain neutral about encouraging my son -- that is, despite my excitement, I wanted to leave the decision about pursuing the part to him -- but when I heard this name, which sparkled with celebrity and allure like the glittering names of the cast, some hold I had on my resolve just gave way, and I felt my perspective, once moored securely on a pillar of good sense and reason, slip swiftly away.

I found myself really wanting my son to want the part, and really wanting the director to choose him for it. This was a big feeling, and a childish one, like when you know what you want your main Christmas present to be, and you start hoping for it. That feeling -- of wanting my son to be the gifted one -- persisted and grew. I watched the other mothers more carefully, noticed how they coached their boys, told them to straighten up, primped them as if they were looking not at their children, but a reflection of themselves.

Even as I recognized my own desire to push my son, their behavior repulsed me. I was determined not to give in to it. I didn't want to be an obnoxious stage mother, using my boy to fulfill my frustrated fantasies. More truthfully, I didn't want to appear to be an obnoxious stage mother, but I might have been quite happy to see my boy fulfilling my fantasies. So I affected a detachment and a neutrality I didn't feel. I told Reid that the casting people and the director see hundreds of children, that the chances of getting a pivotal part are minuscule, that acting in a movie is hard work (though I'm not sure I believed that last part).

I asked him just once if he wanted to take the time to look over the script before he met the director -- though I was dying to read it through with him, if only to see how he did it. And my performance as I escorted him to the meeting: Oscar material. For all my inward excitement, you would have thought I was taking him to have his teeth cleaned. I waited for him on a folding chair in the hallway, yawning.

The director liked him. Would I please call to set up an appointment so that he could get Reid on tape the following week? Would I! Giddy, I struggled to contain myself. "So, my little Barrymore," I said to Reid on our way home, "this is getting kind of, you know, exciting, isn't it?"

"Exciting?" said my son distractedly. "What time is it? Have I missed 'The Simpsons'?" And then almost as an afterthought: "They told me the movie was going to be filmed in September, and asked me if I minded missing a couple of months of school. I thought about it and I said that I did mind."

"What!" I said, unraveling fast, as our cab sped downtown, away from the director's office. "You said what? Honey, when you're my age, do you want to look back on the year you were 11 and say, 'I could have been in a movie with Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton and Robert De Niro, but I wanted to learn about polynomials instead'? This could be the chance of a lifetime!"

Reid gave me a fisheye look. "Not my lifetime," he said.

I argued halfheartedly, but I already knew that if my son chose not to travel down this particular road I would respect his decision, even if I thought he might one day regret it. So I gave it up, my fantasy of joining -- even peripherally -- the acting biz.

Reid did return for the taping because I insisted. To his great relief, that was the last we heard from the casting director. My disappointment was considerable, but it didn't last very long. I realized I had raised a boy who knew exactly what he wanted, and said so, and who was not nearly as dumbly star-struck as I. That's a supporting role I'm proud of.

Think it's selfish? Think again.

I learned the hard way how to put myself first.

Almost 30 years ago, my husband's identical twin brother killed himself. He was addicted to drugs. My husband—also addicted, I soon discovered—began a rapid descent along the same ruinous path, forsaking me and our 1-year-old son for grief's dark embrace. I tried to help my husband, became, in fact, almost sick with trying to help him and take care of our baby and our precarious finances. Family and concerned friends phoned me constantly to find out how my husband was doing and how I was holding up. "I can handle this," I told them. "I'll be fine." And compared with my husband, I did seem fine. But the tentacles of worry that had gripped me fitfully when I first discovered his addiction now snaked around me always, tighter and tighter, choking my appetite, my sleep, and my belief that he would ever get well. I would sit up all night waiting for a phone call—from him (I hoped) or from the police (I dreaded)—and then face another full day of chasing around an active toddler. "Keep this up and you will get sick," someone said, "and then who'll take care of you?" There was no one to take care of me. Well, yes, there was: me. And so I did, because I had to. I got help to look after the baby and started going to a support group, and once my husband was recovering in a hospital rehab, I treated myself every visiting day to a fine steak dinner at a nearby pub.

"I think I'll order a steak," I'd say to the baby as he sat in a plastic booster seat, sucking on his bottle. "Baked potato or mashed?" He'd kick his feet and slap the table with his chubby hands. "Good choice," I'd say. "Mashed it is."

Why is it hard for many of us to do things for ourselves before we do for others? Maybe we believe the "good" woman sacrifices herself for her family and, increasingly, for her work. "In terms of our relationships, women often feel they're responsible for everything—which is not a complete misperception," says nationally syndicated columnnist and life coach Harriette Cole. "We are the ones who usually lead the way. But somehow we get from there to the idea that the world won't work if we don't help it along." 

Taking on responsibilities that might be well or even better handled by others is one of the ways we begin to lose our balance and slide down the slippery slope from generosity to martyrdom. Because women are likely to be the primary caretakers for husbands and children as well as for aging parents, we have ample opportunity to fall into the pattern of serving the people we love before we serve ourselves. But there are good reasons to be judicious about that. "If you always put someone else first, there's a tendency for others to depreciate you, to lose respect, because respect comes from an understanding that that person has her own wishes, dreams, and desires," says Ethel S. Person, MD, author of Feeling Strong: The Achievement of Authentic Power. Besides, why must there be only one person in first place at a time? "It's possible to have equal concerns for yourself and for loved ones," says Person. "There aren't always conflicting priorities."

In fact, being skilled at taking care of yourself may improve your capacity to care for others; if you're not fulfilled, you're only able to see other people through the filter of your own needs. And studies suggest that not taking care of ourselves is unhealthy for those who depend upon us. At the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, researchers found that greater levels of caregiver stress were associated with increased respiratory problems among the infants in their charge. 

A friend who does a lot of pro bono work in addition to demanding full-time paying projects seemed to be in a debilitating cycle: She'd work till she collapsed, when she'd have to take a couple of weeks off to recuperate (during which time she lost both momentum and money), and then she'd fall back immediately into the same frenzied work routine. Because she is a brilliant woman, and kind, her family and friends often called on her expertise in matters professional and otherwise. Her appointment book looked like the diary of a Survivor contestant. Which, in a way, she was. But though she had won many hard-earned victories for other people, she herself was barely surviving. (Not incidentally, her house, quite literally, was falling down around her.) So she started to make exercise—which sometimes meant just a vigorous walk—a priority, planned her meals thoughtfully rather than eating on the run, turned off the telephone after 11 P.M. so she could get a full night's sleep, and settled in with a guy who happened to be terrific at fixing things, like leaky plumbing and loose shingles. Guess how all this affected her work: Because she is now more engaged and energetically enthusiastic, her projects are reaching (and therefore helping) more people than ever before.

I recently read about a kind of therapy advocating that when we're stressed or suffering, we put our hand over our heart or touch our cheek as we might touch the cheek of a child we love, and say simply, "I understand." In that moment, we're accomplishing one of our greatest responsibilities; without feeling loving-kindness and compassion for ourselves, we can never really know what they are.

It's the easy way to put yourself first. And it only takes a moment.

Attention mothers of sons: Women of the future are counting on you. Valerie Monroe tells how to bring up a good, kind, happy, mindful, nongrunting husband-to-be.

I was describing in prodigious, enthusiastic detail the trip to Japan from which I'd just returned with my then 15-year-old son. "And he's so much fun to travel with," I went on to my patient friend. "His observations were really interesting, and when we met new people, he was such a good listener, and he seemed willing to try almost anything," I said. 

"Well, of course he's a fine companion," my friend said. "You raised him to be."

I felt a sharp urge to deny that, as if she'd accused me of something selfish. But I have raised a boy who's smart and observant, sensitive and kind, who listens well and is remarkably honest and articulate about the way he feels.

Lest you think I'm bragging—oh, never mind, I am bragging—there are many more mothers like me who've broken what William Pollack, PhD, calls the boy code, the persistent, largely unspoken but pervasive belief that we should bring up boys to be stoic, to hide their feelings, to become quickly independent of their parents (their mothers especially). In short, not to be like girls. Pollack, assistant clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, and author of Real Boys, believes that for boys to be happy and healthy, they must be allowed to have feelings, to show empathy, to be able to express the range of emotions encouraged in girls. Until I had a son, I thought, well, naturally you want to raise your child—boy or girl—to have a full emotional life. Then I tried to. And I discovered that there's a big difference between believing a boy should show his feelings freely and actually having a boy who does.

When my best friend's older son and my son were both around three, her boy delighted in swathing himself in glittery tulle and prancing around with a fairy wand. My friend took it in stride, providing generous amounts of fabric and making aesthetic improvements—more sparkles, a bigger star on the wand, etc.—to her son's great and often delirious satisfaction. On the face of it, I supported her and her boy, but I confess I was also relieved that my son didn't express quite the same level of interest. It was such a small thing: A boy, barely out of babyhood, innocently enraptured by clouds of tulle—why was it even the slightest bit threatening to me? For the same reason that when my mother (an adoring grandmother in every way) saw my son weepy with hurt feelings when he was ten, she asked me reprovingly, "Do you think it's good for him to be so sensitive?" Or that when a friend who noticed him at 14 snuggling with me on the couch later asked, "Is he interested in girls yet?" A sensitive, affectionate boy risks being perceived as a "mama's boy, tied to her apron strings." Isn't it interesting that we have no such phrases to describe a girl who is attached to her mother? And that "daddy's girl" completely lacks the pejorative connotation? 

My mother's and friend's questions scared me because they suggested that the closeness between me and my son was in some way inhibiting his path to a healthy manhood. Should I have sent him signals that I expected him to reject the intimate bond established between us? There are many reasons mothers might feel the need to withdraw from their sons, says Olga Silverstein, family therapist and author of The Courage to Raise Good Men. We're afraid that we'll contaminate our boys with "female" qualities. We believe that boys must grow away from their families, and so we want to protect ourselves and our sons from the inevitable pain of separation. We think we're incapable of modeling qualities important to becoming a man, or that our closeness will make him homosexual. Or we believe that because he is male, he is unknowable to us, or that our affection and bond will be construed as seductive.

"It's absolutely necessary to shift the way we think of those qualities we call feminine," says Silverstein. "As a culture, we perceive empathy, nurturance, talent for friendship and relationship as belonging only to women and less valuable than independence and other kinds of strengths traditionally associated with men," she says. "Women have to believe that feminine strengths are valuable not just in women but in humans. Then we won't worry about feminizing boys." This isn't to say that we shouldn't respect the differences between boys and girls, whatever we perceive them to be. But the idea of defining male and female as opposites (as we do in this culture) is misguided and leads us into trouble, Silverstein says, because it implies that boys must not only separate from their mothers but reject the qualities associated with them. Does this sound unfair? Even misogynistic?

We know what we get when a boy is raised with the code, says Pollack: a mask of masculinity, false bravado, the need to be aggressive and to win, and to ignore or repress feelings of vulnerability. These are the men who seem strong but who are, ironically, weakest in many ways because they're hiding or are unaware of their neediness and are poorly equipped to engage in any kind of honest relationship. But those boys who get affection, love, respect, and compassion, grow up whole, not unconsciously seeking what they needed from their parents. I see these boys everywhere among my son's friends. They have pals who are girls. They are friendly with their mothers. They like their mothers. 

One afternoon when my son was a senior in high school, a group of his friends gathered in our living room to play video games. From the kitchen, I was aware of a sea of voices, deep and loud. Exclamations of playful frustration and surprise rose and fell in waves, over a steady undercurrent of exchange about schoolwork and teachers. After a while, I waded into their midst. They all glanced over at me. 

"Hi, Reid's mom," one of them said.

I had a question for them, I said, related to a story I was writing: "You guys are 18, right?" I said. "Do you still tell your mothers that you love them?" 

There was an earsplitting commotion as the game players wiped out the enemy. The playing stopped and silence swept the room. I stood there uncomfortably.

"Well, sure," one of the boys said finally.

"Of course," said another.

"Why not?" said a third.

A fourth boy, whose mother is a doctor, stretched his legs and leaned back in his chair. "My mother raised me and my brother and sister pretty much by herself," he said. "My mother is a goddess." No one snickered. It was a statement of fact.

How did our boys turn out like this? Silverstein suggests some important ways to ensure that our sons grow into whole human beings. We must continue to talk to them about our feelings and their own and not let them get away with putting us off. We should not be afraid to demonstrate our affection or anger or disapproval. We need to be honest about what we like and don't like about the way they act, supporting empathy, self-knowledge, and respect for feminine qualities. We can help them understand that both men and women can model how to raise a good person.

A child who is fully and deeply loved, who learns to acknowledge his feelings and is well equipped to express them, and who learns to take responsibility for his actions, to value compassion and live it daily—this is the boy who will grow into a man who'll make a loving companion. That's good for the woman he marries. Even better for the man he becomes. 

From cooing baby to whiz kid, her son has been her light, love, and learning curve. Now that they've grown up together, what happens to that primal bond? Valerie Monroe reports.

I so loved being pregnant that I wished I could carry my son forever. The bigger I got, the more luxuriously contented I felt. And not just contented: commanding, sorcerous. Who needed to pull this bunny out of the hat? In the end, the doctors had to tie me down and remove my son surgically. My obstetrician, who performed the Cesarean section, would say that my cervix had incompletely dilated. That's what he thinks. I simply refused to give my baby up. 

One evening when my son was about 8 months old and I had not yet weaned him, my husband and I left him with a sitter so that we could take in a ballet. By the end of the performance, my throbbing breasts were signaling that I'd been away from the baby long enough. When we walked into our living room, the cheerful young sitter was holding him by the hands as he stood, his fat legs wobbly, on her lap. In the moment before he saw me, his expression was one of careful determination, as if he knew he'd had one too many, but that he could stand on this lap without falling over, dammit, if he just tried hard enough. When his eyes met mine, though, he burst into a brilliant, drooly grin, leaning toward me and bouncing crazily in his excitement. I picked him up. He clutched my neck and started snuffling around in my blouse. As I settled on the couch to nurse him, I felt absolutely whole and complete, the way I'd felt during my pregnancy. It is this powerful, primitive, empathetic connection, this merging, this heady blend of joy, satisfaction and easy competence that is also the deep grief of motherhood. Because to raise a child successfully, you have to let him go.

As a new parent, I was ambushed by the intensity of the attachment; I had no idea how my feelings would evolve over the course of my son's childhood, from his early loud and stubborn stirrings for independence to his current status as a 20-year-old college student and world traveler. The first time a sitter took him out in the stroller, I stood at the window, my face pressed to the glass, waiting for her to round the corner on their return. The idea of my son's ever crossing a busy city street alone? You might as well have said that he'd be walking on the moon. Tentatively, I shared a confession with one of my mother-friends: "I know I'm not supposed to," I said, "but I love my baby more than I love my husband." "What can you do?" she said. "Me too."

Yet day by day, as my son grew, our connection somehow became elastic enough to accommodate his need to establish himself as separate from me: At 3, he suggested a playdate at his best friend Nicolette's house. Really? He wanted me to leave him there alone? "Yep," he said, "pick me up later." At 6, he wanted to join an after-school program; at 9, to go to sleepaway camp; at 12, to spend the weekend at a friend's in the country; at 17, to go to school in Minnesota; at 19, to study in Japan.

The summer before he left, I couldn't get enough of him; I took every opportunity to be home when he was. One day I asked him if he agreed that the closer a child is to his parents, the farther away he has to go to become independent of them. "I don't know," he said, "maybe." Is that why he chose to go to Japan? "Oh no," he said. Then: "Maybe." The day he left for Kyoto, I felt as queasy as the first time he walked to school alone. Only he was no longer a small, slender shoot, bearing the heavy fruit of his backpack, overripe with books—he was tall and strapping, firmly supporting the weight of his decision to leave everything familiar for eight months of the unknown. "We're doing this quickly, like taking off a Band-Aid," he said at the airport when it was time to say goodbye. He hugged me and my husband tightly, turned around and walked to the plane. I waited till we got to the parking lot and then cried—I cried in short bursts for weeks. I kept thinking, "The sweetest part of my life is over. How can I stand it? What will take its place?"

About halfway through his stay, we visited him. He met us at the airport. He was easy to spot, a couple of heads taller than everyone else in the crowd. "Just follow me," he said, as he led us through the maze of people, passageways and ticket booths to our train. "Follow me," he said, as he bought our tickets, as he helped us find our room at the hotel. When he was on his own, he rode around Kyoto like the Japanese, on a bicycle. The bike was a little small for him—as was almost everything else—which made him seem bigger than when he'd left home. Or maybe he was bigger; I wasn't sure. His host family obviously adored him. Though I couldn't understand their conversations, the mutual kindness and respect they shared with my son needed no translation. For two weeks, my husband and I followed him like baby ducklings. And by the time he put us on the train to Osaka for our flight home, I understood that the sweetest part of my life was not over but that it was expanding, the way the connection between my child and me has always been expanding, to include experience and satisfaction and joy I could never have imagined. I wish I could love everyone in my life the way I love my son: cleanly, without jealousy or neediness; wanting for him happiness, success, strength and many more people who love him as I do. 

She was feeling raw, out of sorts, intensely emotional. And then Valerie Monroe figured out that her out-of-whack attacks always led to a great leap forward.

"If I weren't at a birthday party, I would've fallen to my knees and wept with gratitude." That's how, years ago, I began a letter to Louise Bates Ames, then the director of the Gesell Institute of Human Development, a research organization dealing with children's developmental growth, in New Haven, Connecticut, and the coauthor of a slim volume called Your Six-Year-Old. I had opened the book as my son had run off to find his friends, and found described in it nearly every one of the difficult and, to me, unfamiliar characteristics of his formerly easygoing personality. In her series of books—Your One-Year-Old, etc.—Ames describes what researchers have found after decades of studying children: that every couple of years, kids move through periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium as various aspects of their development alternately synchronize and conflict. During periods of disequilibrium, their behavior tends to be stormy as they cope with frustration and inner turbulence. The most notorious of these times, when a child might know what she wants to do but is physically unable (or forbidden) to accomplish it, is the terrible twos. 

"I'm in my terrible 52s," a friend remarked recently, and I knew what she meant. For the first time in a long time, I was feeling off-kilter, vulnerable, unbalanced. Was it hormonal? Was it empty-nest syndrome? I mourned the days when I was raising a young child and relied on the constancy of his needs to give me a deep sense of purpose. I fantasized about having another baby, but quickly (with a nudge from my husband) recognized the folly of that idea. After a long stretch of feeling stable, productive, and fulfilled—as if I were playing the lead in the story of my life (or at least happily scripting the plot)—I suddenly felt like a bit player, marginalized, with no lines worth repeating. Plus, there was a new sense of urgency. Not to overextend the metaphor, but it was the beginning of the third act and the houselights were going down. 

Then a weird thing happened: I had a tantrum. Or more of a meltdown. The woman who did a mediocre job of cleaning my house once every couple of weeks called to tell me that she was quitting. I hung up the phone and cried. For hours. I felt like the two-year-old who is inconsolable over a dropped Cheerio or a missing toy. And when I came to, I wondered whether, like the two-year-old, I was moving through a period of disequilibrium. Might such periods continue throughout adulthood? "Yes, of course," says Jacqueline Haines, director of training and clinical services at the Gesell Institute. As adults, Haines says, it appears we move in and out of equilibrium in five-to-seven-year configurations as we experience frustrations and adapt to them. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, similarly, suggests that throughout our lives we confront a series of crises that require adaptation, and that struggling through each crisis allows the opportunity for a basic strength to emerge. In mid-adulthood, for example, we face a conflict between feeling the need to contribute to society and feeling purposeless, as if there's no more that we can accomplish. Here's the beauty part: All the crises are related in some way, so that as we work through one, we're simultaneously resolving past issues and laying the groundwork for the resolution of future ones. 

Much of my sense of feeling unbalanced and adrift was a result of not having the anchor of active mothering day in and day out. Now I've grieved over that loss and am slowly settling into something else. A few months ago, when my son returned from college for his holiday break, I was struck by how independent an adult he had become and, more profoundly, by how much I liked the adult he had become. The result of my 19-year endeavor had become delightfully clear. And then one morning not long after, as I stood on a subway platform on my way to work, I realized that I was having a recurring fantasy. In it I am a grandmother—a young and vital one, to be sure—playing with my infant grandchild. I see my grown son in the background, looking on with pride. I feel happy, optimistic. I think I am doing what psychologist Robert Havighurst says all humans do: I think I am learning my way through life.