Authenticity
AUTHENTICITY | ACCEPTANCE
"I think that one of the things that makes me who I am is the ability to say, "Yes, I am. I'm sixty-one years old and I'm going for it while I can. Get out of my way, or you know, we'll talk later." As we say in the Zen world, let's just stand in our Dharma position. Let's stand as who we are. Just be fully who we are at this time, and place. There's also a kind of fierceness there, like, I'm not all that nice, not all that tame, a kind of fierce determination about being who I am and just going on with it and stepping fully into my life."
"It's been a kind of liberation to have gray hair. I feel that beauty is not about subterfuge, it's about authenticity. Like Susan Sontag said, 'I let a patch of truth develop'."
"I think in previous generations women survived really well by compartmentalizing themselves and by promoting the pieces of themselves that were acceptable. And in later years I think we found that being integrated and authentic is part of health. If you just figure out who you are and present that, it makes life simple for us and easy. It helps your emotions and your mind correspond to each other and creates happiness."
"I never dyed my gray hair. I never associated it with age. I always associated it with the art of being."
"There's a threshold, I guess, for everybody where something starts to feel fake. But if the person is not fake, it doesn't really matter how they are pleasing themselves."
“Just a few months ago, someone suggested I hit the bottle again to look ‘years younger.’ I balked. Younger than ... what?!”
“The one time I hennaed my hair, it covered up the beginnings of my gray silver. I was sad to see the gray go. I was really surprised. I just remember thinking, "Oh, I don't look quite as much like me."