Why do I dislike the phrase “giving back?” After all, it’s usually a benevolent context: often, a multi-millionaire rock star or hockey player giving some kind of charitable donation or service to the community. What could possibly be wrong with that?
     Some background: I dislike tropes, those overused phrases that suddenly appear everywhere. For example, the “COVID-19 Pivot” phrase that was used during the early pandemic, particularly in health care and education. Previously, the word pivot evoked, for me, either a basketball manoeuvre, or the hilarious episode of “Friends” where Ross shouts “PIVOT. PIVOT,” while the group of friends moves a couch. Suddenly in 2020, pivot became a euphemism used by those in upper echelons, trying to make us all think that a complete, unprecedented change in our lives and workplaces was just a little thing, a slight turn, a tweak. The reality, of course, being that it felt more volcanic. The “COVID-19 total upheaval and shit show” doesn’t sound quite the same, but is more accurate.

I was in the emergency room during COVID. I was there not as an ER physician but a hospitalist physician, doing a patient admission in the ER because there were no beds on the wards. People were anxious and angry; the day felt interminable and stressful. Amid the coughing, groaning, shouting, alarms, and overhead announcements, there was one nurse who was speaking to everyone kindly. She was one of the out-of-town  nurses who had flown in from Toronto to help us out, because so many staff members were off sick. We introduced ourselves, and she gave me a huge smile.
“You deserve a gold star,” she said, peeled one off a sheet in her pocket, and affixed it to my name tag. My eyes filled with tears.

I'm thinking about aging and beauty. Beauty, as sixty-three-year-old Bets tells seventeen-year-old Hannah in my novel Drownproofing, is quite arbitrary to begin with, although most of us can agree on a general idea of what the word means.
     My thought process started with Sarah Jessica Parker, who is older than me and made a name for herself on Sex and the City, a show that very much showcased her attractiveness, thinness, and ability to pull off various fashions. The recent "newsworthy" event was her photograph in unflattering light, with wrinkles showing and her hair going gray. Apparently, the images sparked some Internet hate about her (what is wrong with people?), to which she responded, "I know what I look like. I have no choice. What am I going to do about it? Stop aging? Disappear?"