The Grace in Withering

Decay, Disdain, and the Delirium of Being Looked At

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

We only ever show our flowers at their climax. Tight petals, willing stems, no bruising, no bent heads, no yellowing edges, no record of the labour it took to remain beautiful. A peony at peak is a compliant spectacle, eager to be adored and already half-aware of the price. It’s the same choreography with humans: polished skin, curated grief, the illusion of composure, the brave smile held a beat too long, the well-phrased confession that reveals just enough pain to be palatable, like we audition for our own immortality. But try posting a picture of a rotting bouquet. Try showing up with circles under your eyes that don’t suggest a life of indulgent mystery but one of grinding repetition. No one wants the truth. They want the flourish, not the fall.

I keep the dead flowers. Always have. Not as some performative nod to impermanence, but because I forget to throw them out and then, when I finally remember, they are too beautiful in their surrender, just like Baudelaire wrote “Le beau est toujours bizarre.” (Beauty is always strange.) Something in the stoop of the stem, the way the bloom collapses inward like it bows to a god it no longer believes in. It feels honest. The unfiltered end of something that once begged for sunlight now asking only for privacy. There’s no need to be inspiring anymore. That, ironically, is the most inspiring part.

It’s strange, isn’t it, how decay has become unphotogenic. Now authenticity is filtered, vulnerability is monetised, and sadness needs to be hot to be palatable. You are allowed to fall apart, but only if you do it like a French film character, beautiful in shadow, with a cigarette dangling and cheekbones sharp enough to puncture narrative arcs. The rest of us, those who fall apart messily, ungracefully, without a decent soundtrack, are quarantined to the margins.

There’s a whole economy now built on “rawness”, but God forbid you rot out loud.

And don’t mistake this for romanticising decay. It’s not romantic. It’s messy. It smells. It leaves rings in the vase and pollen-stained tablecloths. But what it does, what it offers, is liberation from performance. A dying flower doesn’t care if it’s liked. Neither does an aging woman who’s finally bored of being legible. The dignity isn’t in the bloom. The dignity is in the disinterest. In no longer needing to be interpreted.

My grandmother used to keep a vase of dying roses by the window. I asked her once why she didn’t replace them. She shrugged. “They’re company”, she said, “and they don’t ask anything of me anymore”. That line has haunted me in the way only a casually dropped truth can.

We spend so much time trying to be useful, desirable, strong, relevant, extraordinary. But there’s a strange and rare peace in simply being, used up, unremarkable, still warm with memory.

Five hundred years ago, decay was a metaphor. Now it’s an inconvenience. Renaissance paintings were obsessed with vanitas – rotting fruit, skulls beside mirrors, hourglasses tick-tocking next to silk and jewels. It was a way to remind the rich that they would die too. (Spoiler: they didn’t listen.) Later, we industrialised death. Made it hygienic. Fluorescent. Whispered behind curtains. Even grief became suspect, something you are allowed for a week, maybe two, before you are expected to return to your inbox and resume consuming. Meanwhile, aging is now treated like a mistake that can be corrected with subscription serums and disciplined optimism. Even time has become a branding problem.

It wasn’t always this way. There were brief, inconvenient eras when decay was treated as sacred, but even then, only under supervision. The Romantics flirted with it intensely, poetically, and with a reliable exit, the way the privileged flirt with danger. They adored ruins as long as the ruin had narrative value, as long as collapse could be translated into longing, masculinity, genius, or a woman dying beautifully for someone else’s development arc. Decay was acceptable if it remained symbolic, legible, erotically available. They didn’t want rot; they wanted permission to feel profound without losing control. The grotesque could appear, but only if it knew how to pose. Only if it had good hair, good lighting, and the decency to die on cue.

Fast-forward to now, where rot is either digitised into horror content or cropped out entirely. The Instagram algorithm doesn’t reward entropy. You’re not going viral for posting your actual breakdown unless you are cute-crying and it comes with a discount code. But there are still unmarketable cultures where the crack isn’t redeemed or reframed, just lived with, where damage doesn’t need to be instructive or beautiful to be allowed. In the West, we patch. We conceal. We Botox the reminder. If a woman’s face shows wear, she must either explain it (job, motherhood, divorce, not enough collagen) or be erased by the feed’s indifference. There’s no room for things that don’t ask to be consumed.

Decay is democratic. It does not care about status, algorithmic ranking, or your skincare routine. The queen and the waitress will both sag. The influencer’s pout and the old man’s tremble will, in time, arrive at the same slackness. Nihilism?! No! It’s relief. Watching the flesh give up its need to seduce feels deeply egalitarian.

Beauty, finally, is just biology relaxing.

I’ve also learned it’s generous. In the garden, rot feeds next year’s bloom. In the psyche, a cracked certainty makes room for nuance. In the heart, especially the heart, decay clears space for unexpected tenderness. The one that whispers, “I’m still here”, after the love has technically expired. The one that doesn’t need to be named to be real.

We are not taught to find beauty in aftermath. We are taught to fear irrelevance, to manage decline like a failing brand, to weaponise positivity against our own pain, to reframe exhaustion as gratitude, to translate grief into “growth” before it has even finished speaking. But some of the most truthful moments I’ve witnessed in life came from people who had nothing left to sell. There’s a nobility in collapse, when it isn’t curated, when it just… is.

Ten years ago, my shift wasn’t philosophical, it was behavioural. I stopped correcting how I came across. I stopped smoothing my sentences, my face, my reactions, even when no one was watching. I noticed how often I stayed “on” in private, how performance had silently followed me into solitude like a second skin. That’s when irrelevance stopped frightening me. What frightened me was the possibility of continuing to rehearse for an audience that wasn’t there, of mistaking coherence for truth, polish for presence. Aging, and disease back then, didn’t take anything from me. they revealed how much energy I had been spending on being interpretable.

I don’t want closure. I want honesty. I want the unmarketable moments. The sag. The souring. The awkward silence that doesn’t get edited out in post. I want to write things that sit in your throat like a bone. Something to reckon with, not repost. If decay teaches us anything, it’s that real beauty has nothing to prove and nothing to hide. It just stays. Until it doesn’t.

And maybe that’s the only kind that ever mattered, the one that was never trying to last, only to be real. The one that asks nothing of memory, nothing of investment, nothing of applause, or of the future. The one you recognise even if it doesn’t shine because, when it’s gone, something in you finally rests.

Still here, present without performance, with nothing left to prove,

Tamara

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