The weather tipped 100° F this week, so of course that means it’s time for cold tea. I mostly make this by grabbing one of the many packages of tea that don’t fit in anywhere, because all the actual tea storage places are full, tipping a bunch into my coldbrew jar, adding water, and then stashing it into the fridge until I'm ready to drink it.

 

In this case, I happened to grab one of my favorite gyokuros—a competition grade one—which you know, isn’t really intended for cold brewing, but that’s what experimentation is for. As a cold brew, this tea turned out the palest green in color; the nitrogenation process made that even lighter. The taste is sweet, without any astringency, and with the characteristic round, butteriness that comes with a good gyokuro. It was sweet and frothy, delicious and refreshing, and caffeinated to a massive degree.

 

Cold brews aren’t really a subject for reflection the way that multiple steep teas are: they show up in quantity, and they taste the same all the way through. But they’re wonderful for refreshment, and this one hit the spot on a hot day.

You can get Yohei Gyokuro from Ikkyu Tea.

You can also get a nitropress kit from Amazon.

Don’t buy a cold brew jar for brewing tea unless you have nothing that will work or you're really intense about tea. You just need a jar, water, and either tea bags or some kind of filter.

(Mild content warning for some negative body image discussions.)

 

I have been using the same author photo for almost my entire life as an author. You’ve probably seen it. It looks like this. I got this photo taken in February of 2009; at the time I was 32 years old.

The photoshoot was semi-painful, and after a few weeks, the photographer handed me a gallery and told me to pick a few. I hated almost all of them; I picked two that I hated the least and have been using them ever since.

 

(A very small number of you may have seen my earlier photo. This was very much from a mall glam photo shoot, and I felt like I was looking at a stranger when I looked at this photo.)

In any event, it is 2024. My birthday passed this last week, and I am now 48, which is a large number. For several years, I have been thinking that I should get updated author photos because there are 15.5 years between 32 and 48. This should, by the way, be read steeped in the same sense of despair and resignation that one uses to say, “I should do my taxes.” 

 

I hated looking at pictures of myself when I was 32; I found exactly 1.5 photos that I could tolerate in that first shoot. So how much worse was it going to be at 48? I've aged. There are little crow's feet at my eyes. There's the weight difference. Plus, I’ve spent the last four years basically not doing anything with human beings at all, and my ability to fake a competent professional demeanor (which was never an actual ability, and more like a few vague panicked habits), has atrophied.

 

This is, to be clear, a skill issue. I didn't learn most of the things people learn as a child. My mom knew nothing about make up except what she learned in a 1987 Mary Kay makeover from someone at church. She was told her season was winter and she has worn blue eyeshadow ever since.

 

I was the fifth girl in a family of seven, and that didn't help. I can count the number of items of clothing that weren't socks or underwear that were purchased for me, at my choice, when I was under eighteen on one hand. “What to wear” was just “what your older sister no longer fit.” (Two, if you count the dresses we learned to sew.)

 

I spent the vast majority of undergrad and law school not understanding how every other woman around me (it seemed) knew how to look endlessly sharp and professional. “Oh, I just blowdried my hair,” someone would say when I asked how they made it look so great.

 

Fine, I thought. I can do that. How hard could it be? Except when you know literally nothing, it doesn't work like that. I didn't know what brushes to use; I didn't even know that you were supposed to use brushes. (YouTube didn't exist for most of my law school career, and was only in its infancy at the end.)

 

The conclusion I came to every time I tried something I didn't know how to do was that my hair just didn't do that, or my eyebrows just didn't do that, or that I looked stupid with makeup. I didn't realize that other women had eyebrows that looked that way because they had them done professionally: I didn't even know that there were eyebrow professionals in this world until I was thirty years old. I am sure someone mentioned this to me earlier, but it probably fell into the black hole of “why would I remember this thing when I have no money?”

 

I have excelled at many other things, but I started at such a massive deficit with regard to appearance that even if I've now picked up the things that most five year olds know, “having to look decent” falls into the category of things that plunge me into a well of anxiety. Occasionally, I've hired someone to do it for me, and this helps: I can temporarily make myself look like an acceptable human being. But afterward, I look at photos and struggle to see a person that I know.

 

So yes: for years I have thought that I should probably, definitely update my author photo, but it felt like my choices were “have a photo that I hate” or “have a photo that looks like a stranger." And I would rather try to file taxes from fifteen years ago using nothing but an abacus, a stone tablet, and a chisel.

 

Then I got an email from Chandra Wicke, a photographer and romance lover, who said that she was going to be in Colorado for a visit and asked if I would let her take my photo. (There’s a lot more to this—she has a project she’s working on, and I’ll probably tell you about it at some point when she’s ready to spill the details.) I wrote back and said, “possibly you don’t understand how bad I am at being a human being,” and we talked and she reassured me that she would not judge me. I thought, “sounds fake, I don't think she can possibly know how little I understand.”

 

And yet she did not judge me. Chandra came over and took pictures of in my office and me outside at an outdoor place. (This sentence wildly underestimates how much work she did.) I thought, “great, that’s done” and dreaded the moment when I would have to do the horrific task of actually looking at pictures of myself to see if there was one I could tolerate and/or that looked like me.

 

Then the email came with the gallery.

Photo credits: Chandra Wicke

I am older than I was in the last photo, and I think you can tell that. But for some reason, these photos feel better: less antiseptic, more me. I did not feel like I was looking at a stranger. 

 

And I actually liked almost all of them. I am still processing what it means to not cringe away from an image of myself. It is not a feeling I am familiar with, and it probably means that there are things I need to examine and think about, because wow, that's a lot of anxiety, Courtney. Maybe I don't need to carry it around.

 

But for now, here we are. I have updated author photos. This is me at forty-eight. This is what I look like now.

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