Unfucking Midlife: Turning 46
On mortality, grey hair, and the freedom that comes from finally not giving a fuck
I was standing in the airport recently when a younger woman came up to me and said she liked my hair.
I looked at her, confused. My hair was in a ponytail. I hadn’t washed it in a couple of days.
“Thanks,” I said, with half a smile.
“I just love seeing a woman age naturally,” she added.
That’s when I realized she meant the grey. The grey hair lining my face that I hadn’t covered. Not because I’d made some philosophical decision about aging naturally, but because I’d been too busy to get in for my hair appointment around the holidays.
My instinct was to tell her to mind her millennial elders. But I thanked her again and kept walking.
The interaction stayed with me though.
It made me think about all of it. The Botox, the fillers, the hair dye, the declarations about aging naturally. Whether any of it is actually the point.
Or if it’s all just distraction.
A way of not having to feel what it actually means to watch yourself age. To see time passing in your own body. To know, on some quiet level, that this is finite. That we are, slowly, disintegrating. That one day we will die.
I asked myself if that was true for me. Then I did the thing I usually don’t do.
I stopped and sat with it.
With the temporary nature of my existence. With the fact that I’m going to die.
I won’t lie... my chest tightened. I felt afraid. Maybe even terrified.
Not of how it will happen, but of the simple truth: being here today means I won’t be here one day.
Sitting with that didn’t send me spiraling. It did the opposite.
It reminded me why I’m here at all.
Not just to live, but to feel my aliveness. To stop escaping and start inhabiting my days. To meet what shows up with breath and steadiness.
To be present in my relationships with my children, my family, my lover, my friends, my dogs. To speak with integrity. To act with intention. To forgive, forgive, forgive.
To not take for granted a single wrinkle, stretch mark, mile run, tear shed, belly laugh, or moment of connection.
The woman in the airport wasn’t really seeing me. She was projecting her own story about aging onto my unwashed hair.
I wasn’t fully present either. I was busy deciding whether to correct her, feel annoyed, or let it go.
Meanwhile, life was just happening around us.
That’s the real distraction.
Not Botox. Not hair dye. Not whether you choose to do something or not do it.
But all the fucking energy we spend making meaning out of it. Deciding what it says about us. Whether it makes us more evolved or more authentic or more acceptable.
So yes, I’ll still get Botox. I’ll dye my hair again when I have time.
But I don’t want those choices to pull me away from what’s underneath.
In the end, the wrinkles won’t matter. The grey won’t matter.
What will matter is whether I actually felt my life. Whether I was present for the people I love. Whether I let myself be seen and loved fully. Whether I experienced the full range of my aliveness. The pleasure, the grief, the rage, the tenderness. Instead of numbing or performing or distracting my way through it.
My forties have been my biggest awakening yet. Spiritually, sexually, sobriety-wise.
It reminds me of the butterfly metamorphosis. Not the pretty, inspirational version, but the actual biology of it. A caterpillar doesn’t just grow wings in the chrysalis. It dissolves. Completely breaks down into liquid. The old form has to disintegrate for something new to emerge.
That’s what midlife has felt like. You spend the first half of your life building a self based on what you think you’re supposed to be. What your parents wanted. What society expected. What would make you acceptable, lovable, successful, good. You’re encased in all those shoulds.
Then something cracks it open. You realize: I don’t actually have to be any of that. I can finally be free.
The parts I’d been hiding, the ones I’m finally accepting, weren’t flaws. They were the parts that didn’t fit the mold I was trying to squeeze myself into. The anger. The desire. The refusal to perform niceness. The big personality. The sexuality. The parts that were “too much” or “not enough.”
I don’t give a fuck about being what everyone around me says I should be. I can age how I want. Botox or grey hair or both or neither. Without needing anyone’s approval for my choices.
It’s like being birthed into your real humanness. Into all of it. Without too much concern for who’s watching.
This is what 46 means to me: acceptance of who I am. Of the temporary nature of this body, this life. Of all the parts I tried to hide or change or perform away.
And from that acceptance comes freedom.
Freedom from the performance. From the approval-seeking. From all the shoulds I spent the first half of my life trying to squeeze myself into.
The freedom to feel alive in this body. Not preserve it or perfect it, but actually live in it while I’m here.
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"Or if it’s all just distraction.
A way of not having to feel what it actually means to watch yourself age. To see time passing in your own body. To know, on some quiet level, that this is finite. That we are, slowly, disintegrating. That one day we will die.
I asked myself if that was true for me. Then I did the thing I usually don’t do.
I stopped and sat with it."
So damn good!!!
Love this. Brutally honest. I'm fifteen years ahead of you. I'm wrestling with some of this and more--will be writing about it one day. Stay tuned!