Women in their 50s are quietly having the best time
For me, 50 has been less about getting older and more about getting free.
A while ago I posted something on Instagram that apparently hit a nerve:
It was just a thought. One of those things that feels so obviously true when you write it that you don’t think much more about it. But people did. They shared it, saved it, sent it to friends. And it made me wonder why.
Why does this decade still get talked about almost entirely in terms of what we’re losing?
Our collagen. Our hormones. Our waistlines. Our children leaving home. Our relevance, apparently. There’s an entire industry devoted to pointing out everything that is changing and then offering to sell it back to us.
What nobody prepared me for was the freedom.
Fifty, for me, has felt like putting things down.
Not the good things. Not ambition, curiosity, love, excitement, plans. If anything, I have more of those. I mean all the other things I apparently spent decades carrying without realizing quite how heavy they were.
The internal voice with its completely unreasonable expectations. The one keeping score, telling me what I should have done by now, how I should look, what I ought to be better at. I’m not going to pretend she has disappeared entirely, but she has become considerably less persuasive.
Then there is the fear of not being liked.
God, the amount of energy we can spend on that. Did I say the wrong thing? Is she upset with me? Should I have gone? Should I have stayed longer? Should I explain why I can’t? Should I soften the answer so nobody thinks I’m difficult?
And then somewhere around 50, a miraculous little word starts becoming available to you.
No. Full stop.
No twelve-line explanation. No fictional appointment. No “I’d absolutely love to, but unfortunately…” followed by an elaborate account of circumstances outside your control. Sometimes you simply don’t want to. And that turns out to be a perfectly legitimate reason.
I think some of this freedom comes from having lived long enough to finally trust your own judgement. You’ve made mistakes. Proper ones. You’ve chosen the wrong people, taken the wrong job, said yes when you should have said no and occasionally blown something completely out of proportion.
And you survived all of it.
You begin to understand that most things are fixable, some things really aren’t, and worrying yourself sick rarely changes which category they fall into.
I raised my son.
Those years required sacrifice, as raising children does. There were things I put aside, decisions I made because they were right for him rather than easiest for me, and years when being the best mother I could be mattered more than almost anything else.
I don’t resent a second of it. It was one of the great gifts of my life, and I am enormously proud of the job I did.
But that job has changed now. He has his own life to build.
And suddenly I find myself standing at the edge of a chapter I haven’t written yet, asking a question that feels both unfamiliar and incredibly exciting:
What do I want now?
Not what does my child need from me. Not what should I do. Not what would everyone else consider sensible. What do I want the next twenty or thirty years to look like?
I genuinely don’t know yet.
And I love that. For the first time in a long time, the unknown doesn’t feel frightening. It feels like possibility.
Perhaps the biggest shift, though, has been the one happening in my head when I look in the mirror.
Somewhere along the way, I started seeing ageing as a gift. Even writing that would have sounded suspiciously like something printed on a motivational tea towel to my younger self. But I mean it.
Not chasing after my 20-year-old skin has been incredibly freeing. I had lovely skin at 20. I also had a 20-year-old brain, very little money, considerably worse judgement and no idea who I was.
I don’t want to be her again. So why would I make her face the price of admission for feeling beautiful now?
My skin has changed. Of course it has. So has everything else. There are things that creak that absolutely did not creak before.
The goal is no longer to rewind it. I want to look good now. I want my skin to feel comfortable and healthy. I want to take care of myself without spending every morning conducting a small war against the evidence that I’ve lived.
That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring how I look. Quite the opposite. I think I care in a much more enjoyable way now.
I know what I like. I know what clothes feel like me. I know which people I want around my table. I know that expensive doesn’t necessarily mean beautiful, that more rarely means better, and that there are very few things improved by making myself miserable.
My taste has become clearer. My friendships have become richer. My tolerance for nonsense has become dramatically lower.
Honestly, it’s a pretty good trade.
And yes, there are hard things about this age too. Bodies change. Parents get older. Relationships shift. There is loss. There are reminders that time is not infinite.
You stop behaving as though it is.
You use the good glasses. You take the trip. You tell people you love them. You leave things that make you unhappy. You start the ridiculous business. You order dessert. You stop saving your life for some imaginary version of yourself who will eventually deserve it.
I thought getting older would feel like things being taken away.
Instead, so far, it has felt much more like being handed things back.