This week is birthday week, both my daughters and I are celebrating the addition of another year to our lives. Year after year, my parents continue to congratulate me for my 39th birthday and when asked how old I am my answer is always: “Between 45 and death.”

What is it with women and aging? For many of us aging and points of transition are scary and uncomfortable. We are programmed to dread aging and “fight” or “conquer” a natural process that has in some way become our enemy. We are praised when we appear more youthful than our age would suggest. We buy into the narratives sold to us by the media and socio-cultural norms: a woman has to stay youthful and thin. If not, she becomes invisible. Men on the other hand are like wine. They become better with age. Think of the “silver fox” imagery: the smart, attractive, distinguished middle-aged man (the crown of ANY woman) while mature women experience the loss of youth frequently as shameful and threatening.

Does my self-worth hang on maintaining youthfulness?

Can I earn my ‘enoughness’ by managing my appearance?

Do I embark on a frantic journey of self-optimisation?

What does it mean if we hyper-value youthfulness as a quality?

This is where the tricky conversation starts. The one I have with myself and other women.

What is guiding my choices around appearance?

How do self-acceptance and appearance relate to each other?

How do I want to feel if I embark on self-modifying processes: more valuable, relevant, attractive, sexy, powerful?

We all feel better when we are beautiful and boost vitality. Nothing wrong with enhancing looks, health, and fitness. The body is an expression of selfhood. It supports the sense or absence of wellbeing.

However, the cut-off point, or red flag, might be when appearance becomes an addiction or an obsession.

Let us dialogue with fear and then shift the conversation from “fear of aging” to an opportunity to explore the freedom that can come with “invisibility” – we can decide on how we want to show up in the world. It can feel safer moving through spaces without being objectified. We can start to experiment with the freedom of self and might find new ways to experience fullness and aliveness of the body and thrive as true self in our relationships and communities.

We are not alone. We can help each other to become examples of joyful embodiment of aging and an inspiration to our daughters and younger women. We are not models but we certainly can be role models and shape the way for our youth, who in all their ‘beauty’, tackle yet another set of issues: as young women they have to navigate a world, where they constantly see reflections of unattainable perfection achieved with hush hush plastic surgery, feature enhancement Instagram filters and a constant newsfeed on everyone’s highlight reels.

As seasoned women we have SO much more and can portray that any age is the perfect age to be RELEVANT and RADIANT– let’s become ridiculously incredible!

Share more. Laugh more. Be creative. Have fun. And… be gentle with yourself and each other.

After all, the alternative to getting older, is dying early…