The Biggest Lie Women Tell Themselves at Midlife

I think the biggest lie women tell themselves at midlife is:

“It’s too late.”

It’s too late to change careers. It’s too late to start a business. It’s too late to get in the best shape of your life. It’s too late to leave something that isn’t working. It’s too late to become someone completely different.

And I think that lie is incredibly dangerous because eventually, if you say it to yourself enough, you start living like it’s true.

I’m in my mid-forties, and if there is one thing I know now that I didn’t know at 25, it’s that your life can change incredibly fast.

And sometimes it changes because you choose it.

And sometimes it changes because life chooses it for you.

I have had seasons of my life where I thought I knew exactly what the next five or ten years were going to look like. I had the career. I had the title. I was successful. I had built something I was incredibly invested in. I poured years of my life into it.

And then things changed.

And when something you’ve attached so much of your identity to changes, you have a choice.

You can spend the next five years trying to get your old life back.

Or you can ask yourself a much more interesting question:

What if I build something better?

That’s where I am right now.

I’m building businesses. I’m launching brands. I’m creating a podcast. I’m building this community. I’m talking publicly in ways I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to do ten years ago.

And strangely enough, I’m doing all of this at an age when women are constantly being told that we’re supposed to start becoming… less.

Less visible. Less ambitious. Less sexy. Less opinionated. Less willing to take risks.

We’re supposed to be grateful for what we’ve already accomplished and quietly maintain it.

And I just don’t believe that.

I actually think one of the greatest advantages of being a woman in your forties is that you finally have enough life behind you to understand yourself.

At 25, I had ambition.

At 45, I have ambition and context.

I know what I’m good at. I know what I’m terrible at. I know which rooms I don’t need to be in anymore. I know that not everybody is going to like me — and more importantly, I’m beginning to understand that they don’t have to.

That’s freedom.

And yes, aging is real.

Our bodies change. Our hormones change. Our metabolism changes. Our priorities change. Relationships change. Careers change.

I’m not interested in pretending that getting older doesn’t happen.

I’m interested in asking:

What are we going to do with it?

Because there’s another lie buried inside “it’s too late.”

And that lie is that everybody else has already figured it out.

They haven’t.

Somebody is 46 and starting over. Somebody is 52 and walking into a gym for the first time. Somebody is 41 and realizing the career she spent twenty years building isn’t what she wants anymore. Somebody is 55 and falling in love. Somebody is starting a company. Somebody is going back to school. Somebody is finally learning how to take care of herself after spending decades taking care of everybody else.

And somebody is sitting in her car right now thinking:

I know there’s more for me than this.

If that’s you, I want you to know something.

You don’t need to blow your entire life up tomorrow.

Reinvention doesn’t always start with some massive dramatic decision.

Sometimes it starts incredibly small.

You start lifting weights. You change what you eat. You make the appointment. You apply for the job. You start the Instagram account. You take the class. You stop answering the person who drains you. You finally say the thing you’ve been afraid to say. You walk into a room where you don’t know anybody. You decide that being uncomfortable isn’t going to kill you.

And then you do another uncomfortable thing.

And another.

And eventually you look around and realize… your life changed.

That’s how most of my biggest changes have happened.

Not because I woke up fearless one morning.

I don’t think fearlessness is even the goal.

I’ve been scared plenty of times.

I moved across the country when I was 18 with money I’d saved and started building a life for myself. I didn’t have some magical certainty that everything was going to work out.

I just believed there was something on the other side worth finding.

And I’m finding myself in that place again now.

Except this time, I’m not 18.

I have decades of experience behind me.

I’ve succeeded. I’ve failed. I’ve trusted the wrong people. I’ve made great decisions and I’ve made decisions I would never make again. I’ve had things work out exactly the way I hoped. And I’ve had things fall apart.

But here’s what’s interesting:

I’m still here.

And so are you.

Maybe that’s the real gift of midlife.

You finally have proof that you can survive the plot twists.

So maybe instead of looking at 45 or 50 or 55 and thinking about how much time has passed, we start thinking about how much life is still in front of us.

Think about it.

What if the next ten years become the decade that changes everything?

What if you become stronger at 48 than you were at 28? What if you make more money at 52 than you did at 32? What if you finally build the business? Take the trip? Wear the dress? Leave the situation? Write the book? Fall in love with your life again?

What if the woman you’re becoming is actually far more interesting than the woman you’ve been trying so hard to hold onto?

That’s the conversation I want us to start having about midlife.

Not: “How do I stay young?”

But: “How good can this next chapter actually get?”

Because you’re not behind.

You haven’t missed your window.

And you’re certainly not too old.

You might actually be standing at the beginning of the most interesting part.

And maybe the biggest lie we’ve been telling ourselves isn’t just that it’s too late.

Maybe it’s believing that our best years were supposed to happen already.

I don’t believe mine have.

And I don’t think yours have either.