HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN?
Several years ago, as I was sitting at my desk in a quiet little city in Eastern Washington, I was reflecting on my approaching 59th birthday, and reality suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. Holy Shit! I was almost 60 YEARS OLD!
The long list I’d been adding to through the years of things I wanted to do and places I wanted to see “someday” flashed through my mind.
I Googled the Current Average Life Expectancy for Women in the United States and felt myself sinking into a funk as I estimated how many of my remaining years I’d be active|healthy enough to be able to complete all the items on my list ( please tell me you’ve done this too ).
For the next few months I was obsessed with a sense of urgency that I needed to hurry up and blow through my bucket list while I still had all my faculties.
During those weeks I found myself unusually nostalgic as my mind wistfully meandered through the years that were behind me.
I became frustrated with my body as each day seemed to bring new signs of aging…dark spots on my skin, drooping eyelids, grey hair, eyes that required reading glasses, crepey skin, and lately when I unleashed ‘the girls’, even they hung (yes, H-U-N-G) tired and listless.
HEY…WAIT. I’VE GOT AN IDEA!
Normally a fairly easy going and friendly person (outwardly), I noticed myself becoming more quiet publicly, and my confidence faltering when observing how other people perceived me (or how I believed they perceived me).
When had grocery clerks started calling me “honey”? Why was I being dismissed as unqualified when looking for work? What was with the pause and then polite smiles in response to my input during brainstorming meetings with my younger colleauges?
I felt old. It was an unfamiliar feeling. I wasn’t comfortable with it. Well no kidding.
Sadly, society still perceives 60 as “elderly”, “senior”, “aged”. I had been acting age appropriate by their standards. I believed myself to be old, so I was treated as such. Once I grasped this concept, ya know what I decided? NOPE! Not gonna happen. I’m not ready yet.
And just like that, my mind went into high gear and my thoughts took a whole different direction…(I love it when that happens!)
WHAT IF…
The more I thought about how many of us are out there who are still full of passion and so not ready for a slow descent into old age… women like me who still have a bucket list a mile long and are full of curiosity, a desire for adventure and a hunger to learn and discover, the more fired up I became. I needed to find my people!
What if I sought out other women like me? What if we could create a community that dispelled society’s perception of us as just aging baby boomer women who are past our prime?
What if together, encouraging and cheering each other on, we became a united front of strong independent women who were respected, admired and treated equally in today’s world?
I don’t believe that a silly little thing like aging should slow us down and keep us from accomplishing what we’ve always wanted in our lives. We’re strong. We’re driven. We’re motivated. We’re intelligent. We’re women who survived the 60’s and 70’s for god’s sake!
“I believe that armed with the right skills and knowledge, fueled by confidence, and backed by the support of thousands of other women like ourselves, we can pretty much accomplish anything we set our minds to.”
TAKE A MINUTE…
Think back on your life…all the experiences you’ve had, the struggles, the accomplishments, the hard lessons you’ve learned, the hundreds of skills you’ve acquired.
You did this all yourself because you had no one else to do it for you, and because you were, well….pretty much a badass. Guess what? YOU STILL ARE! But maybe you just forgot for the past several years while you were busy doing life.
Don’t you agree you’ve earned the right to back off from a lifetime of taking care of everything and everybody for a minute to finally put yourself in the forefront and take care of yourself now?
With all of us supporting and encouraging each other, how can we not become even more amazing women in the future than we’ve been in our past. C’mon. LET’S DO THIS!!
