I’ve been open and fully transparent about my journey with aging. It– like most things in personal growth– has not been linear, but a roller coaster of emotions, thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs. I love that some women feel so empowered and embrace it, and it’s not that I’m fighting it…but why is no one talking about the in-between place? The bridge we walk along as we walk towards that empowerment place?
In this sixteen minute minisode you’ll hear me talk about this; it’s what I brought to my therapist last week. You’ll also hear a conclusion I came to that goes right along with some advice I gave my middle school daughter.
Book recommendations:
You know how I love a good personal development book, right? I’ve compiled a list of book recommendations, as mentioned in past episodes. Check out these amazing book recommendations here. Happy reading!
Right-click to download the .mp3
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Andrea 00:11
Welcome to Make Some Noise Podcast, your guide for strategies, tools and insight to empower yourself. I'm your host, Andrea Owen, global speaker, entrepreneur, life coach since 2007, and author of three books that have been translated into 18 languages and are available in 22 countries. Each week, I'll bring you a guest or a lesson that will help you maximize unshakable confidence, master resilience and make some noise in your life. You ready? Let's go.
Hey, everyone, welcome to another minisode I'm so glad that you're here. I hope that you like these. I really like bringing them to you so I hope that they're entertaining and keep you engaged for the 10 to 20 minutes that that they are. This is the last episode I'm going to be making on this particular computer. So I bought an iMac and I use GarageBand. Any of you know, the software. And I recorded my my solo episodes on GarageBand. And apparently, I bought this iMac you guys and 2017. It wasn't to me. That's not that long ago. That's, you know, it was just like yesterday. And the software kept crashing on me. It was infuriating. Here I am having a conversation with you and then I get that damn pinwheel. That rainbow pinwheel. And it's like, I don't even remember what the error message was. Basically, like, they're like, you're talking too much, lady. You talk too much and we can't keep up with…the error message that I saw. And there were some other problems. So I take it to the Apple Store. And the guy was basically like, yeah, you need more storage on here. And I'm like, I don't under…explain this to me. I spent an obscene amount of money on this computer, just five short years ago, less than that four and a half years ago and I need a new one? Yes, you do. Okay, so it's being delivered today. And I'm very anxiously awaiting the FedEx driver bringing me my brand new iMac with a lot more storage, a lot more storage. So my daughter is going to get this computer.
But I wanted to bring you…I thought, you know, what could I were going to talk about today on the podcast, I know what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about what I brought to therapy because what does Andrea Owen do best? She airs all of her dirty laundry out for everyone to see much to my mother's discomfort. I talk about all the things that are on my mind, including what I what I brought to therapy. Okay, so here's, here's what I brought. I have not lied ever about the struggle that I have been going through as an aging woman. I think especially since the pandemic hit, I feel like it just put it on hyperspeed. My physical health, my face looks like it aged 10 years in just the handful of years that the pandemic has been happening. And I've talked to you guys.Like I am really struggling here. And I sort of look to other experts or celebrities or women that I admire who seem to be handling it so gracefully and feel so empowered by just the whole process of aging. And I am like a cat that's gotten thrown in the bathtub. Like what get me out. I am so uncomfortable here. What is this? I don't know what to do. I don't know if my hands help. And so also, because I've told you guys, my mental health suffered over the pandemic. I also suffered professionally because I wasn't completely on my A game. I wasn't my normal, super ambitious can handle 17 projects at the same time. And we knew that it was going to be a time like that and luckily we were fine. But just it was weird. It was super weird and uncomfortable and something I had never experienced before. So I walk into therapy and I say, how do I grapple with both the fact that I'm watching myself in the mirror age, and I feel like I wouldn't have such a hard time with this if I didn't have a forward facing career. In other words, what I look like matters because I am getting chosen or not chosen to get up on stage and be paid handsomely to give keynote speeches. I have a social media platform where I have to show up and it just it matters. I hate that it matters but it does. It's tricky. How do I How do I do this better? How do I age more gracefully? How do I embrace this, because it's just starting, it's barely so I'm only 47. Just starting. And also, my career pivoted and kind of spun out for just a little bit there. And it's fine, it's going to be fine. But like these two things, that for me, in my experience, and I know, it's for a lot of you, these two things that tend to, you know, we live in America, where the beauty standards are ridiculous and capitalism. We are valued based on not only how we look, but how productive we are, how much money we make, how successful we are.
So these two things took a hit, how do I, how do I handle this better, because it's been really, really hard. At the end of the session, I won't get into much of like, the nitty gritty of it, but it became well, you just have to grieve, you know? It's a grief process. And also, just unpack that. This doesn't define me, like, I understand this, like, this is exactly what I would tell a client. It doesn't define you like what defines you? Other things define you who you are your character, how you treat people, etc, etc, etc. I work in personal development, I know these things. But when it's in your face, it still feels like it hits me over the head with a frying pan sometimes, I think, coupled with that as well, is that because our appearance is something that is unearned, I think for me, I have always tried so hard to prove my worth, through my talent, or through my sense of humor, or through my book smarts. You know, Brené Brown talks about how we hustle for our worthiness. Mine has always come from that direction. I don't want people to look at me and not take me seriously. I want people to take me seriously because I am talented. So I find myself going above and beyond and bending over backwards at times. Not as much anymore. But definitely 1015 years ago, 100% I was killing myself to try to prove to everyone that I was worthy of their time. That I was smart, that I was funny, that I was professional, that I was successful.
And it's a recipe for disaster because it you know, for many of us, myself included, we're constantly moving the goalpost. And I think it just kind of caught up with me the pandemic and just for being forced to slow down, right? Being forced to slow down. And I think one of the things that's helped, one of the realizations that I've come to, is it in terms of appearance and aging, literally, no one cares except me. Nobody cares. Nobody's thinking about it at all. When you're in middle school, and you're like, okay, because I have a ninth grader and a seventh grader. So you know, when you're in middle school, and I don't think this is everyone's experience, but everything is embarrassing. Everything's embarrassing. And as a parent of a middle schooler, you're like, no one is watching you. When you go to bring in the empty trash cans from the street up the driveway. How is that embarrassing? It's not. No one cares. Except you. It's this invisible audience, right. It's the same with aging. And I think that that's not totally true, because we see women celebrities get just crucified online, if any of you follow Madonna, on social media? She has been interesting lately. Really interesting. She's definitely had a lot of plastic surgery done. And she's, I mean, has Madonna ever been, like average or boring? No. And what is she in her 60s now? Like she's not going to start now. And so she does these really interesting things on social media and people are just making fun of her and like, you know what, what's wrong with your face would you do to your face and it's just. Yeah, we see women get crucified either way for either looking old or having too much plus big surgery done even when they're plastic surgery is fantastic. Like I think Jane Fonda looks amazing. I think Kris Jenner looks amazing. But still, they get just raked over the coals.
But for people like me, no one cares. No one cares. And every once in a while, I'll get a mean comment, from some anonymous account, about my age. Rarely, I can count on one hand, how many times it's actually happened. And I know like, at the end of the day, it's an attempt to just insult me because who knows, we could that's another topic for another podcast episode. But all this to say, no one really cares. The people that matter the most. Y'all, my family, my friends, my colleagues, don't give a shit about the lines on my face, or that I have the beginnings of jowls and that I have tech-neck. To his note, they have a term for it. The lines on your neck? No one cares. So that's actually been helpful to realize that, and in terms of career, and, you know, actually my financial advisor and CPA, who are both women, I'm grateful for that have both said…and these people specialize in, you know, people with small businesses and people who are middle age who are in their earning years and they're like, this happens to everyone, like everyone has a couple or a few or several bad years, where they've gone backwards where they have not reached their goal. Like it happens to literally everyone. And I was like really? Because I was making up. It only happened to me. It was just it was just me. Who had it backwards a year or two. And they're like, no, no.
So I say all this because it's really easy to fall into that trap of feeling like you're the only one. Like the you are unique, universal, unique. And you're the only one that's struggling this way. No one else knows how you feel and then you feel shame about that. And then you don't want to talk about it anymore and then it's just like taking up so much headspace and it's such an ego… It’s such an ego trip that we can get on as humans. And yeah, I just want to tell you if like, if you're doing that right now, you're not alone. If you have done it in the past, you're not alone. And if you ever stumbled upon this in the future, I hope you remember this podcast episode of that weird lady who talks about all of our dirty laundry. And so now my iMac is making a liar out of me. And is being just fine. It's like fuck you. Okay? Don't talk bad about me to all of your listeners.
Anyway, that's about it. And I just I want to add too, there is some grief and all of that. And I think, you know, I have come to terms, and this is why I got surrender tattooed on my arm, the more we tried to deny our grief, the more we try to bypass it or speed through it, or pretend it's not there or, or even kind of like shame ourselves for having it, the more it will stick around and just be even further uncomfortable. So I am…I mean, I'm not afraid to say, I think for many of us, there's grief in aging. Our body is not as quick as it used to be. It's not doing the things that we make up in our head we can still do. Do you know what shuffle dancing is? Okay, if you look on social media, sorry, my ADHD jumping all over the place. But speaking of jumping all over the place shuffling is really it's this really cute dance thing. So I see it on TikTok, and I'm like, I could totally do that. And in my head easy. So I tried to do it and it was a disaster. It was a disaster. I can kind of still do the running man. And then I bought a course on it and tried to, it was only like $11, and then I tried to practice and it was so hilarious that I took a video of myself and sent it to two of my friends. I sent it to Amy and Anna Maria and they were like, don't show this to anyone. They were like, watch the video back and I'm like who is that? That is now how it looked in my head. That's certainly not how it looked in my head. Anyway, I have to have a sense of humor about it, which I think is important for me for grief. It can aid in the healing process.
But there is grief in not recognizing yourself in the mirror anymore and when your physical health starts to shift, and you're just not as resilient… My body's just not as resilient as it was even five years ago. And it's frustrating. It's frustrating. So I feel you if you're also going through that, if you're not, and you think I'm weird, that's okay. That's kind of my reputation and that's totally fine. And I think that's about all I have for you today. And I hope you're well over there as this holiday season is quickly approaching us.
I am excited for our future episodes. I'm pretty sure I'm going to do a sexual health theme. I already tell you that I might have already told you that. And we are also excuse me, we're going to do a recovery theme. And then it's going to be the new year already. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for telling your friends about this podcast that I'm coming up on 10 damn, years. Y'all may 2023 It will be 10 years of this podcast. And remember, don't forget, it's our life's journey to make ourselves better humans and our life's responsibility to make the world a better place. Bye for now.
Hey, did you know there's free secret podcast episodes waiting for you that are not part of my regular podcast feed? Yes. AndreaOwen.com/free and you just sign up. You get a link sent to you. It's very secret. It's like a secret club. We don't have a secret handshake. Don't worry about that. But it's these motivating podcast episodes that I made for you. They're under 20 minutes each. There's three of them there for wherever you are in your life. So head on over there and grab them. They range from really supporting you and seeing you where you are and being compassionate all the way to giving you a giant kicking your ass and telling you how amazing and gorgeous and phenomenal you are. So AndreaOwen.com/free and get your hands on that free podcast feed.