“Say it again!” my therapist demanded the first time I admitted this out loud. Still, I clung to the belief that being side-eyed was better than not being eyed at all. Did I need to lose weight? Smile more? Lean in? Opt out? Have a family, a career, an aesthetically pleasing set of Kegel weights? Maybe. Oh, sure, I’d heard about some shadowy corners of the world where women over 40 supposedly “lived” and did “what they wanted,” but who was gullible enough to believe that? Not me, a person whose regular-degular life choices were so overscrutinized by strangers, politicians, and children that I wasn’t sure I even existed if I wasn’t being judged. Some helpful, reassuring antiaging ads from ages past Getty Images Just the act of turning 40, it seemed, would place me firmly on the wrong side of a series of binaries: young vs. What would happen to me should I not achieve my full potential before the decade was up? I tried not to think about it too much, which was fine because men had already done the thinking for me. As such, I had a lot to get done, including all the things I’d been deemed too young and unserious to do earlier in my life, like speak in uninterrupted sentences, get credited and compensated for my work, and relentlessly pursue dreams that did not require athleticism, decent health insurance, or disappointing anyone. I was, after all, just starting the decade I’d been assured (by network sitcoms, beer ads, and men) would be my last on earth as a semirelevant human woman. The one thing I knew about aging in my early 30s is that I for sure did not want to do any more of it. Welcome toĤ0 Is the New 40, a series of stories about-and for-a generation rethinking what it means to get older. Over the next few years, the oldest millennials will hit a major milestone.
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