Hot Menopause Summer! 😎

Stand In Your Shower 💪🏽

Welcome to the companion piece to the light hearted and brutally honest final episode of Season 1 of Actual People featuring 3 amazing guests

Christine Morrison

, Lydia Langford, and Allison O’Shea. All with different perspecs on the same thing: We are the ones we always wanted. But we could do without the side effects…

I've been wondering for a while now, how do I want to get older? What do I want that to look like?

What is my aging style, if you will?

Like the many vibes we go through in adolescence and our 20s like cheerleader! goth! vamp! punk rocker! minimalist!, we can step into a creative embodiment of a new phase of our life for ourselves with intention. We can wrest control of this speeding bullet and make it our own while accepting that we ain’t going back.

In my life now, I’ve enjoyed the freedom of leaving behind the panic of seeking a mate to procreate. I got the kids. I got the divorce. I’m loving motherhood. I’m loving no more drama.

All aspirations of pleasing a big corporate boss are behind me, if that was ever a thing. I never felt comfortable having a boss, always fearful my all was not enough and job security was a pink slip away. I’ve been burned too many times to count by a “strong work ethic” and “great work” not saving my ass from misogyny or a drop in funding. I am possibly a weirdo in that I rather have no job security than live with the fear that someone I barely know, can, at any moment, take away my job no matter how I’ve performed. That’s not to say some people haven’t lucked out on amazing jobs with long tenures. I wouldn’t mind being Andréa Mallard, CEO of Pinterest, for example, from what I can see of her work, but there are few other roles I can imagine wanting at that level within that top down structure. I admire people who thrive in that environment, kudos to them, but I know I need to be my own boss 99% of the time.

The thing is knowing yourself, accepting yourself, and getting out of your own damn way. For me, that’s one of the many perks of being ‘not young’.

With all this freedom of mind, I’ve lost freedom of body. One twin birth, double mastectomy and complete hysterectomy later, I’ve watched my body morph into something I don't recognize with an undercurrent of terror. I never had an eating disorder or any operably harmful dysfunction regarding my body but I’ve had to live with scoliosis and up until my late 30s, being “just a little bit skinny” which made me relate to T-boz singing about Unpretty all those years ago. And I have lived with negative self-talk as my unfaithful companion all these years even when my body was arguably pretty close to the ideal.

I didn't learn negative body talk from my mother. She loved her body at every age and would often say so. In fact, what is more revealing was my own reaction to her self acceptance - How dare she love her aging body? - as a symptom of my larger environment and the trauma it wrought. 80s 90s Miami ‘perfect’ tan bodies in Brazilian bikinis at the Delano, impossible standards in magazines, my own father’s parade of models and beautiful women going in and out of his life as I vied for his attention.

My mother has always looked good. But ‘for her age’ always lingered in the air…

That stuff sticks.

Norms are created by humans. And mostly male pale humans who have masterfully designed it so that they themselves are removed from such criticism.

Ah men.

With their tufts of ear hair and male pattern balding, their beer paunches and loose limp figures lovingly referred to as “dad bods”…

A dad bod is a sign of rootedness and self-acceptance. Family. All things we love, but are reluctant to accept in ourselves or other women.

At the same time as we grow older, through the hot flashes and caregiving, the myriad of responsibilities and conflicting priorities, myself and the many women I’ve spoken to all agree on one thing: we are going through life with much more self-acceptance and self-love than ever before and we have a lot less time for the bullshit.

It’s a bit of a paradox. Having a second puberty with its awkward physical and emotional changes and also having more confidence and love of self at the same time. While we step fully into our power and shed all traces of other peoples ideas of us, we are dealing with that pesky old thing called mortality along with itchy skin and belly fat.

How are we going to live this next chapter wasting zero time on the bullshit and loving ourselves physically on par with the way we are loving ourselves mentally?

What will be my style of aging, I ask myself, that is not one of decline. How do I slip into a new older-me identity of beauty? I want to love myself for the physical reality of where I am now and love it in all its glory so what does that look like?

I think I saw a clue to the answer this past week at the beach, and it ties back to a couple of months ago. I noticed that I was more reluctant to wear eye makeup, which has always been a staple of my makeup routine. I always wear eyeliner and now I feel like I might look better without it. I feel like I look healthier and less tired when I only have a moisturizer and some kind of shimmer or blush maybe over a light foundation. All the women on reality TV with their 10,000 layers of goop on their skin. That's not for me so I've decided that I'm not going to pick that. The revelation came to me when I took a series of pictures with my daughters and saw the pictures afterwards. Often when I look at these vacation shots, I think, oh God, I'm kind of falling apart, all that yoga, all those classes, what are they amounting to?

But when I looked through those pictures this time, this is what I saw. I saw the eyes of my father that I've passed down to one daughter and the mouth of my mother that I passed down to another daughter. I saw a deeper me. Here’s the thing: The best thing to do in defining your aging self is to go further into your essence. Go all the way. So what, I’m no longer a hundred pounds with tiny arms I'm self-conscious about. I'm now 145 pounds with a tummy I'm self-conscious about. Same dif, right? Since I'm not trading on my looks and really am not out here trying to impress random men hoping they they like me, I don’t have to compromise on myself or for them.

I have no idea what is on the horizon for me, but my main desire is to be alive, be healthy, spend time with my children and be self-actualized. I mean, that's why I removed both breasts and my entire reproductive system when I was 45 after learning I was BRCA positive. I want a vibrant future for as long as I can have one.

In my “hot menopause summer”, the catchy title I thought of for the last episode of my podcast, I went to the beach, the mountains, both in my own state of North Carolina. Next month, my kids go to their dad and I'm off on a 17 hour flight to New Zealand to see a friend of mine there. I've never been to New Zealand and the two of us, both 51, will go off on an amazing adventure together, sunkissed with a few more lines and freckles on our faces, enjoying the skin we’re in on this beautiful earth.

Here is the episode (the YouTube version below) that gets into perimenopause and menopause (what exactly is it!?), how to intentionally plan your aging to stay out of assisted living in later years, and what a hot menopause summer looks like. The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok or Instagram @actualpeoplepodcast where I’ll be posting clips and teasers.

More hilarious images that A.I. gave me for this: