I started noticing things happening to me and my friends that I couldn’t quite put into words.
So I started talking. Out loud. To anyone who’d admit the same thing was happening to her. This is the longer version of that conversation.
— Donna
At a certain point in a woman’s life, it can feel as though the world begins to see her differently — or sometimes stops seeing her altogether. I noticed it first in small, almost embarrassing ways. The waiter who looked past me to take my husband’s order. The young colleague who explained my own idea back to me. The party where I’d once been the loudest voice in the room, and suddenly nobody turned when I walked in.
I started noticing it happening to my friends, too. We’d be at lunch — accomplished, funny, sharp women — and someone would lean in and whisper something she’d never said out loud. That she felt invisible. That she couldn’t remember the last time someone asked her what she wanted. That she’d spent so long being needed, she’d forgotten how to be wanted — by herself.
And here is the part I can’t get over. The strange, almost cruel contradiction of it:
“At the very moment society may begin paying less attention to us, many of us finally understand ourselves better than we ever have.”
Think about that. We are clearer, braver, more ourselves than we were at twenty-five or thirty-five — and somehow, that’s exactly when the room gets quiet. We finally know what we think, and nobody’s asking.
So I started asking. Quietly at first, then less quietly. I’d corner friends over wine. I’d bring it up at dinners where you weren’t supposed to bring it up. And every single time, the same thing happened: a woman would exhale, like she’d been holding her breath for a decade, and say, “I thought it was just me.”
It was never just her. And it was never just me.
Who am I now?
What do I want the rest of my life to look like?
Why don’t we talk more openly about aging, beauty, marriage, friendship, sex, loneliness, money, ambition, changing bodies, grown children and starting over?
“We have focused on others for so long that we have forgotten who we are and what makes us happy.”
Now, before you think this is going to be one of those hand-on-heart, scented-candle monologues about the “gift” of getting older — let me be honest. I have no complaints about aging. Except for the aches and pains.
The knees. The hip that announces the weather before the forecast does. The way I now make a small involuntary noise every time I sit down or stand up, like a woman in a period drama. My friend Claire calls it the “oof.” We all do it. Nobody warned us about the oof.
But the aches are a trade I’d make again in a second. Because here’s what I got in return: I stopped performing. I stopped apologizing for my opinions. I stopped shrinking to fit rooms that were never built for me. I started liking the woman in the mirror — not because she looks the way she did at thirty, but because she finally tells the truth.
It’s about what happens next.
That’s the whole thing, really. Not what we lost. Not what’s behind us. What happens next. The next conversation. The next reinvention. The next version of ourselves that we actually get to choose.
I wanted conversations that were funny. Uncomfortable. Emotional. Unexpected. The kind where you laugh, then cry, then say something you’ve never admitted to another living person.
I wanted to bring together fascinating women, experts, and everyday women from around the world — and let them say the quiet part out loud. No scripts. No life-coach energy. No pretending we have it figured out. Just the real, unpolished, sometimes messy truth of what it’s like to be a woman in The Last Quarter.
When I picture this podcast, I don’t picture a studio. I picture a woman alone in her car in a parking lot, engine off, not ready to go inside yet. I picture a woman walking her dog at dawn, earbuds in, the neighborhood still asleep. I picture a woman getting ready in the morning, mascara in one hand, pausing because someone just said the thing she’s been thinking for two years.
I picture a woman lying awake at 2 a.m., the house finally quiet, hearing something that makes her sit up in the dark and whisper:
“Oh my God.
I thought I was the only one.”
— The woman I’m making this for
“Because maybe becoming invisible to the world gives us an opportunity to finally become visible to ourselves.”
Donna