There comes a moment in a woman’s life when she realizes the room is no longer looking at her the way it once did. No one really prepares her for how disorienting that can be, because no one ever tells her how much of her identity may have been built inside of that looking. She was young, beautiful, desired, needed. Maybe she was someone’s daughter, someone’s girlfriend, someone’s wife, someone’s mother. Maybe her identity came through her career, her strength, her competence, her sexuality, her independence, or simply the way the world responded when she entered a room. She asked and doors opened. Her body may have created life, or her life may have created businesses, art, relationships, homes, communities, ideas, and places where other people felt held. For years, the world reflected something back to her about who she was.
Then, almost imperceptibly, the mirrors begin to dim. The heads do not turn as often. The body changes. The face carries years it cannot conceal. Children, if she has them, begin needing her differently. Careers evolve. Relationships change. Parents age. People leave. Some of the roles that once gave shape to her days begin loosening around the edges, and there can be a strange emptiness in realizing that many of the things that once answered the question of who she was are no longer speaking quite as loudly.
That experience can feel remarkably close to disappearance, especially when so many of us have absorbed, often without realizing it, the idea that being seen is connected to being valuable. Attention becomes a kind of currency. Beauty becomes currency. Being needed becomes currency. So do motherhood, desirability, usefulness, productivity, competence, achievement and strength. We may never consciously decide to construct an identity around any of them, but attention teaches. Approval teaches. Being chosen teaches. Being depended upon teaches. The world spends decades reflecting these things back to us, and eventually it becomes difficult to know where the reflection ends and the woman begins.
I remember this in a very personal way. I was single for a long time, and during those years I had already founded a nonprofit and was working with people living with spinal cord injuries, traumatic brain injuries, strokes and amputations. I was responsible for complicated work, for people whose lives had changed in an instant, and for helping them navigate bodies and realities that demanded an enormous amount of care and attention. And yet there were still moments when I had the strange feeling that certain people did not quite see me as a fully arrived woman.
One woman in particular has stayed with me. She was older, Filipino, married for decades, a mother and grandmother, and I had spent countless hours helping her daughter rehabilitate after a spinal cord injury. She never seemed especially interested in me personally until I became engaged or married. Then one day she asked when I was going to become a mother and told me that motherhood was a rite of passage for a woman. I understood that she was speaking through the lens of her own life, her culture, her family and everything that had taught her what womanhood was supposed to look like, but the sentence stayed with me. I remember wondering how strange it was that I could build an organization, carry responsibility for people facing enormous physical challenges and create a life on my own, yet there was still another threshold that, in her eyes, somehow made me more fully a woman.
We all have versions of those thresholds. Beauty. Marriage. Motherhood. Career. Success. Being chosen. Being needed. Being admired. We collect these markers and use them to decide whether we have arrived, and other people reinforce them so convincingly that we may never stop to ask who decided where the finish line was in the first place.
Then one day some of those currencies stop spending the way they used to, and that can be brutal. There is grief in watching parts of youth recede. There are days when the mirror tells a story we did not ask it to tell, moments when the body feels unfamiliar, when energy changes, when the people around us respond differently and when we realize that some things we assumed would always belong to us were only ours for a season. I have no interest in pretending those losses are insignificant simply because aging is natural. Something can be completely natural and still break your heart a little.
What I am beginning to wonder is whether we have mistaken one kind of currency for the entire inheritance.
While some things are receding, something else has been quietly accumulating. A woman reaches a certain stage of life carrying things she simply could not have possessed when she was young. She has loved people through impossible seasons. She has been disappointed and survived it. She has made mistakes and lived long enough to understand what they taught her. She has been chosen and overlooked, needed and ignored, praised and misunderstood. She has built things, lost things, repaired things, grieved things, carried people, released people, changed her mind, changed it back, started again and discovered over and over that she was capable of becoming someone she had never previously imagined.
There is a kind of knowing that arrives only through living. She begins to understand the difference between urgency and importance. She recognizes which battles matter and which ones are simply invitations to surrender her peace. She may walk into a room and sense what is happening long before anyone explains it. She understands that love can exist beside disappointment, that forgiveness does not always require reconciliation, that boundaries can be loving and that some endings are actually beginnings we cannot recognize yet. Certainty begins softening into perspective, and proving herself starts becoming considerably less interesting than knowing herself.
I keep returning to the image of a tree. When a tree is young, part of its beauty is immediately visible. It is fresh and green and reaching toward the light, visibly becoming. We can watch that kind of growth because so much of it happens above ground. An older tree carries another kind of presence. Its roots have traveled farther into the earth. Its trunk has thickened. Storms have left marks. Branches may have broken. Its bark carries scars and seasons and evidence that time has passed through it.
And somehow it can hold more. It can shelter more. It can withstand more. The tree has become powerful in ways that could never have been visible when it was young because so much of what gives it strength has been growing where no one could see it.
That image comes very close to something I have experienced in another part of my life. Through my experiences with ayahuasca, I have repeatedly encountered what I can only describe as an enormous feminine presence, and one particular journey still returns to me years later. I found myself climbing onto the back of an enormous, impossibly soft owl, and together we flew through a forest at night. We moved seamlessly between the trees, completely surrounded by darkness and the unknown, yet I felt no fear. A perfectly warm breeze moved across my face and through my hair, and I remember feeling completely free, protected, content and safe. I did not need to know where we were going because somehow being held by her was enough.
I can still feel that experience in my body years later, and that sensation has stayed with me because it gave form to something I struggle to explain intellectually. There is an aspect of the feminine that feels enormous to me, maternal in a way that has nothing to do with whether a woman has ever carried or raised a child. It is the capacity to hold, to nourish, to protect, to heal, to create space for something else to become. There is softness in it without weakness, strength without force, and a kind of safety large enough to hold uncertainty without needing to make the uncertainty disappear.
She is something closer to the tree, rooted and enormous, shelter and storm at once, carrying that same ancient, maternal energy. I think that is part of what we fail to see when we measure women primarily by what is visible. The body changes, the attention shifts, the roles evolve, yet underneath all of it there can be an extraordinary deepening of presence. A woman may become less centered in the gaze of the room while becoming far more capable of holding the room itself.
We spend so much time looking backward toward the woman who could turn the heads in the room that we can miss the woman who walks into the room now carrying the ability to change it. We grieve the reflection of who we were and overlook the presence of who we have become. We notice what is leaving because it is visible, while so much of what has been accumulating is hidden underground: judgment, depth, discernment, capacity, compassion, boundaries, perspective, the ability to sit beside another human being in pain without rushing to fix them, the ability to hold complexity without forcing it into a convenient answer, the ability to recognize what is ours to carry and, maybe even more importantly, what never was.
When the old currencies begin losing their value, we are eventually forced into questions that can be uncomfortable. Who am I when I am not being admired? Who am I when no one needs me in the way they once did? Who am I without the title, the body, the role, the achievement, the beauty, the productivity, the constant usefulness? Which parts of me developed because the world rewarded them, and which parts have been quietly mine underneath all of it?
Those questions do not come with easy answers because there is very little applause attached to depth. Nobody stops traffic because a woman has developed extraordinary discernment. There is no cultural obsession with the face of someone who has learned how to hold grief without collapsing underneath it. Wisdom rarely photographs as well as youth, and yet wisdom may be the thing we spend an entire lifetime earning.
That woman all those years ago told me that motherhood was a rite of passage, and I have thought about the phrase differently as I have gotten older. Maybe there are many rites of passage in a woman’s life, and some of the most important ones have no ceremony at all. No one gathers around us. No title changes. No ring is placed on our finger and no child is put into our arms. We simply begin recognizing that the life we have lived has been growing something inside us all along.
I am starting to believe this may be one of the richest passages of a woman’s life. We have lived long enough to understand that other people’s opinions change, bodies change, children grow, careers end, marriages evolve, people leave, plans fall apart and life has an extraordinary habit of becoming something entirely different from what we once imagined. Somewhere inside all of that living, we begin discovering what deserves our energy, what we are finally willing to release and what remains when so many of the external definitions become quieter.
There comes a point when the mirrors dim, and for a long time I thought that meant something was disappearing. Now I am beginning to wonder if that is the moment when we finally have enough quiet to see what has been growing underneath the reflection all along.