I don’t want to disappear. I want to choose where I am seen.

This past summer, I was at my friend Catherine Zack’s 40th birthday celebration, where she passed around a notebook. Her instructions were simple:

If you were under forty, you were invited to write your deepest question.
If you were over forty, you were invited to write your hard-earned wisdom.

I should mention that, at that gathering, I was two days away from turning forty myself. So when the notebook came to me, I didn’t write something poetic or impressive. I wrote the thing that had been quietly haunting me:

Two days out from 40. I’m curious about this fear I have of becoming irrelevant, disappearing. Because I can see in our culture how as a woman ages, she becomes less visible and less valued. But I also have seen women in midlife and elderly years refuse to become invisible, refuse to go quietly. And I’m curious about what it takes to choose that and continue to choose that over and over. How do we as women refuse to disappear?

It was honest, it was vulnerable, an it was also deeply conditioned.

Because I live inside this culture, I’ve absorbed its math. I’ve seen how visibility peaks in youth and then subtly drains. I’ve watched how aging women are made smaller in the cultural imagination - less central, less desired, less valued.

So I wrote from that place, closed the book, and sang the birthday song to my beloved friend.

Venus with a Mirror, 1555 by Titian

Later on at the party (unbeknownst to me), someone else picked up the notebook, saw my words, and responded directly underneath them.

Catherine read that response aloud to me months later when I was a guest on her podcast, The 40 Portal. I hadn’t heard it before.

She wrote:

I think in a major way we disappear from the aggressive societal gaze that has been so often thrust on us. We don't disappear from the spaces we seek out or the community we knit. I feel very seen by the people I want to be seen by. Am I less visible to random men on the subway or cat-callers on the street or condescending men in Home Depot who ask if I know how to use tools? Yes. I am not visible to them anymore. Thank God. The headspace this invisibility gives me—it kicks ass.

When Catherine read that back to me during our podcast interview, I felt my whole body exhale.

Because what if the portal of midlife isn’t about fighting to remain visible everywhere What if it’s about reclaiming where our visibility lives?

There is a specific exhaustion that comes from being seen by people you do not wish to be seen by. From being assessed, appraised, ranked, desired, dismissed. From the constant low-grade hum of being “on.” I didn’t realize how much psychic real estate that took up until I imagined its absence.

What would I do with that reclaimed headspace? What could grow there?

Midlife, I’m discovering, is less about becoming someone new and more about deciding who gets access to you now. Who gets your attention. Who gets your softness. Who gets your creative lifeforce. Who gets your labor. Who gets to witness your becoming.

And the rest? Well that can just fall away.

That evening at Catherine’s 40th birthday gathering, I could feel the difference between cultural invisibility and chosen visibility. These women in their forties, fifties, sixties were not fading. They were not shrinking. They were not waiting for permission. They were deeply seen by one another.

That distinction keeps rearranging me.

I don’t actually want to be visible to everyone. I don’t want to be optimized for the algorithm. I don’t want to contort myself to avoid being misunderstood. What I want is to be deeply seen in the rooms I choose. And that is a very different kind of power.

Catherine and I talked about all of this - the fear of irrelevance, the relief of disappearing from the wrong gaze, the erotic awakenings no one warned us about, the ritual of being asked again and again, “Are you sure?”

But the moment that keeps echoing is that notebook page. My fear written in ink. Another woman’s arrow pointing back up at it. A communal reframing.

That’s what the portal actually is. Not a solo transformation. A collective one.

If you’re somewhere in that hallway - if you’ve felt that flicker of fear about fading, or that unexpected relief at no longer being available to everyone - I think you’ll find yourself in this conversation.

You’re not disappearing, you’re deciding.

I invite you to listen to the full episode on everything from fawning no longer, erotic awakenings in midlife, re-villaging & refusing to disappear after 40 on our co-released podcast right here.