IDC, IDK & IDGAF: Turning 50

Turning 50 is weird because nothing is over, and yet suddenly everything feels more finite.

Behind me is the person I have been: ambitious, visible, fearless. Before me is… Well, something else with a lot of emotions. A weird new terrain made up of freedom, grief, pride, panic, and a low, steady question humming beneath it all: Now what?

I don’t feel old. I feel the same way I did in my 20s and 30s. That’s what makes the number so shocking. 50 sounds like someone else. And yet here I am with a whole life (and multiple careers) behind me, wondering wtf is next.

That is the disorienting thing about midlife: you are old enough to understand time and young enough to still want things badly.

Since my mid-40s, I’ve felt something else too, something women are expected to endure quietly: the soft erasure of becoming invisible. The glances you once got fade. The ambient noticing disappears. Maybe that’s a liberation? It frees you from the exhausting theater of being looked at. But let’s be honest, it can bruise the ego all the same. No one really prepares you for the psychic whiplash of living in a culture that teaches women their visibility is value — and then withdraws it.

Escaping the male gaze brings a freedom that is absolutely one of the benefits of growing older. It’s like exhaling and realizing you’ve been holding your breath for decades. And yet I find myself yearning for a smile, just one. An acknowledgment that I’m still somehow alive.

When it comes to work, the contradiction gets sharper.

Part of me wants to work less now. I want to travel more, create art, spend time with friends, explore the universe, and just enjoy the life I spent years building. I want more beauty, more spaciousness, more joy that isn’t scheduled between deadlines. But another part of me feels the clock in a very new, very urgent way. If there are still things I want to make, ideas I want to chase, new worlds I want to build, then I have to get on it. Like, yesterday!

This, too, is midlife: wanting rest and urgency at the exact same time.

I’ve even found myself longing for the corporate world again — not because I’ve lost my entrepreneurial edge, but because working from home since Covid has hollowed something out in me. I miss the electricity of building big things with other people. I miss momentum. I miss directing a big team. I’ve actually always thrived as a leader in that environment. Also, having a 401k program and stellar dental benefits would be very nice.

But I also know what happens to women at this age. Seniority and experience in a man reads as authority. In a woman, it too often gets flattened into age. He is seasoned, she is old. He is commanding, she is past her prime. It’s amazing how quickly a culture can turn a woman’s hard-won wisdom into a liability. Would all my vision and experience be valued or discounted?

But wait! It’s not all doom and gloom.

There is a particular clarity that comes with getting older, especially for Gen X women, who were practically raised on irony, independence, and disappointment. My tolerance for bullshit is gone. I know what I will no longer tolerate. I know that much of life is theater, and I’m less interested in auditioning for roles I never wanted in the first place. There is real relief in that.

When I look back at my life, I feel something close to awe. I’ve had several lives already. I was almost a pop star in my 20s. I was the director of multiple TV stations online. A deputy editor at a style magazine. An interior design personality on HGTV. Then I moved back to LA and into entrepreneurship and built things that mattered: Unique Markets, LA Food Fest, CAMP, The Unique Space.

I have created. I have risked. I have made things from thin air and turned them into real experiences, serious businesses, and amazing communities. And that matters to me.

Maybe that’s what makes this in-between period sooo emotionally weird. I’m not mourning a life I didn’t live. I’m standing inside a life I did live, and still feeling restless. Still feeling unfinished, wanting more, and a little sad about the things I didn’t do (like not having kids when I always wanted to be a mom, or being a published author).

I’d love to know: if you’re in midlife, approaching it or have been through it, does any of this resonate? Have you felt more free, more invisible, more restless, more yourself? What has this chapter of life brought up for you that no one warned you about?

Maybe midlife is not the beginning of irrelevance, but the end of pretending. I don’t have this figured out. I am in it. That’s the truth. I feel deeply accomplished and strangely like I haven’t done enough. More invisible and more myself. Less willing to perform, but a real drive to not shrink.

So far, fifty is confusing and a little all over the place.

Which feels very familiar… Maybe 50 really is the new 30?

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