Did I miss the one perfect day when I was exactly the right age?
It is the sort of question that arrives uninvited.
Was there one brief, glorious day when I was old enough to seem credible but young enough to seem exciting? Experienced, but not entrenched. Polished, but not fixed. Wise, but in a way that still suggested collagen. The exact professional sweet spot. The perfect vintage.
And, more to the point, did I spend that day answering emails and wondering if I looked tired?
Almost certainly.
· · ·
There was a long stretch of my working life when all I wanted was to be older in the room.
I remember walking through Gastown with a work friend on our coffee break, heading out to buy enormous cinnamon buns, and having one of those conversations that now seems both faintly ridiculous and completely sincere. We were discussing, with absolute outrage, that our boss had referred to me as twenty-three.
Twenty-three! As though I were a child prodigy who had wandered in off the street wearing lip gloss and carrying a notepad. I was horrified. Offended. And, twenty-five!
Older meant authority. Older meant gravitas. Older meant people might stop speaking to me as though I were a cheerful intern who had wandered in holding the good pens. It meant no longer being mistaken for the person who would "make it look nice" when what was actually required was thought, judgment, and deeply strategic thinking.
Oh, I longed for people to stop and listen when I spoke.
Older, I assumed, was where the power lived.
· · ·
I thought there would be some elegant crossing into it. A point at which age and authority would finally align and everyone would see me exactly as I wished to be seen: intelligent, capable, composed, and not to be trifled with. A sort of professional debutante ball.
Instead, it happened the way most important things happen. Quietly. Gradually. With very little fanfare and far too many administrative portals.
One day I was simply no longer the youngest person in the room trying to sound older. I was the one with the context. The institutional memory. The point of view. The one expected to know where the bodies were buried, metaphorically speaking, and occasionally where the actual file was saved.
And then, the next time I looked up, I was not older in the room.
I was the oldest in the room.
Or near enough for it to make no meaningful difference.
· · ·
This, I should say, lands differently in marketing and communications than it might in some other professions. There are industries that greet age with respect. This is not always one of them. Ours is a world perpetually in love with what is new, what is next, what is trending, what has just arrived, wearing white sneakers and talking very confidently about a new platform.
In marketing, being older can start to feel less like a mark of authority and more like a quiet liability. Not openly, of course. No one says, Danielle, you seem a touch seasoned for this brainstorm. They simply develop an odd enthusiasm for words like fresh, emerging, digital native, and high energy, as though the rest of us are faxing campaign briefs from a candlelit room.
And that is when the question begins to sting.
When was that one perfect day?
That one narrow, shimmering moment when I was old enough to be trusted and young enough to be considered full of possibility? When I had enough experience to sound convincing but not so much that I risked being mentally filed under established, legacy, or that dreadful corporate compliment, pillar.
Did that day happen? And, more humiliatingly, did I miss it?
· · ·
I think what makes this question sting is not just vanity, though vanity always likes a seat at the table and has never been shy about ordering lunch. It is something sadder and more human than that.
It is the suspicion that there may have been versions of us that were more powerful, more attractive, more compelling, more in command than we knew. At. The. Time.
That we may have been standing in some golden patch of life, complaining.
Which, frankly, sounds exactly like me.
· · ·
This does seem to be one of adulthood's less charming arrangements. You almost never know when you are in the sweet spot.
At twenty-five, you are desperate to be older. At forty, you look back on thirty-five with the kind of tenderness usually reserved for old photographs and shuttered restaurants. At fifty, you look back on forty and think: my God, she had competence, energy, smooth skin on her neck, and somehow still thought she was late to her own life.
What an idiot. What a darling.
There is something almost funny about the way we spend our lives mishandling ourselves in real time, only to look back later and see that we were, in fact, doing rather well.
· · ·
But I do not think the answer is to spend the second half of life in mourning for the first.
That would be dull. Also bad for posture.
Because the older I get, the less I believe there was only one perfect day. Or one perfect age. That is the sort of scarcity thinking best left to beauty marketing and venture capitalists.
I think there are many right ages.
There is an age for hunger. An age for proving yourself. An age for saying yes too often and learning why not to. An age for real discernment. An age for finally understanding that not every room deserves your best self. An age for authority that does not need to announce itself in a larger font.
And there is, if one is lucky, an age for becoming more fully oneself. Less eager to please. Less dazzled by nonsense. Better dressed, ideally. More able to tell the difference between what is actually important and what is merely loud.
· · ·
What I feel now, more than regret, is a kind of rueful affection for the selves I have already been. The younger woman who wanted so badly to arrive. The slightly older woman who had, in many ways, already arrived but was too distracted by her own face in bad lighting to notice. All of them working very hard. All of them assuming the real authority, the real beauty, the real ease was still coming later.
Perhaps this is the great midlife correction. Not the sudden discovery that you were once perfect and failed to appreciate it, though that is certainly part of the fun. But the dawning awareness that every age comes with its own authority, its own glamour, its own leverage.
Not glamour in the usual sense. Nothing so exhausting. I mean the glamour of substance. Of discernment. Of having survived enough to know better and remained interested enough not to become unbearable.
· · ·
The people who most move me now are not the youngest in the room, nor the oldest.
They are the ones who are most alive in it.
Still curious. Still engaged. Still willing to be surprised. Still capable of changing their minds without acting as though civilization itself has collapsed.
That, to me, is the real distinction.
Not whether you are the right age. But whether you are still in conversation with life.
And so yes, perhaps I did miss the one perfect day when I was exactly the right age.
But I no longer think there was only one.
~ Danielle
The Midlife Syllabus
Lesson #20
Time makes you bolder, as Stevie Nicks wisely observed.
Beauty, Grace & Daily Artistry
A small, imperfect pleasure:
Those hellebores I planted made it through the winter.
What I'm Reading, Watching, or Listening to
Watching
Project Hail Mary.
Sam called me at midnight after going to see it because suddenly Halifax felt very far from home. So I went on Thursday evening.
The entire movie hinges on whether or not you find Ryan Gosling charming. Thankfully I do.
This Week on the Blog
A piece on the trouble when clarity feels like a destination.