There are hidden blessings to middle age, and I do not think we discuss them enough.
This may be because we are too busy discussing the other parts. The neck. The knees. The way one glass of wine can now affect three nights of sleep. The sudden requirement to stretch before doing things that do not appear to require stretching. Sleeping. Gardening. Reaching for something in the back seat of the car.
But there are blessings.
One of them is this: people are paying far less attention to you than you once believed.
I discovered this recently in a hot yoga class.
I had arrived, carrying my mat, my water bottle, my towel, and that particular form of spiritual smugness that comes from having made it to an exercise class before the day has run away.
The room was full. Not politely full. Full full. Mats close together. Bodies everywhere. A great deal of Lycra. A great deal of damp ambition. Everyone arranging themselves into the pre-class tableau of people who have come to transcend the self but would also very much like the spot near the fan.
I found my place.
I rolled out my mat.
Then I shook out my hot yoga towel.
And there, landing with some ceremony in the exact centre of the mat, was a pair of my underwear.
Not near the edge. Not discreetly folded into a corner. The centre.
Firmly attached to the towel by static from the dryer, as if it had been waiting for its entrance.
There are moments in a life when time behaves badly.
This was one of them.
I looked down.
Underwear.
My underwear.
I looked around the crowded room, expecting something. A glance. A flicker. A small electrical current of recognition. Surely someone had seen. Surely one of these beautiful, hydrated, ponytailed people had noticed that a middle-aged woman had just unfurled her laundry onto her yoga mat.
Nothing.
No one looked.
No one cared.
One woman was adjusting her sports bra. A man in the corner was doing something with his hamstrings that felt, frankly, private. Someone else was scrolling with the grim expression of a person receiving either a work email or a text from a teenager. The instructor was arranging blocks. The room continued.
Reader, they could barely have been paying less attention to me.
So I did the only thing one can do in such a moment.
I leaned over, picked up the underwear, walked calmly back to the locker room, put them in my bag, returned to my mat, and began class.
Namaste.
I have thought about this more than the incident deserves, which is how I know it belongs in the newsletter.
Because twenty-five years ago, this would have ruined me.
Not permanently. I am not suggesting a single pair of static-cling underwear would have altered the course of my life. But I would have felt watched. Exposed. Singled out by the universe as a woman who could not manage laundry, dignity, or moisture-wicking accessories.
I would have scanned the room for witnesses. I would have built a case. Who saw? Who whispered? Who would remember? Had I become, in some small but enduring way, the underwear woman of hot yoga?
At twenty-five, we live under imaginary theatre lights.
Every entrance feels observed. Every mistake feels registered. Every outfit feels like a statement, even when the statement is clearly “I panicked and bought this top because I had somewhere to be.” We are certain strangers are forming views. We believe the room has noticed us. We believe the world is keeping minutes.
It is not.
This is both disappointing and liberating.
When you are young, invisibility can feel like failure. You want to be seen. Noticed. Chosen. Desired. Admired. You want the room to know you have arrived.
There is power in visibility then. Or at least the promise of it.
But by middle age, visibility becomes more complicated.
You have been seen in enough ways by then. Some flattering. Some useful. Some professionally necessary. Some deeply irritating. You have been seen as competent, difficult, responsible, tired, attractive, invisible, too much, not enough, older than expected, younger than expected, the mother, the colleague, the woman who can handle it, the woman who probably has a pen.
Being seen is not always the prize.
Sometimes the prize is moving through the world without every small human error becoming a referendum.
Sometimes the prize is picking up your underwear in a crowded yoga room and realizing that everyone else is too busy managing the private emotional storm of their own body to care about yours.
This is one of the great corrections of middle age.
You begin to understand that most people are not watching you because they are watching themselves.
They are thinking about their stomach. Their parking. Their phone. Their marriage. Their hair. Their knee. Their child. Their inbox. Their blood work. Their mother. Their face in the mirror that morning. Their own towel. Their own underwear, metaphorical or otherwise.
This should have occurred to me earlier.
I have spent an unreasonable portion of my life assuming that my small embarrassments were being archived somewhere. As if strangers were filing reports. As if there were a committee.
There is no committee.
No one has the time.
They are all trying to remember a password, find a charging cord, interpret a tone in a text message, decide whether that mole has changed, and make it through the day without eating crackers over the sink for dinner.
Which is not to say that becoming less visible is always easy.
Of course it isn’t.
There are real losses in it. There are rooms where you feel the shift. There are moments when you realize you are no longer being looked at in quite the same way. There are forms of attention you once found annoying that you now realize were part of the wallpaper of being younger. There is the small sting of being overlooked by the person at the counter, the group at the table, the industry that keeps insisting innovation only wears sneakers and has no memory of fax machines.
I am not going to pretend there is no grief in that.
There is.
But there is also relief.
A great deal of it.
The freedom of not having to enter every room as an audition. The freedom of not treating every outfit as evidence. The freedom of not needing to be the most interesting woman at the dinner table. The freedom of letting other people be young and shiny and overconfident while you sit there comfortably in your stretchy pants.
There is a kind of privacy that arrives with age.
Not invisibility exactly. More like a softening of the spotlight.
You are still there. You are still fully there. But the room is not always asking you to perform yourself at full volume.
What a mercy.
~ Danielle
The Midlife Syllabus
Lesson #29:
Being unseen is not the same as being unimportant. It is closer to being unsupervised.
Beauty, Grace & Daily Artistry
A small, imperfect pleasure:
On a Thursday afternoon at 2:30pm, I lay in the sun on my back deck and read Anna Wintour’s biography.
I felt zero guilt about either.
What I’m Reading, Watching or Listening to
Reading
See above.