When I Turned 40, Everything Changed
A sudden wave of shame and fear about aging shattered my sense of self. But what started as a personal crisis, rooted in beauty standards and myths, turned into a powerful awakening, one that I believe every woman needs to hear.
What we verbalize becomes what we visualize. And when I turned 40, my internal dialogue was a damn mess. I remember waking up that February morning of my 40th birthday, looking in the mirror, and not recognizing the person staring back at me.
I told myself she was old. She looked old. And I hated her.
It was the same face I had the day before. But somehow, the shift into a new decade brought with it an overwhelming sense of fear, shame and embarrassment. And it wasn’t just my physical appearance that I felt was no longer acceptable. I could feel my own self-doubt creeping in, my inner voice shrinking me in every aspect of my life.
But why had I internalized so much shame around something so natural, so human, as existing?
The answer is obvious. Society tells us – particularly women – that our worth diminishes with age. That beauty is something purely physical and defined by others. And like loyal subjects, we’ve surrendered to this manufactured truth.
For the next year, I obsessed over stopping what I perceived as my physical deterioration. I was in battle mode. And every which way I turned the message was reinforced – younger is worthy of love and respect. Older is not. My mind was consumed with ways to reverse the signs of my evolution – products, treatments, exercises, massages, injections, surgeries. You name it, I bought it and bought into it. My mental energy was spent trying to undo time. And I was never satisfied.
And then I turned 41.
There was no existential crisis this time. I had fully set into the defeat of time and the harsh realization that I had wasted an entire year of my life mourning something inevitable. A year of living in fear, instead of joy. I knew I was not happy living like this. But I didn’t know how to stop. The noise about “anti-aging” was, and is, deafening.
How was I to change this pattern of thinking when the entire world tells me that aging requires an “anti” prefix?
One day, in all my exhaustion, after a particularly annoying experience with botox and fillers, I had an epiphany.
This is all fucking weird. Trying to look younger is fucking weird. "Anti-aging" is fucking weird.
We aren’t meant to be stuck in time or Benjamin Button reverse age.
And Riotess was born.
For Every Woman Who Has Ever Felt Invisible
With Riotess, I want to give an alternative view and to disrupt outdated expectations around aging, beauty, and power. I want to explore our humanness and all the greatness that it brings and introduce new ways to think about our natural evolution.
The conversations that need a spotlight, the narratives that need rewriting, and the language that needs to be tossed out for good – it will all be explored.
What if we were able to shift the narrative so radically that when we look in the mirror, we feel joy, not dread? What if instead of resisting aging, like we are commanded to do, we embraced it? What if the next time you saw your reflection, you celebrated the sunspots and the wrinkles and didn’t assault your face with serums, creams, injections and devices?
I love how Diane Von Furstenberg views aging – she says that aging is just living. Instead of asking “how old are you,” she says we should ask “how long have you lived?” DVF views aging as a continuation of life, not a decay, and embraces it as a testament to a life well lived.
Aging Is Power
Anti-aging is a lie. We’ve carried this burden like it was ours to bear. It never was.
Just for a moment, imagine the sheer magnitude of time, energy, joy, and money women would reclaim if we stopped surrendering to this colossal societal brainwashing. Can you feel the freedom? Can you feel the weight lift?
I’m certainly not saying it’s easy or that I’ve found a way to fight the indoctrination in my own life. I still give in to the hype of supplements and skincare that promise to plump and hydrate and increase substances in my body I never knew existed until they became part of the marketing narrative (seriously, fuck collagen and hyaluronic acid).
This is not a plea to ‘let yourself go’ or not value feeling or looking beautiful. But it is about redefining what is beautiful. And unquestionably that starts with recognizing that younger is not more beautiful.
I want this new perspective so badly-for myself and for every woman. For every woman who looks in the mirror and feels like she’s disappearing, who feels like her worth is diminishing. For every woman who has ever been told she’s “past her prime.” For every woman who has wasted a single moment feeling shame for the most natural and human thing in the world.
I want to live in a world where women live on their own terms - unburdened, without pressure and without shame. And I believe we can get there.
A Final Thought
I certainly don’t sit here in judgment. Everything I’m writing, and everything I’m creating, is as much for me as it is for anyone else. I’m not here to tell you to stop wearing makeup or stop dyeing your hair. Honestly, it’s quite the opposite. The self-help gurus will tell you the affirmations won’t always land right away, and I get that. So I’m sharing my journey in real time: flawed, evolving, and unfinished because maybe, just maybe, the repetition is where the shift begins.
Let’s riot.