I Stopped Auditioning at 55

There’s something no one tells women when they’re younger.

Not about wrinkles or weight or invisibility but about relief.

For most of my life, I was carrying an unspoken job description: be attractive enough, pleasant enough, light enough, agreeable enough.

Even when I thought I was just “getting dressed for dinner,” I was still dressing for the male gaze. Even when I thought I was being “easygoing,” I was still making sure I didn’t take up too much space.

It’s so deeply conditioned you don’t even feel it as pressure. It just feels like reality.

Don’t be the loud one. Don’t be the bitch. Let them own the room, you just smile.

And then something strange happens as you get older.

The gaze loosens.

Not because you disappear but because you stop orbiting it.

I’m aging well. I know that. Good genes, some luck. But I’m also aging honestly. My face is changing. My body is changing. Menopause has opinions. And for the first time in my life, I’m not at war with any of it.

What surprised me most wasn’t grief. It was freedom.

I no longer feel the low-level obligation to be desirable. I don’t have to calibrate my clothes, my tone, my opinions around male comfort. I don’t have to soften my truth so it lands prettier.

I can dress for temperature. For comfort. For myself.

I can speak plainly without checking whether it makes me “too much.”

That’s not bitterness. It’s release.

I’ve watched women cling, to youth, to procedures, to clothes meant for someone else’s body and someone else’s stage of life. And I understand why. The world rewards women for staying consumable.

But I don’t want to be consumable anymore.

I want to be present.

I still care about my body, not because of how it looks, but because of how it feels. I want my belly to feel lighter, my joints less heavy, my system calmer. That’s not punishment. That’s relationship.

There’s a version of aging we’re never shown:one where you stop auditioningand start inhabiting.

Where your voice gets steadier because it’s no longer filtered through the question: How am I being perceived?

I used to worry, when I was younger, about what I’d become.Some caricature of a middle-aged woman I’d been taught to fear.

Now I look at myself and think: oh.I’m adorable.

Not because I’m trying. Because I’m finally free.