My life at 50 is not as I’d imagined it. In a life brimming with love and loss and plenty of twists and turns, turning 50 was a milestone for me, yes, but even more transformative were the seven-plus years of living leading up to it.
My forties were life-altering. I required a cane, walker and eventually a wheelchair after developing Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). To give some context, CRPS is rated on the McGill Pain Scale as more painful than childbirth and the amputation of a finger or toe without anaesthetic. The pain of CRPS is likened to being on fire, in my case it was like being burned alive 24/7 through my right side. It lasted seven years before I went into complete remission at 49.
Now pain-free and mobile, life in my fifties is indeed far better than it was through those painful forties, and to say that I do not take any of it for granted would be putting it mildly. Through the difficult losses and extreme pain of my illness, I discovered for myself, in ways that are difficult to articulate here, that I am more than my physical body.
Having to show up in the world as a wheelchair user led to a host of challenges that disability advocates have been highlighting for decades. The world is inaccessible. It can be a career killer, too. As I told friends and family at the time: “The problem is everyone calls you inspiring, but no-one hires you.”
There is a core of me that transcends all of this – the pain, the labels, the physical world. This is true for all of us. In my case, it was perhaps something only a trial by fire could fully reveal. I can tell you now that you are far more than your body, your age, or the sum of the physical parts that so many insist on judging you by. And make no mistake, women are still heavily judged this way.
As you get older, you care less about what others think. That’s lucky, because not much has changed about the stereotypes and labels women and girls face since my first non-fiction book, The Fictional Woman, came out 10 years ago. In it, I blended memoir – my experiences growing up as a tomboy in Canada to becoming a model in the ’90s and then a bestselling author – with an analysis of the everyday sexism women face in wider society.
Caring less about societal norms may be particularly important for women because of the ways in which expectations under the patriarchy filter down, past the workplaces and titles and right to the very heart of us, our private lives, our very bodies. As the art critic John Berger famously remarked, “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” There is no clocking off. We are trained to watch ourselves, not only at work, on the street or in polite company, but in our homes, in the sanctuary of our bedrooms, our bathrooms with our mirrors, and even in our dreams. We work to pay the bills and we work out to stay healthy and we work to keep up appearances and we raise our children and no-one is waiting to hand us our slippers and a martini at the end of the long day, there’s only us looking at ourselves again, tired, and with all that laundry left to finish.
How might this time of life be different for men our age? Well, when men are married it is to wives who likely do more than their share of the housework. (I mean this all too literally – a study by Roy Morgan in 2023 found that in Australia, women contribute more hours of domestic labour than their partners even when working full time themselves.) While I cannot put myself into a man’s shoes, I do know that he would be coming into his power at my age, according to mainstream society’s view. A man over 50 is the age of kings, of CEOs and of modern world leaders. In fact, for these roles, 50 would be young. At the time of writing, current Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is 62 years old, new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is 60, and during the first round of US presidential debates, Donald Trump was 78 and Joe Biden was 81.
We simply do not have these archetypes for women. Julia Gillard, for example, was only 48 when she became Australia’s first female prime minister, and already, she had to contend with her opponent Tony Abbott infamously campaigning in front of a sign that read, “Ditch the Witch”. When women no longer fit the archetype of young damsels in distress, or when they dare step beyond the role of homemaker and mother, they are labelled witches and crones. (The male-gendered equivalent, ‘wizard’, is a compliment.)
So, have I entered my witch era? Perhaps, though what it means is not at all what Disney marketing suggests. Independent woman – check. Over 50 – check. A healer in my community – check. These are all factually things women were before they were burned at the stake in those witch trials. It’s not all green skin and flying brooms, after all, it was always just the spectre of the independent woman.
In short, you can let the labels get to you as you age, and you can try to do it all but backwards in high heels and while “continually accompanied” by the image of yourself, or you can say “No, I am re-writing this.” I choose myself. Prioritising one’s needs allows room for more compassion, more love, more realness and kindness, because we can only love others as much as we do ourselves. It is better for our health because as the airplane safety manuals point out, you should put your oxygen mask on first, then help others. In short, if you can’t breathe, you can’t help anyone else. And it’s not easy to breathe in a box.
My life at 50 is beautiful, outside the box, just as it should be.
You could say I found my writer’s voice in my twenties, my career in my thirties, my public advocacy and path towards personal healing in my forties. But at 50 I have found freedom from expectations, including my own. And that just might be the most healing thing of all.
- The Italian Secret hits bookstores in September.
