Taking Up Space After Fifty

There is a peculiar message women receive as we get older. Nobody necessarily sits us down and explains it, yet somehow we absorb the suggestion that we should make a little room for the younger women, dress appropriately, be sensible, and stop worrying so much about being seen.

I appear to have misunderstood the assignment.

This October, I am incredibly excited to be the Featured Artist at the Baton Rouge Art Market. Last Saturday night, I also stood onstage doing stand-up comedy for a mostly female audience and listened to them laugh and laugh and laugh.

At 56, I seem to be getting considerably worse at disappearing, and I think that is worth talking about.

There is a popular idea that reinvention belongs to the young. We expect people in their twenties to try things, fail spectacularly, change directions, discover new talents, and decide they want entirely different lives. By fifty, supposedly, we should have ourselves pretty well sorted out, with fewer surprises waiting around the corner.

I am beginning to think fifty can be the age when possibilities expand because we finally become less interested in asking permission.

Saturday night was wonderful. I performed at She Boom at Boomerang Comedy Theater, and there was something particularly joyful about performing stand-up in front of a room filled mostly with women. They got the jokes, and they laughed loudly and generously. I could feel that wonderful exchange that happens when something you've experienced connects with something a stranger has experienced too.

Comedy has a strange ability to make incredibly private things communal. For a few minutes, something that might have been embarrassing, frustrating, ridiculous, or simply part of getting older becomes something a roomful of people can laugh about together. There is a surprising amount of power in hearing other women laugh because they recognize some small piece of themselves in what you're saying.

I feel a similar sense of connection when I put something I've made on a table and trust that it deserves to be seen.

I've spent a lot of weekends doing exactly that.

Being named the Featured Artist for October at the Baton Rouge Art Market feels particularly lovely because markets aren't glamorous most of the time. They involve loading vehicles, setting up tents, worrying about weather, arranging displays, talking to strangers, tearing everything down again, and occasionally wondering whether you have somehow accumulated more folding tables than any reasonable human being should own.

Then you come back and do it again, and somewhere in all that repetition, showing up becomes its own kind of declaration that you have found a place where you belong.

Maybe that is one of the gifts of getting older.

Women spend so much of our lives being taught to monitor the amount of space we occupy. We learn to worry about being too loud, too demanding, too ambitious, too visible, or simply too much. As we get older, another set of rules arrives about what we should wear, how we should behave, and how much attention we should expect to receive.

Somewhere along the way, I became considerably less interested in following those rules.

There is tremendous freedom in deciding that you are allowed to be visible, especially when you have reached an age when the larger culture sometimes seems to expect the opposite.

You can start painting or write a book. You can take a class where everyone else seems younger than you. You can put your work in a market or pick up a microphone. You can discover that you are terrible at something and keep doing it until you get better, or discover a talent you never imagined having.

Most importantly, you can become a beginner again at an age when everyone seems to think you should already know who you are.

The older I get, the more interested I am in discovering how many directions a life can still take. Mine has expanded in ways I could never have predicted even a few years ago, and many of the things bringing me the most joy right now began after fifty.

This October, I get to see my artwork featured at the Baton Rouge Art Market, and last Saturday night I had the extraordinary pleasure of making a roomful of women laugh. Both experiences came from allowing myself to enter spaces where I was once a beginner, keep showing up, and eventually feel that I belonged there.

There are still doors I haven't opened, things I haven't tried, and versions of myself I haven't met yet. At 56, that feels less like uncertainty and more like one of the best reasons I can think of to keep going.