SWC #72: Ageism We Commit Against Ourselves

Cindy reminds us to honor ourselves and embrace and celebrate aging, rather than commit ageism against ourselves. 

Video Transcript:

Can you say you have truly been boomed?

I invite you to watch my TEDx Talk. You can see it on YouTube. And what I'm talking about is Ageism that we commit against ourselves.

Most women I know wanna be loved, adored, valued, maybe even worshiped. Not only for part of their life, but for their entire life. And what happens is we allow these messages, these subtle archaic messages that we lose value as we age to seep into our psyches. And what happens is, we commit ageism against ourselves.

Every time you look in the mirror, you go, "Ugh. Ugh, that's bad. That's not good. What do we do?" Every time you look in the mirror and get nervous because you have a sun spot, or another crow’s foot line. You judge yourself as losing it, as somehow becoming worse, less valuable, less beautiful. And what happens is you become more beautiful as time goes by because you've been doing it longer. You've been living longer. Every stage of life brings another kind of beautiful.

What I've seen a lot of woman do, including myself from time to time, and my friends, is we consider ourselves either doing everything we can to look as great as we can, so we go to the gym, and we eat well, and we get all the best cosmetics, and the nicest clothes we can. Or we give up and we let ourselves go.

So it's a little bit intimidating to look at all the things you have to do to stay looking socially acceptable, beautiful, pretty, you know, whatever your standard is. And we get tired of doing that. We've all heard other women and maybe ourselves, at least in our minds say, "You know what? I just can't get out the bottle of dye again. I'm tired of wearing these tight belts. I'm gonna just cave and do the elastic waistline thing."

They're becoming clichés. That's how much, that's how often we think that way. Well, what about all the other possibilities. They're infinitive. It's not a matter of doing everything it takes to look 35 the rest of your life, or letting yourself go. You can decide how you want it.

Maybe you wanna dye your hair, but you'll never get a face lift. Maybe you will never wear high heels again because they're just not comfortable, but you're gonna pay attention to your grooming. You're going to get your manicures and buy the nicest clothes that you find. There are so many choices. It's your choice. It's time to honor yourself and do what you wanna do and what makes you feel good.

If you wanna dye your hair purple, and cut it into a Mohawk, or you wanna dress like the classic little old lady with your shawl and your comfortable shoes, and your bun, it is up to you. And I can tell you, if you're enjoying it and you're honoring yourself, you are going to be attractive to everyone else because what we are attracted to is pleasure and joy.

When you're having a good time, we want to get up against you. We wanna rub, get some of that to rub off against this because we all want to enjoy life and experience pleasure for as long as possible.

So keep it up. That's another Saturday with Cindy and I’m Cindy. Come back. We'll do it again.