OVER 45 AND INVISIBLE?
HOW TO REINVENT YOURSELF WHEN THE WORLD HAS WRITTEN YOU OFF.
Dear lovely readers
I hope this edition of the newsletter finds you well and thriving?
In this edition of the newsletter, I want to go back to the beginning where I’m talking about why I started 45 Not Out and what has happened in the meantime. I’ve had a few new people subscribe, and I think it’s important that they know the origins of the brand.
It’s no secret that I started 45 Not Out based on my experience of being a 50-something and starting a business in a sector that was populated with successful business owners and CEO’s who were young enough to be my children.
That sector was the digital and creative media sector that I fell into (and I wasn’t in the least unhappy about it either) and I had a freelance business where I was undertaking marketing outreach for these successful digital moguls, who were wonderful at producing the most effective videos and all sorts of visual digital media, but absolutely crap at bringing in new business.
That’s where I stepped in.
Years beforehand, I’d had in-depth traditional sales and marketing training and I was good at it. I was able to go into a company, irrespective of their size, have a quick overview of their marketing activity and suggest and implement methods and processes that they could use to promote themselves and bring in new business.
And, because these CEO’s were ego-driven male Millennials (I make no apologies for saying that - it is a very accurate description), they didn’t want to do the outreach themselves - I expect they felt belittled by actually rolling their sleeves up so they employed me to do that. And it didn’t bother me in the slightest.
I had a successful business on the back of it.
But, the downside of that was the treatment I received when I was in company with these incredibly successful digital agencies.
For example, I’d be at networking events trying to raise my profile in the sector, and would end up talking to these egotistical but powerful men and very clearly would be brushed off.
I remember the one who couldn’t look me in the eye when I was telling him about what I did in my business (and he specifically asked me what I did in the first place) and spent all the time when I was speaking by tapping away on his phone.
Then there was the guy who actually walked away when I was in mid flow.
At the start, I began to think it was me.
Then I realised it wasn’t and it was the beliefs that these young guys had about older women and their effectiveness. And, also, I realised that it wasn’t just this generation that held these beliefs, and I began to notice it more and more in my everyday life.
But, I couldn’t do anything to rock the boat. I had to put with this treatment and plough on to find clients who could see the value I could bring to their table. Eventually I did and worked for several very happy years with these amazing companies.
Further along the road, podcasting crossed my radar rather loudly and I wondered if my experiences with the ageism I had encountered would be a worthy topic to launch a podcast. I later found it was a very worthy topic and women came out of the woodwork to agree and align with me. I produced 21 episodes of the podcast in total, and you can listen to the podcast here. A short while after the podcast, I started this newsletter and you can sign up here if you don’t already subscribe and then finally, the beating heart of 45 Not Out -a private Facebook group where women who think like you do can kick back, have a moan and get sisterhood in return and feel valued and useful. You can find the Facebook group here
I’m pleased to say that all 3 platforms are growing and it’s my utmost joy to continue to create content of all sorts for these platforms, knowing that in some small way, I’m contributing to make positive changes for women in midlife and their older years.
But, along the way, I learnt some things I could do to ensure I got the recognition to which I deserved.
SO LET’S UNPACK THIS, SHALL WE?
Because nobody told me, when I was building a life, raising children, holding careers together, navigating grief and change and everything in between, that there was an expiry date on my relevance. Nobody handed me a form to sign. There was no meeting. One day the world simply started behaving as though I’d already had my turn.
And here’s what I’ve noticed about that particular injustice: it doesn’t announce itself. It seeps in. Through the job application that goes unanswered. The conversation at a dinner table where the younger voices fill all the air. The way a room recalibrates when you walk into it — or, more accurately, the way it doesn’t. The way it just carries on, uninterrupted, as if you hadn’t arrived at all.
I know women who have shrunk in response to this. Who have quietly started dressing differently, speaking less, taking up less room, as though the world’s indifference were a verdict they’d decided to accept. I understand the impulse. When something is thrown at you repeatedly, with enough force, eventually you start to believe it might be true.
But it isn’t true. And that’s what I want to say today.
Reinvention isn’t a consolation prize. It’s an act of defiance.
The word “reinvention” has been doing the rounds for years, often packaged in a way that implies you’ve had some kind of failure that needs correcting. A life that needs a rebrand. I want to untangle it from all of that, because for midlife and older women, reinvention isn’t about fixing something broken.
It’s about refusing to be diminished.
It’s about looking at the version of yourself that the world has decided you are — smaller, quieter, less relevant — and saying: no.
That’s not me.
That’s a story you’re telling. And I’m not in it.
Reinvention, at this stage, can look like many things. It can look like the woman who spent twenty years in a career that no longer fits her and decides, finally, to follow the thread she’d been ignoring.
It can look like the woman who has spent a lifetime being defined by her relationships to other people — mother, wife, carer — and who asks, perhaps for the first time, what she actually wants.
It can look like starting a business at 52, going back to study at 58, or simply deciding that the room that doesn’t notice her arrival doesn’t deserve her presence. (side note: I personally love this one!)
None of these things require a plan. Some of the most profound reinventions I’ve witnessed have started with something much simpler than a strategy — a single, quiet realisation that the current version of things isn’t working, followed by a decision to try something else.
The thing that nobody tells you — or perhaps we don’t tell each other enough — is that this stage of life carries something genuinely useful in it. The decades behind you haven’t just aged you. They’ve taught you.
The accumulated weight of experience, failure, recovery, and recalibration that you’re carrying isn’t a burden. It’s the thing that makes you formidable. It’s the thing that younger versions of yourself — and frankly, younger versions of everyone else — don’t yet have access to.
And there’s something else, something that I’ve been thinking about a great deal lately.
The world that writes us off is often working from an image of us that is thirty years out of date.
The 60-something woman in her slippers, retired from the world. This was the 60-something women I grew up not just seeing, but interacting with. But that was almost 50 years ago.
AND IT VERY MUCH ISN’T US TODAY!
The women I know and admire at this stage of life are still showing up, still creating, still making noise in exactly the spaces where they’re supposed to have gone quiet.
For example, you have Kirsty Wark anchoring the most recent election coverage at 71. Madonna rocking the stage at Coachella at 67. Remember Floella Benjamin - a presenter on Play School, if you can remember those days? She is now Baroness Floella and sitting in the House of Lords and still campaigning fiercely for children's rights.
And it’s not just women in public life.
Look around and you can see women in their 50s running businesses, leading newsrooms, raising second families, writing books, going back to school. These are not exceptions. They are simply what happens when women refuse to accept the terms being offered to them.
So what does reinvention actually look like, right now, for you?
I don’t know the answer to that, because only you do. But I know this much: the question itself is worth asking. Not the version of the question that sounds like “what went wrong and how do I recover” — but the bigger, braver version. The one that sounds like: what do I actually want this next chapter to look like?
Because there is a next chapter. There are many.
You haven’t had your turn. You’re still in it.
If I could ask you one question it would be this:
What would you do if the world’s opinion of what’s possible for you at this age simply didn’t apply? I’d genuinely love to know.
You can answer that by replying directly to this newsletter and it will find me. Looking forward to your responses!
So, that’ll be a wrap from me. I hope something that I’ve talked about resonates with you. And, if nothing else, reminds you that even if you are ones who has to scroll for ages when inputting their year of birth on one of those digital things, worrying that their birth year may not be there (so it’s not just me?), you still have so much to offer.
Just get loud about it. Join the throng that is rattling the bars of the cages we older women have been put into!!
I’ll see you next time
Keep well
Una x