The Most Magical Time of Year

It’s said that the holidays are the Most Magical Time of the Year.

My horoscope had foretold that there would be peace among everyone gathering at the table this season.

For Christmas I was given a gift card. I figured out how to use it on the internet to buy rainbow moonstone stud earrings.

As 2023 nears I’m grateful to end this year with renewed gratefulness for my good fortune.

I urge readers to live with gratitude. Even for the inevitable trials we all face I say: be grateful for the hard times as well as the beauties.

2023 I envision as the Year of Reflection. The time to examine where we want to go and what we want to do.

My New Year’s Resolution is to buy a skateboard. To practice rolling on the asphalt roadway in the park. At 13 years old I had a red skateboard. Rolling down the hilly streets where I lived gave me joy.

Not doing an ollie or other explosive move I simply loved rolling along.

Remembering this short-lived hobby I got the idea to buy a skateboard. Why can’t a 57-year old woman skate? is what I thought.

A Generation X girl living in her Third Chapter I’m on a kick of self-reinvention. My motto is risk, fail, rise up, repeat.

What gave us joy when we were younger should not be ruled out as a hobby in the 25 years after 50.

Too often we become adults and abandon the happy-makers because we think we should do what everyone else tells us we’re supposed to do to be successful and be accepted.

No–I was miserable living in the mainstream in the years I thought I should try to have a normal life.

Decades later realizing that the only way I would be happy was to live my life Left of the Dial.

In this last week of 2022 I urge readers to join me in renouncing the tried-and-often-(not)-true approaches to living our lives.

For my birthday I’m going to buy a skateboard. Watch YouTube videos on beginner skateboarding techniques.

Watch out as this Skate Girl rolls in the park in the spring.

I hope my blogging gives you the courage to try something new (or return to something that gave you joy).

This really is the Most Magical Time of the Year when we’re getting ready for 2023 and the possibilities that beckon.

Risk, fail, rise up, repeat. If you ask me that’s the only way to live going forward.

Change of Life Change of Outlook

I should not be so nonchalant about telling people my age–57.

Yet living through “the change of life” is central to what I want to say.

Dissatisfied I was reading the first few pages of No One Tells You This–the memoir of a 40-year old woman with no kids and no husband.

I’m writing a second memoir that I would like to publish within two years.

It’s about having my cake and celebrating each new birthday with glee not gloom.

No one talks about being a Generation X Girl living in menopause.

I will do this. Born in the first year of the Generation X cohort I don’t want to be rendered invisible.

Not everyone is a member of “the sandwich generation.” For those of us who are single our lives are often an “open-faced sandwich” acting as the caregiver without children of our own for a mother or father.

This time of life isn’t so terrible even though the pain can be real for a lot of us.

We have only this one lifetime. Use your regret as the catalyst for changing your life for the better. Today is the day to Just Do It.

It can seem like on one ordinary day you pivot on a dime. Most likely this urge was percolating in the coffee pot of your brain for a while. Until it reached the boiling point.

One day you choose to do something totally not like you. Unlike everything you’ve done before.

At 57 I’ve become electrified to Make It Happen–whatever I fancy I want to do before 60 kicks in.

Cherish 50 while it lasts. Grab the bull of life by the horns and ride wild. These can be the best years of our life. At 60 I imagine the bull will get tired of stampeding. Want to laze and graze in the grass.

Our fifties really are the Dangerous Decade. A lot of us are no longer satisfied with the way things are. We risk bending, breaking, and rewriting the rules.

Coming up: How at 57 I’ve become a quick-change artist.

Looking in a Cheer-View Mirror

The year is ending. A time when a lot of us look in a rear-view mirror to take stock of our lives. I say it’s time to look at our lives in a cheer-view mirror.

The memories can be sugar and spice or a bitter pill to swallow. Either way I think it’s wise to view our past with acceptance and understanding instead of regret.

Though I appear to be in my thirties or early forties I’m on the cusp of 56. Are you readers younger? Or are some of you older like I am?

The end of the year finds me thinking of the time I was a disc jockey on FM radio in the 1980s.

As I examine my life I take inspiration from Eric Daman the costume designer for Gossip Girl.

In his book You Know You Want It Daman says that we can use elements of our personal history to create our outfits today.

So too I think we can mine this history to uncover facets of our early life that we want to reclaim post 50.

To ask: “What do I want to keep in my life? What do I want to get rid of?”

You can make a comeback at any age. I’m thinking of my younger self with awe and reverence for how I broke the rules.

No–I didn’t conform when I was 22. I played alternative music on the radio. I subverted traditional beauty by using dramatic makeup on my face. I dressed in Avant Garde clothes.

This points to the reality that I don’t want to fade into the woodwork–to be rendered invisible–as I get older.

As a Generation X girl I want to make a statement once again.

Today I swipe on sassy rhubarb lipstick as a way to be bold.

I’m screwing up the courage to call the guy I’m interested in.

A fortune cookie I cracked open years ago proclaimed: Fate loves the fearless.

Hello tomorrow.

The Highway To You

At 53, I’ve become more obsessed with fashion than I ever have.

I’ve bought five fashion books either print copies or e-books.

I find myself at odds with the target market of forty and older women profiled in a book like The Women’s Wake-up.

That book should be titled Howdy, Dowdy.

I don’t think those drab-color clothes and suited attire are becoming. At least, I wouldn’t be caught dead in those outfits.

The women profiled in these kinds of books are Baby Boomers. I’m not dissing the women themselves. I’m simply astounded that there’s a dichotomy between how I dress and how most older women dress.

It’s most likely because I was born in 1965–the first year of the Generation X cohort.

What a difference one year makes. I align with the Gen X ethic.

This must be why I abhor acting, thinking, dressing, and living in a one-size-fits-all monochromatic fashion.

My kind of mid-life crisis has involved going shopping: for clothes and a man.

I browse the J.Crew and Banana Republic websites because they have Petite clothes. I look for coupon codes or items sold at a reduced price.

Each of us has the right to do what gives us joy. We shouldn’t be made to feel guilty or ashamed for liking whatever gives us joy.

Do men who blather on about their cars or gym routines get the kind of grief women are given for expressing our love of fashion?

At mid-life women shouldn’t give up on ourselves. We should embrace our individuality. We should live and think outside the book.

We should honor the unique facets of our personality, which experts now think isn’t fixed and can change over the years.

Lucinda Chambers is quoted in Know Your Style: “I think great style is individuality with confidence.” I recommend you buy this book. It’s a treasure trove of information.

In the next blog entry I’m going to give a list of beauty and fashion books that have been like bibles to me at this time in my older life.

I’m 53 and have become a rebel in my older years. A rebel who dresses in chic clothes.

Perhaps you understand what it’s like to live your life left of the dial?

Do you also fear living a monochromatic life?

Yes I say: wear an olive suit if that’s your thing. Wear beige if that would make you happy.

I simply need color. I don’t look alive out there in an ivory sweater.

I don’t follow rules that don’t make sense.

Women, start your engines: today is the day to live boldly.

The highway of life is calling.

Burn rubber, because the past has ended.

Listen to the Paula Cole song “The Road to Me” from the 1990s.

The open road beckons at mid-life.