Apparently this is happening

There is something no one really prepares you for about aging in a woman’s body, and I don’t mean the surface conversations about wrinkles or hormones or metabolism. I mean the deeper, quieter shifts that start to happen in the way you experience yourself and the way you feel the world experiencing you. It’s not dramatic in one big moment. It’s subtle. It’s layered. It’s a series of small recognitions that accumulate until one day you realize you are in a new chapter without having consciously crossed a threshold.

I notice that I am still moving my body in many of the same ways I always have, still teaching, still demonstrating, still asking my body to show up for me in familiar ways, and yet the experience of being in it is changing. Not in a catastrophic way. Not in a way that makes me feel broken. But in a way that asks for more listening, more patience, more honesty about what is actually true now instead of what used to be true.

The other day I caught myself squinting at a sign and genuinely wondered if someone had changed the font overnight or if my eyesight had simply decided to begin a new phase without sending me a formal notice. There are moments when I am about to lead a class and cannot find the simplest word, something I have said thousands of times without thinking. A finger. A toe. A direction. It’s as if my brain quietly slips out the back door for a cup of tea while I am still standing at the front of the room mid-sentence trying to remember what on earth I was about to say. There is something both humbling and hilarious about that if I allow myself to see it clearly.

I am also noticing something that feels more tender to name. The way visibility changes. The way you can feel yourself becoming less centered in the cultural gaze even as you are becoming more centered within yourself. The way desirability, sexuality, and the assumptions the world makes about your vitality start to shift in ways that are rarely spoken about directly. There is a strange experience in feeling more embodied, more comfortable in your own skin, more honest in your sensuality than you may have ever been, while also sensing that the external narrative has quietly begun categorizing you differently.

It can feel like you are being moved to the margins of a story you are still very much living. Not discarded, but not clearly placed either. No longer the woman the world organizes itself around, and not always fully acknowledged as the elder whose depth carries real authority. It is an in-between space that can feel both sacred and disorienting at the same time.

I am learning that aging is not simply about the body changing, but about identity reorganizing in real time. It is about learning how to stay in relationship with yourself when the mirrors around you, literal and cultural, begin reflecting something unfamiliar. Some days I feel incredibly strong and deeply at home in this body. Other days I feel surprised by it in ways that are both confronting and oddly clarifying.

What I keep coming back to is the knowing that I am still here. Still moving. Still teaching. Still listening. Still evolving into a more honest version of myself.

And yes, apparently now also squinting.

With love,

xxoo Marianne