The Best Thing About Being in My Forties Is Everything I’m Unlearning

Introducing The Forty Files—a new series about aging, identity, and stepping into our most magnetic chapter yet.

Earlier this summer, I was in the kitchen sautéing zucchini to throw into this pasta for dinner, and I realized I felt different.

Music was playing and the evening breeze was drifting through the open doors. I was moving slowly, actually savoring the process of chopping the zucchini, washing lettuce for a salad, blending up a vinaigrette.

Some context: things were busy at work, with several product launches on the horizon and my inbox most definitely not at zero. The kids were out of school for summer, which meant a lot of juggling back and forth between family and work. The old me would have been listening to a podcast in one ear while simultaneously unloading the dishwasher, thinking through an email I needed to send, and calculating how quickly I could get dinner finished. I would have been physically in the kitchen while mentally being in three other places.

But now, rather than rushing to get dinner on the table because people were hungry and I still had a ton of stuff to get done, I was actually… calm. And I realized that over time, this had become my new baseline.

Later that night, I glanced through my last several reads on my Kindle: mostly novels and a couple juicy memoirs. Notably absent was anything self-help, nutrition, or productivity-oriented—categories that used to dominate my reading lists.

And it hit me: these shifts were all connected.

Somewhere over the past couple of years, I’d stopped treating every part of my life as something to optimize. I’d shifted many of the beliefs that previously had me moving through the world like I always had something to prove.

The Summer I Stopped Optimizing Myself

The old me was so focused on achievement that she lived with a constant sense of time scarcity—causing her to rush through just about everything. She approached her body as a never-ending improvement project, where restriction and self-control took precedence over pleasure. She viewed success through the lens of other people’s approval rather than her own purpose and passion.

Slowly, as I’ve entered my forties, I’ve started to experience another way of living.

What I’m discovering right now is that my forties are turning out to be the most transformative and liberating decade of my life. They feel like a bridge carrying me from a version of myself who was once performing her life into a freer, more authentic version of me who’s actually living it.

A particular skill that so many high-achieving women possess is knowing exactly what to do to get the job done. And throughout my twenties and thirties, I did the things. I built a career and a company, got married, had two kids, and experienced all kinds of professional success. Along the way, I became ambitious, productive, responsible, highly disciplined, and deeply attuned to others’ thoughts and opinions. I knew how to make things happen and was hyper-focused on the next goal.

In one sense, I’m proud of what those qualities helped me build. But at some point, some of those strengths hardened into habits that made it difficult to fully inhabit the life I’d worked so hard to create.

I couldn’t rest or play or spend unstructured time with my family without a running list of all the things I “should” be doing instead. I restricted myself in so many ways—time, pleasure, food—in the name of achieving goals. Instead of truly enjoying the present, I was usually planning for the future.

Too many times to count, one of my kids has asked me a question and had to repeat it three times before I responded because I was mentally drafting a work email. Even creativity had to have an endgame—I wrote what I planned to publish and photographed what I planned to post.

Ambition had taken me far, but I began to see the cost of letting it become my north star.

Anyone who’s read this newsletter over the past few years has been along for the journey, including my season of burnout, when the pace I’d been living became impossible to ignore. But these deeply ingrained patterns don’t disappear in a single wake-up call.

For me, it’s been a continual returning. A hundred small choices practiced over and over until, eventually, they begin to feel like second nature.

In the two years since I turned 40, I’ve been slowly shedding so many beliefs and habits, and it’s only now that I can see how much unlearning I’ve been doing.

I used to think that forties sounded old and the term “middle-aged” was so ick (let’s not even talk about “perimenopause”). And now it makes me laugh because I can see so clearly that this time in our lives (and beyond) is an opportunity to step into the most full, magnetic, alive versions of ourselves because we carry so much wisdom into it.

My forties self feels closer to who I was as a little girl—creative, intuitive, playful, unself-conscious. She created things just because it was fun. She swam in the ocean, stayed up late to look at the stars, and spent hours reading novels. She wasn’t thinking about whether anyone would see what she made or whether an experience would become useful later.

The layers that I’m unlearning now are creating space for so much that truly excites me:

More creativity.

More play.

More presence.

More unrushed time with my family.

More trust in my decisions.

More energy for work that feels purposeful.

More openness to where God’s leading me.

When I think about the most naturally youthful women I know (of all ages!), they’re not the ones fighting the clock—they’re the ones who are so engaged with life, you can feel their energy when they walk into a room. It’s magnetic.

I still have moments when I think that if I slow down, I’ll somehow get behind. But when I recognize that fear, I whisper to myself: release, release, release. I’m learning to catch myself when I slip back into my old habits, and return to the way I want to be moving through the world.

And I’m curious how many of you are feeling this too, whether you’re in your thirties, forties, fifties, or older. Are you craving a life that’s based less on performing and others’ expectations, and more on following what lights you up and makes you feel fulfilled and free?

Maybe you’re outgrowing a version of yourself that has taken you as far as she can, and you’re ready to step into a new way of living.

These are the questions I’ve kept circling, and they’ve sparked so many conversations with my friends—and with many of you through your messages and comments. Which is why I’m starting a new recurring series here: The Forty Files will explore what it actually feels like to be in this decade and the things I wish I’d started learning years ago.

Our first three conversations will focus on:

• How I’m approaching aging, beauty, and strength

• What happened when I stopped restricting my body and started nourishing it

• How I’m defining my personal style around the woman I’m becoming

And I’d love to hear what other topics you want to explore through this lens—weigh in here:

If you’ve been thinking about joining our paid community, now’s a great time. Over the next three weeks, paid subscribers will receive the first installments of The Forty Files—honest conversations about aging and beauty, nourishing our bodies instead of controlling them, and dressing for the women we’re becoming.

I’m so excited to share them with you.