A friend said it aloud the other night. We were at our monthly catch-up dinner, three glasses of wine in, talking about nothing in particular, and she put her glass down and said, I think I might actually be happier now than I was at twenty-five. Like, way happier. Is that allowed?
There was a beat where the rest of us at the table figured out what we wanted to say.
And then one by one, around the table, the other women admitted some version of yes — that they’d been quietly noticing this for a while, that nobody talks about it, that they’d been a little scared to say it out loud because saying it out loud felt like breaking a rule.
And then we sat there for a minute, looking at each other, feeling something settle.
I’ve been thinking about that dinner ever since. The quiet suspicion a lot of women my age have been carrying around — the one where the script we were handed about our 20s being the golden years might not actually be true — turned out to be something we’d all been carrying.
We just hadn’t said it out loud.
Well, we’re going to say it out loud.
We were sold a specific lie, and it took a decade to stop believing it
The lie wasn’t that our 20s were great. Our 20s were, in fact, great in some ways.
We had energy. Things were new. We looked the way we looked. There was a lot still ahead, and the not-knowing was its own kind of thrill.
The lie was that our 20s were the peak. That everything after them would be a long, slow descent from the high point of our lives.
That we should be photographing the era, savoring it, mourning it as it ended. That women in their 40s and beyond were, by definition, past their best — diminished versions of the version that mattered, which was the one in the photo, the one nobody could quite get back to.
This is the lie that took most of us a decade to stop believing.
It came from movies that staged a woman’s whole life around whether she got it right by twenty-eight. From magazines that ran “before forty” lists like they were countdowns.
We absorbed it before we knew we were absorbing it. By the time we noticed it was a lie, we’d been carrying it for twenty years.
Looking back honestly, the 20s weren’t the peak
The trick of the lie is that it edited the 20s in memory.
The photo album version is real, but it’s not complete. The album doesn’t include the part where we cried in our bathrooms most Sundays because we didn’t know what we were doing with our lives.
It doesn’t include the years we spent dating people who weren’t kind to us because we thought we should be grateful for the attention.
It doesn’t include the constant low-grade panic about money, about our careers, about whether we were keeping up. It doesn’t include lying awake at three in the morning, wondering if we were going to be okay.
We were anxious in our 20s in a way we don’t talk about now. We were lonely in ways that the social calendar disguised.
We were performing versions of ourselves we hadn’t actually met yet, and the performance was exhausting, and we didn’t fully know it was a performance because it was the only thing we knew how to do.
The 20s had real gifts — the energy is real, the novelty is real, the open road is real — but they also had hidden costs that the script doesn’t let us mention.
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The 40s aren’t a consolation prize — they’re the upgrade
What we have now that we didn’t have at 25 isn’t sad-grown-up consolation. It’s specific.
And most of it comes down to one thing — the performance is ending.
We know what we want now. Not in a manifesto kind of way, but in a small daily way. We know what to order. We know when to leave a party.
We know when to skip a wedding. We have stopped, for the most part, doing things we don’t want to do because we’re afraid of what people will think if we don’t.
The energy that used to go into the performance now goes somewhere else, and it turns out the somewhere else is better.
Our friendships are different now because of this. The auditioning is over. The friends we have are the ones who survived the filter — the ones who showed up, the ones who picked up the phone when it mattered.
The conversation goes deeper because nobody is performing. The laugh hits different because nobody is laughing because they’re supposed to.
Sex, if we’re having it, isn’t a performance either. The part of us that used to wonder how we looked from the outside is just gone, and what’s left is whatever we actually want, which is allowed to be quieter or louder or weirder or simpler than we used to think it was supposed to be.
Work, if it’s working, uses things we didn’t have access to at 25. Pattern recognition. Knowing when to push and when not to. Knowing which arguments are worth having.
The career we have at 44 isn’t bigger than the one at 24 was supposed to be — it’s just made of better material.
A care nurse who recorded the most common regrets she heard from people at the end of their lives found that the one that came up more than any other was wishing they’d had the courage to live a life true to themselves, not the life others expected of them.
That’s the regret. That’s the whole regret, underneath everything else.
And the 20s are structurally when most of us are still living the life others expected — because we haven’t yet figured out what our own actual life is supposed to be.
The 40s are when, if we’re paying attention, we start to.
The relief on the other side of admitting it is real
Here’s the part nobody warned us about. Saying it out loud — I am actually happier now than I was then — is its own small earthquake.
The lie has been so loud, for so long, that admitting we don’t believe it anymore feels like permission we didn’t know we were allowed to give ourselves.
And the relief on the other side of giving it is real.
We stop measuring our current lives against a peak that wasn’t a peak. We stop apologizing for the parts of ourselves that took 44 years to assemble.
We stop mourning the version in the photo album, who was anxious and unfinished and didn’t yet know herself.
We stop, eventually, being surprised that we’re happy. The happiness stops feeling like something we have to defend, qualify, or explain.
It becomes the default we operate from, the way the script always insisted the 20s would feel and never quite did.
We start looking at the woman in the mirror, with our actual faces and our actual mileage and our actual lives, and recognizing that she is, by every meaningful measure, the better version.
The one with the harder-won things. The one who didn’t have to be told the script anymore.
The one who finally figured out that the best years weren’t the ones the magazine spread told her to want — they were the ones she was already living, with the people she actually loved, in a life she had quietly built without noticing it was the good one.
