(ThySistas.com) That lie got handed to us early, and a lot of us swallowed it whole. A woman is supposed to peak around 23, it says. Whatever shine she has then is the high point, and the years after just drain it out of her slow. Nobody announced this to me in my twenties. It seeped in.
I am well past 23 now, and here is the flat truth. Whoever drafted that script never once sat across from a woman over 40 who had finally figured out what she actually wanted. Follow the money on that story for a second. Who gains?
Youth sells things. It sells creams and diets and a low buzzing panic that keeps a woman spending, adjusting, apologizing for time doing exactly what time does. A frightened woman is a good customer. She will chase a version of herself she is supposed to already be losing. Meanwhile the actual gifts of getting older, the ones nobody advertises, arrive quietly and go unmentioned in the sales pitch. Nobody makes money off a woman who has stopped auditioning for approval.
My twenties were loud and mostly unsure. Let me be honest about that, because there is a temptation to trash your younger self to feel better about the mirror. That is not the point here. Parts of being young were a genuine joy. The stamina alone was a marvel. Still, plenty of energy went toward trying to be legible to people who were never going to read me correctly no matter how the pieces got arranged. Rooms made me shrink. Laughing at things that were not funny became a habit. There were a couple of men who treated my patience like a renewable resource, and love was what I called it, because the difference between being chosen and being tolerated had not landed yet.
Confidence back then, when it showed up, was borrowed. It depended on somebody else confirming I was worth the space. Now it comes from a deeper place, and it does not ask permission.
There is a particular kind of clarity that can show up later. You start to know your own mind, and you stop treating that knowledge as something to hide so nobody feels threatened. A younger sista often bends toward what the room wants. She reads the temperature and adjusts. Some of that is survival, and Black women learn that survival math early, in classrooms and workplaces and at family functions where an aunt has opinions about your hair. But there is a version of that reading that becomes a cage. You get so good at anticipating everyone else that you lose the thread of your own preference.
Age loosened that grip for me. Turning down a dinner invitation used to cost me a whole essay. These days I just say I cannot make it, and the quiet after does not send me scrambling to explain. Selectivity. That is the word I keep landing on. Not bitterness, which is where people jump the second a woman gets choosy. A woman who quit and a woman who raised the bar to match her worth are not the same creature. My time turned precious in a way it never was back when it felt endless. Guilt stopped running my calendar. I stopped keeping people around because we had history, when the history was the only thing still holding us together. That kind of pruning hurts. It also clears the ground for something better to grow.
Look at the friendships I have kept. Fewer, stronger, honest. My circle is small and it is real, and every sista in it has walked through her own fire and come out with something to say about it. Nobody performs for anybody. We show up rumpled and unbothered by it. Being known that far down means you skip the part where you explain yourself. A song comes on and cracks you open, and the woman next to you already understands why.
Fulfillment gets sold as a grab, something you snatch inside a shrinking window before it slams. Grab the man. Grab the body. Grab the photo that proves you were wanted, and clutch it, because the window is shutting. What a small way to imagine a whole life. As if we were pieces of fruit with firm dates stamped on us.
My aunt Renee did not hit her stride until her fifties. Back to school she went the year her youngest left home. Driving came at 51, after depending on other people her whole married life, and I watched her pull out of that driveway grinning like she had stolen something. She had. What she stole back was her own mobility. At 60 she was more herself than the world ever let her be at 25, and anybody who filed her away as a faded copy of some younger woman just was not looking.
What we forfeit by treating the early years as the summit stays on my mind. Girls get taught to fear the exact thing that could set them free. We hand them a countdown instead of a horizon. A young woman staring down that ticking clock cannot possibly relax into becoming, because becoming takes years, and the story tells her she does not have them.
So here is what I would say to a sista in her twenties reading this while quietly bracing for decline. It does not have to be a decline. The mirror will change, yes, and I will not insult you by pretending otherwise. But your judgment can sharpen. Your voice can steady. The things that rattled you at 25 can shrink down to footnotes. The question stops being whether you are enough for the room. It becomes whether the room is even worth your while, and that turn changes everything.
Room to age on our own terms is something Black women have rarely been handed. The world hands us a script that praises us young and pushes us to the margins the moment we stop being ornamental. I am done reading from it. My best years were never sitting back there at 23, watching me go. That woman was out front the whole time, taking her time, letting me close the distance. Eventually I reached her. And the story that swore she was already behind me can keep itself.
Peak is the wrong word entirely. Some of us are still climbing.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.