(ThySistas.com) Most of us got sold a lie so early we took it for plain fact. The story goes that youth is the best a woman ever gets, and that once the face softens and the body fills out, the good part of her is basically finished. I believed a version of it for a long time myself. Then you watch somebody like Viola Davis hit 61, moving through her days with zero apology, and the whole thing just comes apart in your hands.
By her own account, this decade opened a bigger world rather than a smaller one, and these 60s belong to no one else, in a way nothing before them ever did. Hear how radical that sounds coming from a working actress in a business that treats its female stars like produce, stamped with a date telling you when to toss them. Hollywood spends fortunes deciding that a performer goes invisible right around the moment she finally turns interesting, and Viola looks that whole bargain in the eye and refuses it flat.
What she describes is not denial. Nobody out here pretends the body stays the same or the calendar quits turning. The freedom runs deeper than that. It is the relief of setting down a bag you have hauled since girlhood, the sack packed with everybody else’s verdicts on whether you are pretty enough, thin enough, accomplished enough to earn a seat at the good table. Plainly put, that noise barely lands anymore. Life now centers on the people she loves, the ones who love her back, and what gets left behind when the final curtain falls. Read that again slowly, because the whole sermon sits right there.
For Sistas who have spent decades measured against a ruler that was never built with us in mind, that kind of talk lands like cool water. We got told early that our hair was wrong, our skin ran too deep, our bodies were too much or not enough depending on the day and the room. Countless among us learned to shrink, to code switch, to soften ourselves into something the culture might finally bless. Then somebody seasoned, entering her 60s, stands up and announces that the blessing was never the prize, and a knot in the chest loosens. Your shoulders drop without asking permission.
The trouble with the youth worship we grew up inside is that it robs us twice. First it convinces a young girl the whole value lives in a face and a figure held on loan for a couple of decades. Later it convinces that same grown-up girl that the loan has come due and she owes the planet an apology for aging at all. That con runs so old and so profitable that we quit questioning it. Look at who actually holds the wisdom in most families. Notice who the young ones sprint toward when the money runs short or the marriage cracks or the newborn refuses to sleep. Rarely the 22 year old with the flawless selfie. Usually the auntie, the grandmother, the matriarch who already survived the exact storm you are drowning in.
Value, the real kind, compounds. It refuses to evaporate at 40 or 50 or 60. A grown Sista at this age has buried people and rebuilt herself from the studs up. Rooms tried to erase her, and she planted herself in the seat anyway. Time and again the woman failed at things and learned to fail forward. None of that registers on a beauty scorecard, and none of it depreciates. If anything, all those years stack in her favor. Not a soul warns you about that part when you are twenty and scared of every birthday.
Black women have known this forever, even back when nobody outside our own kitchens and church pews bothered to say it out loud. In many of our families, elders were not treated as expired goods. They got consulted. The church mother, the neighborhood matriarch, the sista whose porch became the unofficial town hall, these were stations you grew into rather than out of. Somewhere the mainstream lost the plot and decided a female’s peak season was the thinnest slice of it, and too many of us absorbed that poison against everything our grandmothers modeled for us.
So when Viola talks about becoming, present tense, at this age, the language belongs to our foremothers, who knew it by heart. Coming home to herself at last, she says, the ruby slippers worn the entire time. That is not decline. Call it arrival. The stereotype claims the story winds down right about here; she insists the finest chapter only cracked open once she stopped auditioning for a life and simply started living one.
I want the Sistas reading this to sit with a hard question. How much of your fire goes toward staying acceptable to folks who will not even be at your funeral? Ask yourself how many mirrors have seized command of your whole morning. A different version of your days waits on the far side of that anxiety, and the elders who crossed over keep reporting back that the water is fine. You do not shrink into less. Instead you expand into more of yourself, the only becoming that ever counted.
None of this knocks youth, Sistas, and it is no call to stop tending the temple you live in. Move your body, feed it well, wear the lipstick that turns an ordinary Tuesday into an event. The message runs simpler and stronger than any beauty routine. Your worth never came as a coupon with a redeem-by date. It arrived standard, it arrived whole, and it shipped without a warranty set to expire when the birthday candles multiply.
At 61, she reads as clarity and mischief and appetite, plus a fearless calm that shows up only after you survive season upon season and learn to trust yourself. If that is what waits past all the pressure, then aging is not the thing to dread. The thing to dread is burning your good years believing the lie.
Viola is out here as living proof that letting go and giving up are not the same thing. The choice sits with the rest of us now, Black women right alongside everybody else, whether to take the lesson she keeps teaching. Count me all the way in.
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.