The Freedom in Growing Older

I turned fifty-five last month. I celebrated by eating cake for breakfast in a mountain hut in Norway, watching the sunrise paint the fjord below in shades of rose and gold. It was, without exaggeration, one of the happiest mornings of my life.

This wasn't always how I felt about growing older. There were years many of them when each birthday felt like a small loss. Youth fading. Opportunities closing. The world tilting increasingly toward people who were younger, faster, louder.

But somewhere between fifty and now, a quiet revolution happened inside me. I stopped mourning who I used to be and started meeting who I was becoming. And she, it turns out, is someone I quite like.

The woman at fifty-five takes up space without apologizing. She says no when she means no. She books the trip, orders the wine, starts the conversation with a stranger. She has learned through loss and love and a thousand small acts of courage that life doesn't narrow as you age. It deepens.

Travel has been central to this transformation. Every solo journey strips away another layer of self-consciousness, another inherited belief about what women of a certain age should and shouldn't do. In the mountains, nobody cares about your wrinkles. On the trail, your worth is measured in kindness and resilience, not youth.

To any woman reading this who fears that the best years are behind her: they're not. The best years are the ones where you finally, fully belong to yourself.