What No One Tells You About Being a Woman in Her 30s and 40s

Do you remember the last time truly belonged to you?

After thirty, time begins to disappear in a strange way. Not taken away piece by piece. Meetings, plans for your children, and everything else that constantly comes before you. You’ve gotten really skilled at putting yourself last. Not because you don’t matter, but because you’ve been accustomed to it.

And alongside that, there’s a quieter kind of disappearing. Not vanishing from life, but retreating from your own perception of it. You share an idea in a meeting and no one responds. Twenty minutes later, a colleague says the same thing, and the whole room nods. You don’t feel angry. You just feel a familiar, nameless exhaustion.

“Body positivity” tells you to love yourself.
“Aging gracefully” tells you to make peace with time.
But no one talks about that deeper feeling of being present, yet slowly pushed to the edges.

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What you need is to find yourself again

Anxiety doesn’t disappear from trying harder. But there are moments when you briefly return from that sense of fading on a quiet morning balcony, in an afternoon drifting with the scent of coffee, when a familiar fragrance rises and something more whole in you quietly reappears.

Before the world asks anything of you, you have already existed for yourself.

This is a statement about time. And the way of living that Upon a Time wants to share with you.

To Summer · Distilled from the Eastern sense of time