We Never Outgrow The Conversation

Just because you’ve crossed the bridge doesn’t mean you stop waving to the people still walking across it.

A few days ago someone replied to one of my Substack Notes saying they hoped conversations about women’s invisibility in midlife were becoming irrelevant.

And I understood exactly what she meant.

More women are speaking up, taking up space, choosing themselves…

And maybe we have finally reached the point where ‘becoming invisible’ doesn’t feel quite so inevitable.

I genuinely hope that’s true.

But my first thought wasn’t whether the conversation had become irrelevant, it was….

I wonder if she’s just standing in a different place on the path now.

Because that’s the strange thing about growing older, we don’t all arrive at the same insights together.

Some women are only just beginning to ask whether they’ve spent their whole lives living for everyone else. Others have been living the answer to that question for years.

Some have finally stopped asking permission. Others still don’t realise they’re asking for it.

Neither woman is wrong. They’re simply standing in different places.

I sometimes think we mistake our own progress for humanity’s progress. I know I’ve been guilty of this in the past – something stopped feeling relevant to me, so I assumed we’ve collectively moved beyond it.

But somewhere today there’s a woman Googling…

“Why don’t I know who I am anymore?”

Somewhere someone has just realised she hasn’t made a decision entirely for herself in 20 years.

Someone has only just noticed she apologises before every opinion.

Someone has only just discovered that exhaustion isn’t always caused by doing too much, sometimes it’s caused by being someone you’ve outgrown.

Just because we’ve crossed that bridge ourselves, doesn’t mean the bridge disappears.

And then something else occurred to me:

The conversations don’t only matter because someone else is arriving. They matter because we keep arriving too.

5 years ago I needed conversations about identity. Today I find myself thinking much more about self-trust. In another 5 years, I might be wrestling with belonging.

Or ageing, or grief, or purpose, or identity again!

The landscape is constantly changing and so are we.

Sometimes I read something I’ve read 10 times before and suddenly it lands somewhere completely different.

Not because the words have changed, but because I have.

There’s a concept in developmental psychology I heard once and have search for again today because it fits:

We don’t just accumulate knowledge throughout our lives, we reinterpret it.

The psychologist Robert Kegan described adult development not as collecting more information, but as transforming the way we make meaning from our experiences. We don’t just learn new things – we become new people reading the same ideas.

The conversation itself hasn’t changed. The person listening has.

That explains so much.

The book that did nothing for you at 41 might completely change your life at 51 (Hello Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert!).

The advice you rolled your eyes at even 5 years ago suddenly becomes exactly what you needed to hear.

The words were waiting. You simply hadn’t arrived there yet.

Which makes me think….maybe wisdom isn’t about finding one conversation that changes everything. Maybe it’s about staying close enough to the conversation that each season can reveal something new.

Because life doesn’t move in straight lines, it circles, cycles, spirals, revisits. It asks familiar questions with different faces.

Every time we think we’ve reached solid ground, life seems to ask us to meet ourselves again. Not because we haven’t been down that road before, but because we’re meeting it as someone new.

This is why I hope we never stop talking about visibility.

Or approval.

Or boundaries.

Or people-pleasing.

Or self-trust.

Or belonging.

Not because we haven’t evolved beyond them, but because somewhere, someone is opening that door for the very first time.

And somewhere else, someone who thought they’d finished that chapter has just realised there was another page.

I don’t think our job is to decide whether a conversation has become irrelevant.

I think our job is simply to keep a seat at the table because there will always be someone arriving.

And if we’re lucky, they’ll be someone there to greet us when we sit back down too.