I'm Shonda Rhymes, and we're bringing the Dominant Stories created by Shawn Land Audio in partnership with the Deft Self Esteem Project. I don't think of menopause as the cessation of being able to have biological children, although I understand that that is part of it. I really do see this as much more of a transition for women. As you said, we do start to feel less concerned with external validation and much more concerned with our own standard and measure of self worth. Hey, I'm Jess Weener and this is Dominant Stories, the podcast that helps us reclaim and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our bodies, our beauty, our creativity, and our identities. Today's show is a topic near and dear to my heart, my soul, and my you riss yep I said it, and my uterus. It is all about aging. Well, we know that aging happens to everybody. It really is often women who bear the brunt of judgment, misinformation, and even stigma about growing older. But we all could develop dominant stories about aging. So we're going to talk about what we can do to embrace our body image as our bodies change. What stories are we currently telling ourselves about our age and our ability, and how do we stay feeling visible when we are often so disappeared by the media as we age. On the show today, I have the perfect guest to have this conversation, the incredible Stacy London. Stacy is a woman I have long admired and you likely have to from her time as co host on the iconic TLC show What Not to Wear, and now in her current role as founder and CEO for State of Menopause, a company dedicated to making the state of menopause easier. Thank you. She has written two books, Dress Your Best and The Truth About Style. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation, and of course, please let me know what you think by subscribing and writing a review wherever you're listening. Stacy London, when I reached out to you to come on this show, you already began to change my life. Where I said to you, would you come on and talk to me about aging gracefully? And you said yes. I just have to tell you I don't believe in aging gracefully. I believe in aging period. Yeah, you know, Look, I think gracefully is an interesting adverb because to me, reeks of this kind of gendered femininity. We don't really talk about men aging gracefully. We talked about women aging gracefully, and so that pisces me off, first of all. Second of all, I mean it's graceful. It's not graceful, it's aging. I don't know where grace certainly plays a role unless we start talking about it from a much more superficial vantage point, like, oh, she's aged really gracefully, meaning what that she's had enough botox not to look her age. Listen, I'm off for it. Do the botox, get the facelip, use the filters. I don't care. But what's actually happening to you. Isn't changing your aging to kind of dress it up in these kind of cosmetic terms really bothers me because it doesn't get at what the real issue is is that women are punished for aging men are not. That's right. And you know what happened when when you said that back to me, I also realized, like, wow, look at how easy it is to fall into those dominant stories about how I'm supposed to age. Of course, and then I just thought, screw it, You're absolutely right, Like we're aging period full stop. Yeah. The one thing that I would say where grace really us make a difference is in our perspective in relation to ourselves and aging. In other words, we don't as women generally give ourselves enough grace and space to deal with the kind of negative self talk that we have internalized been taught to think about aging and be able to kind of untangle that very messy web of what it means to be gracious and kind to oneself, what it means to be gracious and kind, and accepting of what age gives us, not rejecting of what age takes. And that is the narrative that we've always been taught, and changing that narrative is nothing short of revolutionary. And that's why when I saw your announcement around the launch of State of Menopause, I was just tickled and delighted because as somebody actively in the throes of perimenopause and started at around forty six and a half, what I noticed when I read that like this was your newest venture, was it really allowed me to reflect on, like, okay, what has been my story since going into perimenopause and like transitioning quite abruptly by the way into that space. It was like nobody really asked me, where was I ready. It was like, boom, I thought menopause was optional. So that's how much I understood about it. And when I said, when I tell you that, I truly did not understand how unbelievably unprepared I was for menopause. Same for understanding it, for being able to connect the dots when it came to the issues and the effects of menopause, when it starts, how long it lasts, what it means. Right, all of these things were absolutely illusory to me. Like even though all of these things were going wrong, right, I attributed all of my perimenopausal symptoms either to the physical trauma that I experienced after spine surgery or the emotional trauma of losing my father. You can literally write off almost every effect of menopause as thing else related to something else. Right, So my anxiety, my stress, my mood changes, things like that were very much easy for me to say, Oh, well, it's fine surgery, of course I'm anxious. Of course, you know, I was very short tempered. I was very you know, not understanding that progesterone is one of the hormones that decreases first. That's related to mood directly. It's not nature versus nurture, of course, it's always both, And certainly the menopause experience is experienced by people differently right how you get to it, whether it's chronological, age, surgical, medical People like Dr Jen Gunter, who wrote The Menopause Manifesto, said even a childhood trauma plays into the way that you experienced menopause. So I looked at the physical and emotional trauma and realized how much that activated the very severe menopausal symptoms that I have less of now but still really didn't understand at all. Of the time, I felt like I was going crazy. And part of it it was that, you know, all of a sudden, I kind of missed a news cycle. I just somehow wasn't in the loop anymore. And you know who the hell is Emma Chamberlain from YouTube. I mean, it felt like, whereas I have been in the center of understanding kind of pop culture and fashion trends and style and all of the things that I have always talked about, I felt that I kind of, you know, got left behind. And for me, it was very hard not to dive into this sense of negative self talk, of feeling completely worthless, of thinking that wow, I never got married, I never had kids, all of these kind of markers of achievements for women, which is also kind of ridiculous. I like to think of menopause as a huge opportunity, a gateway to safeguard the next forty years of your health. And part of that is because we were going to live so much longer than our mothers did or our grandmothers did. And if our average life spectancy is going to be in our eighties or nineties, we're going to be older a lot longer than we're going to be young. So enough aging gracefully. We're just aging right, and we're aging a lot longer than we did before. So what do we do with this time in the middle. This is the perfect moment for a transition and a reinvention. You know what strikes me is that I think there's this move for me. I'll speak for me. There was a move from the external to the internal at this period of my life in in aging, and some of that is about focus. It was about my focus on external appreciation, validation goals into an internal communication with my body as things were starting to shift and change in the dominant stories that were coming up for me during the beginnings of perimenopause forty years old choosing not to have children. Have always known that that was not a life path for me, and then my dominant stories were like, oh, my god, I'm really going to not be fertile, like last chance lady, like eggs or drop in, what do you want to do? And like, you know, all these stories started coming up that I don't even know where my stories, but they were the dominant stories about my worth or my value about like oh, you're on the decline of your life. Well, but you know, just to be clear, I don't want to invalidate what you're saying, because I think what you're saying is very real and very much a part of this experience. We don't actually as a society recognize the kind of realization that we're no longer able to have children. Right. This is something that even as a person who did not want children, there is something about the fact that knowing you can't do it is different than having the option too. That's right. In addition, I think societally and culturally we have a tendency then to reduce a woman's worth to her reproductive health. We are not just ovens for buns. Women in particular are absolutely being looked at through this patriarchal lens as defective once we can no longer have biological children, And to me, that is the deepest, most ungraceful way to think about it. Right. I don't think of menopause as the cessation of being able to have biological children, although I understand that that is part of it. I really do see this as much more of a transition for women. As you said, we do start to feel less concerned with external validation and much more concerned with our own standard and measure of self worth. Yeah. I was thinking about the way that I was introduced to these concepts, and I was thinking about who welcomed me into the aging process, you know, like I knew my mother hit menopause when she was fifty, and my mother just says like, yeah, just I just stopped, and I just never had my period and always well, we talked about a lot of things. We certainly talked about puberty. I tried most of my life not to get pregnant, right, So we talked about sex and sex education from a preventative measure. But this sort of natural progression in a woman's life we didn't talk about. And I'm curious what that was like for you growing up, and did you have different kinds of conversations around aging with the women in your life. No, I mean to be completely honest with you. The one thing that I want to say about that is that, you know, my mom did not she had a radical hysterectomy. I did not know that she went into menopause. I did not know. She didn't tell me anything about it. She talked to me about burning her bra not burning up right. She talked to me about what it was like to be able to take the pill. You know, what what a revolutionist was in the seventies, The fact that she could have her own credit card after in eighteen seventy two. I mean, these are the things that she talked about, and how far her generation had to kick the can down the road for us. And now I find it very important that we continue to change and more this conversation about what aging and revolution looked like. Um. And the one thing that I'll say about menopause is that I think menopause and aging are conflated they're related, but they are two different things. And Scientific American did a study that I quote quite a bit that says that the lowest point of happiness in a woman's life was forty five to fifty four. And I don't think that's by accident. We either have children or empty nest syndrome where we never had children and maybe are feeling that loss. We have elder care or dying parents. We are in the middle of, at least for women, the potential for our earning to decrease significantly at this stage of life. These are heavy, hard things. Put on top of that, anxiety, depression, mood swings, brain fog, night sweats, hot flashes, I mean, weight gain, weight body distribution, joint pain, muscle fatigue, and we put chin hairs in their chin hairs, food allergies, and all of these things make it sound like menopause is a disease and not an opportunity, right, And that's the problem, right. I will never sugarcoat the fact that the menopause experience for of post menopausal women said that they experienced the jumps that were hard, not impossible, hard. And if we are educated, if we have understanding of our own agency, or choices around what works for us. Well, then that hard journey is going to be a hell of a lot easier. And that is really why I started my company. I think that menopause has an effect on the way that we feel about this age, not vice versa. I love it, and I also think about the additive layer of loneliness when you're not in communication about these things. Right, well, I'll tell you Google analytics most questions surrounding perimenopause during COVID went up. It is not because I think more people went into menopause. I think there was nowhere to go for help. There was no one to ask. You couldn't go see your doctor and create a support system around ourselves that you know, the minute that I was given some tools, it made life a lot easier for me to deal with this stage. When you were back at some the first moments that you were feeling these changes, and I've seen you write a lot about this, but I was curious if you could voice or articulate like what the narrative sounded like in your own head at that time, if you remember, like do you remember what the dominant story was about that for you? All of it, I mean you know. Look, I started my career as a magazine fashion stylist, as an editor, and then I was in television right for fifteen years and what Not to Where is the show that I'm most known for. But I did Love Luster Run, I was on the View for a bit, I did Access Hollywood. I was a correspondent for the Today Show. I was on Oprah and Rachel Ray and I mean it went on and on and on. I did campaigns for Panting, for Well, like for Dr Schulz. There was a point where you could turn on your television there was a thirty percent chance I would be on your screen. And to go from that to feeling like I kind of faded away was incredibly painful. And there was an incredibly difficult time for me where I was like, I'm not worthy. I really lost my way, and I feel like in a lot of ways, I was put in a box like she can only do this, she is only a fashion person, and fashion makeover shows are no longer in style, so she has nothing to offer. And these were the kinds of stories that nobody told me. This is what I was saying to myself, right, I was trying to rationalize where I found myself, this idea of growing older, of starting to look different, of looking in the mirror and not being like, oh, you know, I can't drink too Martini's and wake up the next morning looking bright eyed and bushy tailed, I look like a hag, and understanding that my skin was changing, that where it used to be sort of bright and dewey, it got sallow and dry. And I just didn't feel like myself, which is probably the number one thing that I hear from other women who are experiencing pre menopause, perimenopause, or post menopause. They don't feel like themselves. One of the things that I wrote in my book The Truth about Style, was that you know, there are times where you have to step away from the mirror, no matter what age you are, no matter what transition you're going through, and look for your reflection elsewhere, not in a mirror, but in the example that I gave, I said, look at your reflection through the eyes of the people who love you, and understand that what they see is not what you see and what you say to yourself. And sometimes you need others who love you to remind you of who you are. And honestly, the last six years. That has been a real journey for me. What I really had to think about was what do I have to offer? What have I always been able to offer? And how can I find a vehicle in which to continue serving the needs of communities that I care about. I got a good idea. Let's take a moment to reach hard and we'll be back in a flash. H We're back, ready to conquer your dominant stories. Here we go. For me, part of my long time story has been my worth is my work. And I think where it all became conflated and like piled up for me was when my desires changed around that hustle, and it coordinated with a time where my body was slowing down or softening up or wanting different things. And then it became a matter of like reckoning with myself. You know, hunger has always been a theme in my life, both metaphysical and physical, but the the hunger that I had to want something new, and I hear that in your story as well, and it came side by side with this is what people know me to be and my journey is taking me in a slightly divergent direction. Do I have permission to go there? What will it look like? How will I be relevant? And then on top of all of that, I'm heading into the middle passage of my life and all of these other things are happening, and so it's not just one thing, and I think it gets wrapped into fertility, productivity, connection. My relationship to my body has changed, not in just around these things we're talking about, but into an appreciation of it's quite frankly, it's functionality over its adornment. Yes, I'm so with you, right, I have had body issues my whole life. I am five Well, I don't know if I'm five seven anymore since this fine surgery. Let's just say at five six, and I have been eighty nine pounds in my life, and I've been a d eighty pounds in my life. That's a pretty broad range of sizes. And I can look at anybody. I can. I can look somebody up and down. I can I can know what size they are, I can know what will look great on them. I know what colors work for them. But you know, we're always a little bit blinded by looking at our own reflection. And for me, I've always had issues with body dysmorphia. This is something that I've struggled with my whole life on any channel, on any show, on any in any project where I've had to help somebody kind of create their own sense of style. The compassion that I naturally had for people who were struggling was something that I never gave to myself. And yes, I definitely think that part of aging has been about that compassion, and not for nothing. This hustle culture, this capitalist culture that you're talking about, it is really pervasive. And this whole idea of being lazy or just bored or tired or not wanting to participate is not necessarily a sign of depression. Being able to opt out and say hey, I need a break, I need a rest, that is something we don't talk about enough. I agree. I did not make this decision at fifty while I was fifty one when I acquired the company, because I was like, wow, I need to reinvent myself to be relevant. What I realized was that the relevancy really was about what my existential crisis led me to. It was about what is going to bring me joy, satisfaction, happiness, contentment in this next phase of my life, and maybe maybe that will be done in five years maybe it won't be. But what I realized is this desperation, this fear that like I had nothing left to give, was something so palpable and so scary that I just started to see everything in my life through the lens of loss. You used to be able to get pregnant, was the least agreed. It was like you used to be some of the people wanted on television. You used to be attractive, you used to be a size this you used to be, and never looking and appreciating what was actually happening in the moment. And I even still carry regret that I didn't appreciate what happened to me in the moment when I was younger. But the fact is, I don't think you start to appreciate the present until you start having less of it. I agree, And I think what happens to as I'm talking to friends and menopause and we're going into paramenopause, is yes, we're going to live a longer life. And I think at middle passage we start to reckon with death differently. At this point we've likely had more losses than perhaps we had in our youth. Although I understand people have lost in their youth quite a bit. So when you say we can't quite appreciate this from maybe a younger station in life, I really get that now, and I want to make it easier for our next generation to have these stories, as I imagine you do too, because you know, all of the work that you're doing is about democratizing this story for people. Right. Yeah, And look, menopause has to be something that we don't just normalize as a conversation, but we optimize so that by the time Gen Z gets to be this age, this will no longer be a conversation we need to be having. This will no longer or be a conversation where nobody knows what to do, how to get help, how to ask questions, and what to be ashamed of. I mean everything that you know, the things that women talk about being ashamed of. Right, you know, there's this whole conversation now around younger girls and getting their period and talking about not being ashamed to go to the bathroom with a tampon, And I'm like, well, why do we have to be ashamed of going to the bathroom without a tampon? You know what I mean? Here is something where you can start saving all the money that you were spending on pads or cups or tampons, and buy aarrings, choose a new chair. I want people to think about what is possible, not what is no longer possible. Yes, and the thing is that you can only do better when you know better, right, And that is true of the way we talk to ourselves. So if you are not spending any time thinking about that negative loop that is going on, that voice in your head that is telling you that you're not good enough, that you can't do something, that you're not qualified, you're too old, that you have imposter syndrome, or whatever it is. All those are thoughts that get in the way of you doing whatever the hell you want. You know, you and I share so many things in common. I am seeing more in this conversation. But one of the things that we share is people come to us for advice and we're in the expert role quite a bit all the time, all the time. So here's my question for you, miss Stacy London. Yeah, I find that it's a role that I love to play. It's something that I value of being of service to people, and it has been tricky for me being in an expert role because in my own relationship to that it has stopped me at times from being vulnerable about not knowing and being able to say sometimes like I'm in progress. I'm in process. I don't know, and I'm curious if you've ever shared that feeling and what your relationship is as a current and former and future expert in the space of not knowing. Yeah, I'm a big believer now, I'll tell you I wasn't always a big believer in not knowing. When I went from magazines to television and I was supposed to be considered an expert, I had no sense of humor about myself. I was like, I have to be the authority. People need to take me seriously. I can make fun of them, they can't make fun of me. This is my job. I'm supposed to do this. Blah blah blah. I have this whole set of ideas about what I was supposed to appear like on camera and not being able to be a little bit more relaxed and you know, open to questions or even constructive criticism about what I was doing right, I was like, no, I know what I'm doing. I'm in charge. I got this the moment for me, when I realized, like I have to say I don't know. I wasn't really in television. It was when I realized, Okay, I'm going to step into this role as CEO. I have no obvious qualification via CEO, and I didn't know anything about infrastructure or e commerce or law or all of the things that you know you have to learn in order to run a company. But the thing is everybody is capable of learning. If anything, I believe more now in neuroplasticity than I ever did before. And what I realize is that you have to go in being able to say I don't know. I surround myself now with people as smart as I can find them, definitely smarter than me, because all I get to do is learn. All I get to do is take this knowledge and soak it up like a sponge. And being able to say I don't know is one of the strongest, most powerful things I've ever been able to do. It is that kind of vulnerability that actually kind of creates progress in relationships in business everything and not knowing is kind of exciting. Yes, I feel the same way, and actually being able to say I don't know is one of the power tools that I offer people around challenging their dominant stories because it opens you to questioning. Right, So even if your dominant story is like you're not qualified to be in this business, lots of people have that dominant story actually being able to say, I don't know, am I I don't know? Is that true? It's just a gentle questioning. I find as a technique that I used to say, like, I hear you voice, I hear you loud and clear, but I don't know if that's true. Why what do you mean? Give me an example? Why did I want to do this? Why do I think I can do this? Why do I think I can't do this? Why you keep asking? Why? You finally get to the kernel of truth? And this idea of you know is sort of opening that door to why bingo? Right, I don't know if that's true? And so they're really connected and I never thought about that before. Yeah, me neither. And I like it in this kind of conversation because I think one of the things that we say about growing older, which I do believe is true, is all of this earned wisdom. I get that, and I want to insert the part where we don't also feel like all of a sudden you hit a certain age and then doom. You're supposed to like know it all. I think what I'm hearing in our conversation is a discovery, is a process, is a journey? Is that's where the grace and space comes in. I mean, I think of discovery like falling in love. Right Nobody there's no book that teaches you how to do that. And when you are falling in love with a person, certainly, it's layer after layer, it's moment after moment. It's an incredible process of understanding another person. You know, for me to say that, like what is my girlfriend's favorite food was part of falling in love with her? Or you know where her favorite place to go is? It was part of falling in love with her. I feel the same way about where I am in my journey right now. Discovery is like falling in love. I think about falling in love with your life. It is the opportunity to learn and open your eyes even more to things that you may have looked at a thousand times, but there's always more to know that. To me, just the idea of discovery is grace. Aging is a fact. Yes, it doesn't have it doesn't have a descriptor attached to it. But what you can do while you age, now, that is what can be done with grace beautiful. All right, you know the drill. It's that time. I'll be back before you know it. Hey, hey, we're back now, let's get into our convo. Let me set the stage. It's two thousand seven. It's one of many Oprah appearances, and you are talking to this woman about dressing for her age, and so let me play a clip and then I want to come back and hear what you think. Okay, here is my problem. Okay, you are dressing a little inappropriately for your age, my dear. Okay, So okay, okay, So where is it written? If you has a dressed a way when you get older, we can update your style and make it look like you are ageless and timeless and classic. So I want to make sure that things like this don't happen. Okay, all right, let's go. So the things like this you're pointing to a little people, I think on her shirt. Um, but this is fifteen years ago, and I'm curious where where you go when you hear that. Now I cringe a little bit, to be honest, with you. It's not that I'm sure that that woman was probably dressing in a way that didn't suit her body as well as it could or wasn't as bigure flattering as it m have been. But it also wasn't really my job to say, you know, she asked the right question, She asked the question fault who says right. At the time, it felt very important as an expert to be kind of creating these rules and guard rails for people to follow and educate them. And the thing is, I think I might still say the same thing with the caveat that you can look however you want to look, you can age however you want to age. And what I what I still feel is that if we are dressing in a way that doesn't seem to suit us. In other words, if people react in a way that doesn't kind of match the way we expect them to in the way that we present ourselves, there's a disconnect there. And what I always think that is an issue when it comes to women who are getting older and whatever age they could be thirty, I don't care just as they age that there's this sense that they're still in the style that they wore in their youth, that they hold onto the style that they were when they felt best about themselves, even if that style doesn't actually suit who they are now. In other words, isn't as flattering, isn't as powerful, doesn't give them a sense of themselves other than I wish I was still young. That, to me is where the mistake that I made comes in, is that I should have said, is this look the look that you loved when you were twenty five? Or is this the look that you truly love now? Yeah, but to give yourself space and grace too. Would you have known to do that at that time where you were at in your life. Like I think, as those of us who dole out advice, we do what we do best in the moment we're doing it. I agree. And I also think that like there was a formula for what not to wear? Right, it was like we really were asked to be experts in our field. We had to make sort of black and white statements in order to make it clear what our objective was. And the thing is that that's what would be you know, tricky about a show that was just telling people what to wear. Now, that's it wouldn't fly in the same way, because we have to honor who people want to be, right, I learned to be more expansive, And of course there are lots of things that I look back at and cringe and think, oh god, none of that would fly now me too, right, But it was what it was in the moment. When you know better, you do better. And certainly even my choice to change roles instead of doing something that was solely based in style, to do something that's based much more in wellness and feeling good as opposed to just be looking good is part of my own evolution bingo, And that word is really important I think for us to remember, too, is the combination of looking and feeling. That's a guide post for me to say, how do I feel in this? I let that guide a lot of my choices. Now. Yeah, well look, I mean one of the things that I say now about style right is like take the suit right. People are like, oh a suit. You're always saying, get a suit. What is it that it matters? Right? What matters about the suit? Now, if you're let's say, going on a job interview and you want to be a dominatrix by all means, where the latex cat suit if you want to work at like an old stogy corporate bank where the pinstripe suit, use the language, the visual language that is going to get you what you want. I do not make the rules. I just want you to win the game. I just want you to get where you want to go. And if dressing in a way that makes you feel like you are being your full person, your full self, and you're getting where you want to go in life, then don't let anybody stop you. Amen insert just pumping hands in the air. I love it, you know. I wanted to ask you something a little bit switching gears, but something that you made me think about, and I want to say before I forget, which is also a ps part of my growing older journey is brain fog, brain fog. It's a little brain foggy. But I was thinking about because it's not very often actually that I get to speak so publicly, or I've chosen to speak so publicly about my choice and now my husband and my choice to not have children. And I was thinking about how we mark time as and I know that a lot of my friends who have children mark time differently. They do it by the developmental stages of their children, right, It's like it's first steps, it's kindergarten, it's first food, it's whatever it is, right. And I also marked time and milestones by watching my my friend's kids grow up. So all of a sudden, I'm like, wait a minute, he's ten years old. I remember when she was pregnant. How the hell did ten years go by? I think it's different when you're not raising children inside of your home. I think the relationship to time aging progress is also uniquely different. And I just wanted to ask you if you've noticed that as well. Absolutely, I mean I can't believe that some of my friends kids are graduating from college. Yes, I graduated from college two days ago in my in my mind, but anyway, yes, I do think that that's true. And I do think that for me that was a little bit tricky because so many of my friends had kids that I didn't feel that I could relate to them the same way. And a lot of my friends became a lot younger than me because I had freedoms that, you know, my friends were no longer had, and so for a long time, I was only spending my time with younger people, much younger people, and in a way. I think that did some damage to me as well, because I started to realize that their opportunities were still on the horizon in a way that mine were not. And I don't mean any particular job. I just mean the opportunities that come with having more days in front of you than days behind you. I had to kind of write the ship right. I had to spend time with my friends who do have kids. I just spend time with friends my own age. I just spend time with my younger friends with the perspective that I now have that I am where I am and they are where they are, and that this tendency that we have, this terrible tendency that I've always had to compare myself with others, made so much worse by social media, does nothing but devalue who you are and where you are. And when we love somebody, we have to love them unconditionally, not in relationship to how they affect us. And that was what I sort of I had to kind of re establish my relationships with people from a different vantage point and to offer ourselves, as we've been talking about throughout this conversation, the grace and love to be where we are in those moments. It is really important to remember that we can do things that are challenging that ultimately wind up being incredibly fulfilling. And even when you are negatively self speaking, that you have the potential and the power to step in and say, well, I don't know, I'm not sure why all the things that you preach are things that we should be talking about at this stage of life, particularly where we have wisdom to maybe answer those questions a little bit more deeply and a little bit more profoundly than we could in our youth. Exactly. I have one last question for you, and it's one of my favorite ones. I'm going to hear what you're gonna say about this. What part of your body could tell the story of your life? Oh my god, that is a very interesting question. And I would say the part of my body that probably tells the most about my life is my skin. And I know that that's a pretty big organ, actually the largest organ. But you know, my body is riddled with scars from operations, from topical steroids from my psoriasis as a child. My skin has been at the center of my story since I was three years old when I was diagnosed with psoriasis. And I had no idea what that meant, except that I was told that it was chronic, that I would always have it, and that something was wrong with me. And that is very difficult language for a child to understand or to really process, other than to know something is wrong with me. Right. I was covered in soo rised this from my neck down from the time I was eleven to thirteen, after incredibly bad battles with strap throat, and I was made of scales. I wore white turtlenecks and long black pants every day, even in the summer. I had to cut my hair. It was much longer than it is now. I had to cut it into a crew cut because the cold tar that we were using on my scalp. My mom used to scrub it out with or acid. It was always about my skin. It was, in some sense, always about the visible, which is why the internal work of validation has been so hard for me and so necessary. And so I would say that my skin really does tell a story. My scars tell a story. It's one thing to say, oh, you know, they're badges of honor. I'm a warrior, I've been through all that. Blah blah bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, right, what it is? It's my story, That's all it is. It's my story. And rather than put a value judgment on it, rather than saying I'm brave or how courageous, or oh, it's amazing that you've gotten past this, or oh poor you boo, who look at that scar? That's terrible. Whatever, It's just my story, just like your story is your story, and the best thing that we can do with the story is fucking tell it. And when the story doesn't serve you, to change it. Change it in, chuck it, change in, chuck it and challenge it. This is the whole point of this show, Stacy. Where can people find out more? Where where can we send people to get connected? Sure? Well, of course our website State of Menopause dot com. Our new blah is up now so you can read articles from some of our medical experts who are on our medical Advisory Board, as well as for products. You don't need to know where you are in the menopause journey to see if there is a product that will work for you. There is a search engine so you can shop by issue rather than just by product. We are shop state of on Instagram and Facebook and obviously you can find me Stacy London, you know pretty much everywhere. Stacy London Real on Instagram, Stacy London on Twitter, Stacy London on Pinterest, Stacy London Official on on Facebook. You know, they make it hard for you to always have your name. I love it. Thank you so much, thank you, just thank you so many great gems from Stacy London. But I think number one, we got to talk about this more. Whether we're talking about the process of aging, the ups and downs of aging, and of course body changes in menopause. We just have keep normalizing that conversation. So talk about it with somebody you love and trust, ask a doctor, talk about it with your friends. I think the more we can normalize it, the better. I also really got the sense that we, and I know I do, need to get more educated about these things. And it doesn't mean it has to be a big homework assignment. You don't have to kind of like absorb a whole whole book about it. But I say, you know, look up an article, try to get some expert specific facts because there's a lot of stuff out there, So be diligent as you look up and get educated. But let's get educated and then, of course, the big part of our conversation today with Stacy was challenging those dominant stories, the things that say, who are you to run that company? Or you know you're not as vital or worthy anymore as you're aging. She has an approach where Stacy would ask, why why am I thinking that? Why do I believe that? I have an approach where I say, like, I don't know, is that true? I'm not sure that's true. I like to get curious about those dominant stories. But either way, I think let's challenge those negative voices that tell us these life changes are signaling some ing terrible and instead, as Stacy so beautifully said, we're all aging aging period. But how we do it, how we can embrace it. That's where the grace and compassion comes in. And if you're interested in exploring more about your dominant stories and how you can challenge them and change them, I teach workshops on this stuff, so you can always sign up at Jess Weiner dot com. You can follow me on Instagram at I'm Jess Weiner. I really love the community that we're creating. I love the stories you're sharing and the questions you're asking So if you want to tell us about your Dominant Stories that you're rewriting and working on, you can email us at podcast at Dominant stories dot com or leave us a voicemail at two one three five nine three zero three three. And don't stress, I'm gonna put all that in the show notes. And next week we're going to talk about creativity with my talented and kind and super genius friend, Alex Blackamore. Alex is an award winning music director, arranger, composer. You know he's done some like small but successful Broadway shows like Hamilton's Dear Evan Hansen in the Heights. Yeah, those shows. Alex is incredible. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation. And again, thanks so much for being here, and please don't forget to write a review wherever you're listening. It's super duper duper helps us out. And remember we're always learning, we're always growing. Dominant Stories with Jess Winer is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I'm Shonda Rhymes, and we're bringing the Dominant Stories created by Shawn Land Audio in partnership with the Deft Self Esteem Project. I don't think of menopause as the cessation of being able to have biological children, although I understand that that is part of it. I really do see this as much more of a transition for women. As you said, we do start to feel less concerned with external validation and much more concerned with our own standard and measure of self worth. Hey, I'm Jess Weener and this is Dominant Stories, the podcast that helps us reclaim and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our bodies, our beauty, our creativity, and our identities. Today's show is a topic near and dear to my heart, my soul, and my you riss yep I said it, and my uterus. It is all about aging. Well, we know that aging happens to everybody. It really is often women who bear the brunt of judgment, misinformation, and even stigma about growing older. But we all could develop dominant stories about aging. So we're going to talk about what we can do to embrace our body image as our bodies change. What stories are we currently telling ourselves about our age and our ability, and how do we stay feeling visible when we are often so disappeared by the media as we age. On the show today, I have the perfect guest to have this conversation, the incredible Stacy London. Stacy is a woman I have long admired and you likely have to from her time as co host on the iconic TLC show What Not to Wear, and now in her current role as founder and CEO for State of Menopause, a company dedicated to making the state of menopause easier. Thank you. She has written two books, Dress Your Best and The Truth About Style. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation, and of course, please let me know what you think by subscribing and writing a review wherever you're listening. Stacy London, when I reached out to you to come on this show, you already began to change my life. Where I said to you, would you come on and talk to me about aging gracefully? And you said yes. I just have to tell you I don't believe in aging gracefully. I believe in aging period. Yeah, you know, Look, I think gracefully is an interesting adverb because to me, reeks of this kind of gendered femininity. We don't really talk about men aging gracefully. We talked about women aging gracefully, and so that pisces me off, first of all. Second of all, I mean it's graceful. It's not graceful, it's aging. I don't know where grace certainly plays a role unless we start talking about it from a much more superficial vantage point, like, oh, she's aged really gracefully, meaning what that she's had enough botox not to look her age. Listen, I'm off for it. Do the botox, get the facelip, use the filters. I don't care. But what's actually happening to you. Isn't changing your aging to kind of dress it up in these kind of cosmetic terms really bothers me because it doesn't get at what the real issue is is that women are punished for aging men are not. That's right. And you know what happened when when you said that back to me, I also realized, like, wow, look at how easy it is to fall into those dominant stories about how I'm supposed to age. Of course, and then I just thought, screw it, You're absolutely right, Like we're aging period full stop. Yeah. The one thing that I would say where grace really us make a difference is in our perspective in relation to ourselves and aging. In other words, we don't as women generally give ourselves enough grace and space to deal with the kind of negative self talk that we have internalized been taught to think about aging and be able to kind of untangle that very messy web of what it means to be gracious and kind to oneself, what it means to be gracious and kind, and accepting of what age gives us, not rejecting of what age takes. And that is the narrative that we've always been taught, and changing that narrative is nothing short of revolutionary. And that's why when I saw your announcement around the launch of State of Menopause, I was just tickled and delighted because as somebody actively in the throes of perimenopause and started at around forty six and a half, what I noticed when I read that like this was your newest venture, was it really allowed me to reflect on, like, okay, what has been my story since going into perimenopause and like transitioning quite abruptly by the way into that space. It was like nobody really asked me, where was I ready. It was like, boom, I thought menopause was optional. So that's how much I understood about it. And when I said, when I tell you that, I truly did not understand how unbelievably unprepared I was for menopause. Same for understanding it, for being able to connect the dots when it came to the issues and the effects of menopause, when it starts, how long it lasts, what it means. Right, all of these things were absolutely illusory to me. Like even though all of these things were going wrong, right, I attributed all of my perimenopausal symptoms either to the physical trauma that I experienced after spine surgery or the emotional trauma of losing my father. You can literally write off almost every effect of menopause as thing else related to something else. Right, So my anxiety, my stress, my mood changes, things like that were very much easy for me to say, Oh, well, it's fine surgery, of course I'm anxious. Of course, you know, I was very short tempered. I was very you know, not understanding that progesterone is one of the hormones that decreases first. That's related to mood directly. It's not nature versus nurture, of course, it's always both, And certainly the menopause experience is experienced by people differently right how you get to it, whether it's chronological, age, surgical, medical People like Dr Jen Gunter, who wrote The Menopause Manifesto, said even a childhood trauma plays into the way that you experienced menopause. So I looked at the physical and emotional trauma and realized how much that activated the very severe menopausal symptoms that I have less of now but still really didn't understand at all. Of the time, I felt like I was going crazy. And part of it it was that, you know, all of a sudden, I kind of missed a news cycle. I just somehow wasn't in the loop anymore. And you know who the hell is Emma Chamberlain from YouTube. I mean, it felt like, whereas I have been in the center of understanding kind of pop culture and fashion trends and style and all of the things that I have always talked about, I felt that I kind of, you know, got left behind. And for me, it was very hard not to dive into this sense of negative self talk, of feeling completely worthless, of thinking that wow, I never got married, I never had kids, all of these kind of markers of achievements for women, which is also kind of ridiculous. I like to think of menopause as a huge opportunity, a gateway to safeguard the next forty years of your health. And part of that is because we were going to live so much longer than our mothers did or our grandmothers did. And if our average life spectancy is going to be in our eighties or nineties, we're going to be older a lot longer than we're going to be young. So enough aging gracefully. We're just aging right, and we're aging a lot longer than we did before. So what do we do with this time in the middle. This is the perfect moment for a transition and a reinvention. You know what strikes me is that I think there's this move for me. I'll speak for me. There was a move from the external to the internal at this period of my life in in aging, and some of that is about focus. It was about my focus on external appreciation, validation goals into an internal communication with my body as things were starting to shift and change in the dominant stories that were coming up for me during the beginnings of perimenopause forty years old choosing not to have children. Have always known that that was not a life path for me, and then my dominant stories were like, oh, my god, I'm really going to not be fertile, like last chance lady, like eggs or drop in, what do you want to do? And like, you know, all these stories started coming up that I don't even know where my stories, but they were the dominant stories about my worth or my value about like oh, you're on the decline of your life. Well, but you know, just to be clear, I don't want to invalidate what you're saying, because I think what you're saying is very real and very much a part of this experience. We don't actually as a society recognize the kind of realization that we're no longer able to have children. Right. This is something that even as a person who did not want children, there is something about the fact that knowing you can't do it is different than having the option too. That's right. In addition, I think societally and culturally we have a tendency then to reduce a woman's worth to her reproductive health. We are not just ovens for buns. Women in particular are absolutely being looked at through this patriarchal lens as defective once we can no longer have biological children, And to me, that is the deepest, most ungraceful way to think about it. Right. I don't think of menopause as the cessation of being able to have biological children, although I understand that that is part of it. I really do see this as much more of a transition for women. As you said, we do start to feel less concerned with external validation and much more concerned with our own standard and measure of self worth. Yeah. I was thinking about the way that I was introduced to these concepts, and I was thinking about who welcomed me into the aging process, you know, like I knew my mother hit menopause when she was fifty, and my mother just says like, yeah, just I just stopped, and I just never had my period and always well, we talked about a lot of things. We certainly talked about puberty. I tried most of my life not to get pregnant, right, So we talked about sex and sex education from a preventative measure. But this sort of natural progression in a woman's life we didn't talk about. And I'm curious what that was like for you growing up, and did you have different kinds of conversations around aging with the women in your life. No, I mean to be completely honest with you. The one thing that I want to say about that is that, you know, my mom did not she had a radical hysterectomy. I did not know that she went into menopause. I did not know. She didn't tell me anything about it. She talked to me about burning her bra not burning up right. She talked to me about what it was like to be able to take the pill. You know, what what a revolutionist was in the seventies, The fact that she could have her own credit card after in eighteen seventy two. I mean, these are the things that she talked about, and how far her generation had to kick the can down the road for us. And now I find it very important that we continue to change and more this conversation about what aging and revolution looked like. Um. And the one thing that I'll say about menopause is that I think menopause and aging are conflated they're related, but they are two different things. And Scientific American did a study that I quote quite a bit that says that the lowest point of happiness in a woman's life was forty five to fifty four. And I don't think that's by accident. We either have children or empty nest syndrome where we never had children and maybe are feeling that loss. We have elder care or dying parents. We are in the middle of, at least for women, the potential for our earning to decrease significantly at this stage of life. These are heavy, hard things. Put on top of that, anxiety, depression, mood swings, brain fog, night sweats, hot flashes, I mean, weight gain, weight body distribution, joint pain, muscle fatigue, and we put chin hairs in their chin hairs, food allergies, and all of these things make it sound like menopause is a disease and not an opportunity, right, And that's the problem, right. I will never sugarcoat the fact that the menopause experience for of post menopausal women said that they experienced the jumps that were hard, not impossible, hard. And if we are educated, if we have understanding of our own agency, or choices around what works for us. Well, then that hard journey is going to be a hell of a lot easier. And that is really why I started my company. I think that menopause has an effect on the way that we feel about this age, not vice versa. I love it, and I also think about the additive layer of loneliness when you're not in communication about these things. Right, well, I'll tell you Google analytics most questions surrounding perimenopause during COVID went up. It is not because I think more people went into menopause. I think there was nowhere to go for help. There was no one to ask. You couldn't go see your doctor and create a support system around ourselves that you know, the minute that I was given some tools, it made life a lot easier for me to deal with this stage. When you were back at some the first moments that you were feeling these changes, and I've seen you write a lot about this, but I was curious if you could voice or articulate like what the narrative sounded like in your own head at that time, if you remember, like do you remember what the dominant story was about that for you? All of it, I mean you know. Look, I started my career as a magazine fashion stylist, as an editor, and then I was in television right for fifteen years and what Not to Where is the show that I'm most known for. But I did Love Luster Run, I was on the View for a bit, I did Access Hollywood. I was a correspondent for the Today Show. I was on Oprah and Rachel Ray and I mean it went on and on and on. I did campaigns for Panting, for Well, like for Dr Schulz. There was a point where you could turn on your television there was a thirty percent chance I would be on your screen. And to go from that to feeling like I kind of faded away was incredibly painful. And there was an incredibly difficult time for me where I was like, I'm not worthy. I really lost my way, and I feel like in a lot of ways, I was put in a box like she can only do this, she is only a fashion person, and fashion makeover shows are no longer in style, so she has nothing to offer. And these were the kinds of stories that nobody told me. This is what I was saying to myself, right, I was trying to rationalize where I found myself, this idea of growing older, of starting to look different, of looking in the mirror and not being like, oh, you know, I can't drink too Martini's and wake up the next morning looking bright eyed and bushy tailed, I look like a hag, and understanding that my skin was changing, that where it used to be sort of bright and dewey, it got sallow and dry. And I just didn't feel like myself, which is probably the number one thing that I hear from other women who are experiencing pre menopause, perimenopause, or post menopause. They don't feel like themselves. One of the things that I wrote in my book The Truth about Style, was that you know, there are times where you have to step away from the mirror, no matter what age you are, no matter what transition you're going through, and look for your reflection elsewhere, not in a mirror, but in the example that I gave, I said, look at your reflection through the eyes of the people who love you, and understand that what they see is not what you see and what you say to yourself. And sometimes you need others who love you to remind you of who you are. And honestly, the last six years. That has been a real journey for me. What I really had to think about was what do I have to offer? What have I always been able to offer? And how can I find a vehicle in which to continue serving the needs of communities that I care about. I got a good idea. Let's take a moment to reach hard and we'll be back in a flash. H We're back, ready to conquer your dominant stories. Here we go. For me, part of my long time story has been my worth is my work. And I think where it all became conflated and like piled up for me was when my desires changed around that hustle, and it coordinated with a time where my body was slowing down or softening up or wanting different things. And then it became a matter of like reckoning with myself. You know, hunger has always been a theme in my life, both metaphysical and physical, but the the hunger that I had to want something new, and I hear that in your story as well, and it came side by side with this is what people know me to be and my journey is taking me in a slightly divergent direction. Do I have permission to go there? What will it look like? How will I be relevant? And then on top of all of that, I'm heading into the middle passage of my life and all of these other things are happening, and so it's not just one thing, and I think it gets wrapped into fertility, productivity, connection. My relationship to my body has changed, not in just around these things we're talking about, but into an appreciation of it's quite frankly, it's functionality over its adornment. Yes, I'm so with you, right, I have had body issues my whole life. I am five Well, I don't know if I'm five seven anymore since this fine surgery. Let's just say at five six, and I have been eighty nine pounds in my life, and I've been a d eighty pounds in my life. That's a pretty broad range of sizes. And I can look at anybody. I can. I can look somebody up and down. I can I can know what size they are, I can know what will look great on them. I know what colors work for them. But you know, we're always a little bit blinded by looking at our own reflection. And for me, I've always had issues with body dysmorphia. This is something that I've struggled with my whole life on any channel, on any show, on any in any project where I've had to help somebody kind of create their own sense of style. The compassion that I naturally had for people who were struggling was something that I never gave to myself. And yes, I definitely think that part of aging has been about that compassion, and not for nothing. This hustle culture, this capitalist culture that you're talking about, it is really pervasive. And this whole idea of being lazy or just bored or tired or not wanting to participate is not necessarily a sign of depression. Being able to opt out and say hey, I need a break, I need a rest, that is something we don't talk about enough. I agree. I did not make this decision at fifty while I was fifty one when I acquired the company, because I was like, wow, I need to reinvent myself to be relevant. What I realized was that the relevancy really was about what my existential crisis led me to. It was about what is going to bring me joy, satisfaction, happiness, contentment in this next phase of my life, and maybe maybe that will be done in five years maybe it won't be. But what I realized is this desperation, this fear that like I had nothing left to give, was something so palpable and so scary that I just started to see everything in my life through the lens of loss. You used to be able to get pregnant, was the least agreed. It was like you used to be some of the people wanted on television. You used to be attractive, you used to be a size this you used to be, and never looking and appreciating what was actually happening in the moment. And I even still carry regret that I didn't appreciate what happened to me in the moment when I was younger. But the fact is, I don't think you start to appreciate the present until you start having less of it. I agree, And I think what happens to as I'm talking to friends and menopause and we're going into paramenopause, is yes, we're going to live a longer life. And I think at middle passage we start to reckon with death differently. At this point we've likely had more losses than perhaps we had in our youth. Although I understand people have lost in their youth quite a bit. So when you say we can't quite appreciate this from maybe a younger station in life, I really get that now, and I want to make it easier for our next generation to have these stories, as I imagine you do too, because you know, all of the work that you're doing is about democratizing this story for people. Right. Yeah, And look, menopause has to be something that we don't just normalize as a conversation, but we optimize so that by the time Gen Z gets to be this age, this will no longer be a conversation we need to be having. This will no longer or be a conversation where nobody knows what to do, how to get help, how to ask questions, and what to be ashamed of. I mean everything that you know, the things that women talk about being ashamed of. Right, you know, there's this whole conversation now around younger girls and getting their period and talking about not being ashamed to go to the bathroom with a tampon, And I'm like, well, why do we have to be ashamed of going to the bathroom without a tampon? You know what I mean? Here is something where you can start saving all the money that you were spending on pads or cups or tampons, and buy aarrings, choose a new chair. I want people to think about what is possible, not what is no longer possible. Yes, and the thing is that you can only do better when you know better, right, And that is true of the way we talk to ourselves. So if you are not spending any time thinking about that negative loop that is going on, that voice in your head that is telling you that you're not good enough, that you can't do something, that you're not qualified, you're too old, that you have imposter syndrome, or whatever it is. All those are thoughts that get in the way of you doing whatever the hell you want. You know, you and I share so many things in common. I am seeing more in this conversation. But one of the things that we share is people come to us for advice and we're in the expert role quite a bit all the time, all the time. So here's my question for you, miss Stacy London. Yeah, I find that it's a role that I love to play. It's something that I value of being of service to people, and it has been tricky for me being in an expert role because in my own relationship to that it has stopped me at times from being vulnerable about not knowing and being able to say sometimes like I'm in progress. I'm in process. I don't know, and I'm curious if you've ever shared that feeling and what your relationship is as a current and former and future expert in the space of not knowing. Yeah, I'm a big believer now, I'll tell you I wasn't always a big believer in not knowing. When I went from magazines to television and I was supposed to be considered an expert, I had no sense of humor about myself. I was like, I have to be the authority. People need to take me seriously. I can make fun of them, they can't make fun of me. This is my job. I'm supposed to do this. Blah blah blah. I have this whole set of ideas about what I was supposed to appear like on camera and not being able to be a little bit more relaxed and you know, open to questions or even constructive criticism about what I was doing right, I was like, no, I know what I'm doing. I'm in charge. I got this the moment for me, when I realized, like I have to say I don't know. I wasn't really in television. It was when I realized, Okay, I'm going to step into this role as CEO. I have no obvious qualification via CEO, and I didn't know anything about infrastructure or e commerce or law or all of the things that you know you have to learn in order to run a company. But the thing is everybody is capable of learning. If anything, I believe more now in neuroplasticity than I ever did before. And what I realize is that you have to go in being able to say I don't know. I surround myself now with people as smart as I can find them, definitely smarter than me, because all I get to do is learn. All I get to do is take this knowledge and soak it up like a sponge. And being able to say I don't know is one of the strongest, most powerful things I've ever been able to do. It is that kind of vulnerability that actually kind of creates progress in relationships in business everything and not knowing is kind of exciting. Yes, I feel the same way, and actually being able to say I don't know is one of the power tools that I offer people around challenging their dominant stories because it opens you to questioning. Right, So even if your dominant story is like you're not qualified to be in this business, lots of people have that dominant story actually being able to say, I don't know, am I I don't know? Is that true? It's just a gentle questioning. I find as a technique that I used to say, like, I hear you voice, I hear you loud and clear, but I don't know if that's true. Why what do you mean? Give me an example? Why did I want to do this? Why do I think I can do this? Why do I think I can't do this? Why you keep asking? Why? You finally get to the kernel of truth? And this idea of you know is sort of opening that door to why bingo? Right, I don't know if that's true? And so they're really connected and I never thought about that before. Yeah, me neither. And I like it in this kind of conversation because I think one of the things that we say about growing older, which I do believe is true, is all of this earned wisdom. I get that, and I want to insert the part where we don't also feel like all of a sudden you hit a certain age and then doom. You're supposed to like know it all. I think what I'm hearing in our conversation is a discovery, is a process, is a journey? Is that's where the grace and space comes in. I mean, I think of discovery like falling in love. Right Nobody there's no book that teaches you how to do that. And when you are falling in love with a person, certainly, it's layer after layer, it's moment after moment. It's an incredible process of understanding another person. You know, for me to say that, like what is my girlfriend's favorite food was part of falling in love with her? Or you know where her favorite place to go is? It was part of falling in love with her. I feel the same way about where I am in my journey right now. Discovery is like falling in love. I think about falling in love with your life. It is the opportunity to learn and open your eyes even more to things that you may have looked at a thousand times, but there's always more to know that. To me, just the idea of discovery is grace. Aging is a fact. Yes, it doesn't have it doesn't have a descriptor attached to it. But what you can do while you age, now, that is what can be done with grace beautiful. All right, you know the drill. It's that time. I'll be back before you know it. Hey, hey, we're back now, let's get into our convo. Let me set the stage. It's two thousand seven. It's one of many Oprah appearances, and you are talking to this woman about dressing for her age, and so let me play a clip and then I want to come back and hear what you think. Okay, here is my problem. Okay, you are dressing a little inappropriately for your age, my dear. Okay, So okay, okay, So where is it written? If you has a dressed a way when you get older, we can update your style and make it look like you are ageless and timeless and classic. So I want to make sure that things like this don't happen. Okay, all right, let's go. So the things like this you're pointing to a little people, I think on her shirt. Um, but this is fifteen years ago, and I'm curious where where you go when you hear that. Now I cringe a little bit, to be honest, with you. It's not that I'm sure that that woman was probably dressing in a way that didn't suit her body as well as it could or wasn't as bigure flattering as it m have been. But it also wasn't really my job to say, you know, she asked the right question, She asked the question fault who says right. At the time, it felt very important as an expert to be kind of creating these rules and guard rails for people to follow and educate them. And the thing is, I think I might still say the same thing with the caveat that you can look however you want to look, you can age however you want to age. And what I what I still feel is that if we are dressing in a way that doesn't seem to suit us. In other words, if people react in a way that doesn't kind of match the way we expect them to in the way that we present ourselves, there's a disconnect there. And what I always think that is an issue when it comes to women who are getting older and whatever age they could be thirty, I don't care just as they age that there's this sense that they're still in the style that they wore in their youth, that they hold onto the style that they were when they felt best about themselves, even if that style doesn't actually suit who they are now. In other words, isn't as flattering, isn't as powerful, doesn't give them a sense of themselves other than I wish I was still young. That, to me is where the mistake that I made comes in, is that I should have said, is this look the look that you loved when you were twenty five? Or is this the look that you truly love now? Yeah, but to give yourself space and grace too. Would you have known to do that at that time where you were at in your life. Like I think, as those of us who dole out advice, we do what we do best in the moment we're doing it. I agree. And I also think that like there was a formula for what not to wear? Right, it was like we really were asked to be experts in our field. We had to make sort of black and white statements in order to make it clear what our objective was. And the thing is that that's what would be you know, tricky about a show that was just telling people what to wear. Now, that's it wouldn't fly in the same way, because we have to honor who people want to be, right, I learned to be more expansive, And of course there are lots of things that I look back at and cringe and think, oh god, none of that would fly now me too, right, But it was what it was in the moment. When you know better, you do better. And certainly even my choice to change roles instead of doing something that was solely based in style, to do something that's based much more in wellness and feeling good as opposed to just be looking good is part of my own evolution bingo, And that word is really important I think for us to remember, too, is the combination of looking and feeling. That's a guide post for me to say, how do I feel in this? I let that guide a lot of my choices. Now. Yeah, well look, I mean one of the things that I say now about style right is like take the suit right. People are like, oh a suit. You're always saying, get a suit. What is it that it matters? Right? What matters about the suit? Now, if you're let's say, going on a job interview and you want to be a dominatrix by all means, where the latex cat suit if you want to work at like an old stogy corporate bank where the pinstripe suit, use the language, the visual language that is going to get you what you want. I do not make the rules. I just want you to win the game. I just want you to get where you want to go. And if dressing in a way that makes you feel like you are being your full person, your full self, and you're getting where you want to go in life, then don't let anybody stop you. Amen insert just pumping hands in the air. I love it, you know. I wanted to ask you something a little bit switching gears, but something that you made me think about, and I want to say before I forget, which is also a ps part of my growing older journey is brain fog, brain fog. It's a little brain foggy. But I was thinking about because it's not very often actually that I get to speak so publicly, or I've chosen to speak so publicly about my choice and now my husband and my choice to not have children. And I was thinking about how we mark time as and I know that a lot of my friends who have children mark time differently. They do it by the developmental stages of their children, right, It's like it's first steps, it's kindergarten, it's first food, it's whatever it is, right. And I also marked time and milestones by watching my my friend's kids grow up. So all of a sudden, I'm like, wait a minute, he's ten years old. I remember when she was pregnant. How the hell did ten years go by? I think it's different when you're not raising children inside of your home. I think the relationship to time aging progress is also uniquely different. And I just wanted to ask you if you've noticed that as well. Absolutely, I mean I can't believe that some of my friends kids are graduating from college. Yes, I graduated from college two days ago in my in my mind, but anyway, yes, I do think that that's true. And I do think that for me that was a little bit tricky because so many of my friends had kids that I didn't feel that I could relate to them the same way. And a lot of my friends became a lot younger than me because I had freedoms that, you know, my friends were no longer had, and so for a long time, I was only spending my time with younger people, much younger people, and in a way. I think that did some damage to me as well, because I started to realize that their opportunities were still on the horizon in a way that mine were not. And I don't mean any particular job. I just mean the opportunities that come with having more days in front of you than days behind you. I had to kind of write the ship right. I had to spend time with my friends who do have kids. I just spend time with friends my own age. I just spend time with my younger friends with the perspective that I now have that I am where I am and they are where they are, and that this tendency that we have, this terrible tendency that I've always had to compare myself with others, made so much worse by social media, does nothing but devalue who you are and where you are. And when we love somebody, we have to love them unconditionally, not in relationship to how they affect us. And that was what I sort of I had to kind of re establish my relationships with people from a different vantage point and to offer ourselves, as we've been talking about throughout this conversation, the grace and love to be where we are in those moments. It is really important to remember that we can do things that are challenging that ultimately wind up being incredibly fulfilling. And even when you are negatively self speaking, that you have the potential and the power to step in and say, well, I don't know, I'm not sure why all the things that you preach are things that we should be talking about at this stage of life, particularly where we have wisdom to maybe answer those questions a little bit more deeply and a little bit more profoundly than we could in our youth. Exactly. I have one last question for you, and it's one of my favorite ones. I'm going to hear what you're gonna say about this. What part of your body could tell the story of your life? Oh my god, that is a very interesting question. And I would say the part of my body that probably tells the most about my life is my skin. And I know that that's a pretty big organ, actually the largest organ. But you know, my body is riddled with scars from operations, from topical steroids from my psoriasis as a child. My skin has been at the center of my story since I was three years old when I was diagnosed with psoriasis. And I had no idea what that meant, except that I was told that it was chronic, that I would always have it, and that something was wrong with me. And that is very difficult language for a child to understand or to really process, other than to know something is wrong with me. Right. I was covered in soo rised this from my neck down from the time I was eleven to thirteen, after incredibly bad battles with strap throat, and I was made of scales. I wore white turtlenecks and long black pants every day, even in the summer. I had to cut my hair. It was much longer than it is now. I had to cut it into a crew cut because the cold tar that we were using on my scalp. My mom used to scrub it out with or acid. It was always about my skin. It was, in some sense, always about the visible, which is why the internal work of validation has been so hard for me and so necessary. And so I would say that my skin really does tell a story. My scars tell a story. It's one thing to say, oh, you know, they're badges of honor. I'm a warrior, I've been through all that. Blah blah bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, right, what it is? It's my story, That's all it is. It's my story. And rather than put a value judgment on it, rather than saying I'm brave or how courageous, or oh, it's amazing that you've gotten past this, or oh poor you boo, who look at that scar? That's terrible. Whatever, It's just my story, just like your story is your story, and the best thing that we can do with the story is fucking tell it. And when the story doesn't serve you, to change it. Change it in, chuck it, change in, chuck it and challenge it. This is the whole point of this show, Stacy. Where can people find out more? Where where can we send people to get connected? Sure? Well, of course our website State of Menopause dot com. Our new blah is up now so you can read articles from some of our medical experts who are on our medical Advisory Board, as well as for products. You don't need to know where you are in the menopause journey to see if there is a product that will work for you. There is a search engine so you can shop by issue rather than just by product. We are shop state of on Instagram and Facebook and obviously you can find me Stacy London, you know pretty much everywhere. Stacy London Real on Instagram, Stacy London on Twitter, Stacy London on Pinterest, Stacy London Official on on Facebook. You know, they make it hard for you to always have your name. I love it. Thank you so much, thank you, just thank you so many great gems from Stacy London. But I think number one, we got to talk about this more. Whether we're talking about the process of aging, the ups and downs of aging, and of course body changes in menopause. We just have keep normalizing that conversation. So talk about it with somebody you love and trust, ask a doctor, talk about it with your friends. I think the more we can normalize it, the better. I also really got the sense that we, and I know I do, need to get more educated about these things. And it doesn't mean it has to be a big homework assignment. You don't have to kind of like absorb a whole whole book about it. But I say, you know, look up an article, try to get some expert specific facts because there's a lot of stuff out there, So be diligent as you look up and get educated. But let's get educated and then, of course, the big part of our conversation today with Stacy was challenging those dominant stories, the things that say, who are you to run that company? Or you know you're not as vital or worthy anymore as you're aging. She has an approach where Stacy would ask, why why am I thinking that? Why do I believe that? I have an approach where I say, like, I don't know, is that true? I'm not sure that's true. I like to get curious about those dominant stories. But either way, I think let's challenge those negative voices that tell us these life changes are signaling some ing terrible and instead, as Stacy so beautifully said, we're all aging aging period. But how we do it, how we can embrace it. That's where the grace and compassion comes in. And if you're interested in exploring more about your dominant stories and how you can challenge them and change them, I teach workshops on this stuff, so you can always sign up at Jess Weiner dot com. You can follow me on Instagram at I'm Jess Weiner. I really love the community that we're creating. I love the stories you're sharing and the questions you're asking So if you want to tell us about your Dominant Stories that you're rewriting and working on, you can email us at podcast at Dominant stories dot com or leave us a voicemail at two one three five nine three zero three three. And don't stress, I'm gonna put all that in the show notes. And next week we're going to talk about creativity with my talented and kind and super genius friend, Alex Blackamore. Alex is an award winning music director, arranger, composer. You know he's done some like small but successful Broadway shows like Hamilton's Dear Evan Hansen in the Heights. Yeah, those shows. Alex is incredible. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation. And again, thanks so much for being here, and please don't forget to write a review wherever you're listening. It's super duper duper helps us out. And remember we're always learning, we're always growing. Dominant Stories with Jess Winer is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.