The Long View Is Your Advantage

Last week I was having lunch with my best friend when she said it, the sentence I keep hearing lately from women I respect. Accomplished women. Women who have built things, run things, raised whole people. It came out quietly, almost like a confession. “I don’t know how to be relevant anymore.”

Sunsets from our porch on Dragonfly Farm.

I understand the feeling, because I have been living it. I got on TikTok recently and felt it immediately. My daughter edits an entire video on her phone with her thumbs in the time it takes me to find the right button, and I finally had to go download a desktop app just to do what comes to her without thinking. The world rewards speed right now, and in a moment like that it is easy to watch someone half your age move faster, more fluent, more native to whatever the algorithm wants this week, and quietly decide the race left without you. But here is the thing. Somewhere along the way we started confusing fluency with having something worth saying. They are not the same. One you can learn in an afternoon. The other takes a whole life, and you already have one.

That is the part I want you to actually feel, because it is the good news. Everything you have lived is the asset. The judgment. The long view. The instinct for what matters that only shows up after you have been wrong a few hundred times and paid attention each time. Speed cannot manufacture that. The algorithm cannot teach it. It is yours, and it is the rarest thing in the room.

So relevance was never about catching up to anyone. And it was never about narrowing yourself down to one impressive thing either. You are not one thing. You never were. You can be the writer and the mentor and the one at the table all at once, because that range is exactly what a whole life gives you. Not putting your value on blast does not make it worth less. Your expertise is exactly the same whether or not it performs well on a Tuesday.

Here is what I keep coming back to. For some, their edge is speed and fluency. Mine is depth, story, the long view, the scar tissue. I built a clean beauty company before the words clean beauty meant anything to anyone, with no industry background and a whole lot of people telling me it would not work. None of it happened fast. All of it is mine. And I have never been just one thing. Founder, writer, mother, the woman with her hands in the soil, still figuring out TikTok. The depth was never a single lane. It is everything I have lived, feeding everything I do. Backing yourself like that, in midlife, when the world keeps hinting your best chapter is behind you, is quietly rebellious.

Because this is the freeing part. You do not have to shrink yourself into one lane to be taken seriously. You get to be all of it, the whole range of you, and let it matter, because it does. And you do not have to do it all today. One real thing built this week will always beat a month spent wondering whether you still count.

The women who break through next are not going to be the ones who got faster. They are going to be the ones who stopped comparing long enough to build what is theirs. Quietly, on a page, in a room, in a garden, wherever their real life actually is. You are closer to that than the noise wants you to believe.

Aging is a privilege. So is finally getting to spend your one good life on the work only you can make. I cannot think of anything more relevant than that.

Xx, Indie

PS if you’re on Tiktok let’s be friends (shameless I know, but let’s build this community together).