The Search for My All-Rise Thing

The strange urge to become slightly more interesting to myself.

Why the hell am I suddenly contemplating red lipstick is not a question I expected to be writing at 55.

I’ve spent most of my life being aggressively neutral about red lipstick. Red dresses. Red shoes. Red anything, really. I am not glamorous. I am not mysterious. I am not the woman slowly applying lipstick in a restaurant bathroom while strangers wonder who she is and where she’s going. I’m the woman who forgets she has lipstick in her purse until it melts in her car.

And yet for the past few weeks, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a Substack post from a woman who started wearing red lipstick during COVID. She wasn’t headed anywhere special. She wasn’t trying to impress anyone. She simply liked how it made her feel, and for reasons I can’t fully explain, the whole thing lodged itself in my brain.

The post didn’t make me want red lipstick. It made me wonder if I needed an All Rise Thing of my own.

And by that, I don’t mean turning heads. God no. That sounds exhausting.

I mean the thing that changes your energy before you’ve even said a word.

Part of what’s making this so interesting to me is that I’ve never been someone who chased attention. Look, my blue eyes do still get comments. And my curly hair has generated more conversations in public bathrooms than I can count. At this point, I fully expect some woman to stop me mid-hand wash and ask for my curl routine before introducing herself (it happens a lot). Beyond that, I’ve never been the person who walks into a room and causes a collective stir… and I’ve never wanted to be.

In fact, the heads turning my direction these days tend to belong to men who are approximately 147 years old and somehow still convinced they’re in the running. No thanks, Tom Hanks.

All of this is a little funny, now that I think about it, because I actually did have a somewhat recent accidental All Rise moment: my 50th birthday. My Aussie Man’s daughter’s wedding. I had my makeup professionally done for maybe the third time in my entire life, wore a dress I normally would’ve talked myself out of buying, and for one rare evening I felt... different. Looser. More comfortable in my own skin. Like I’d stopped managing myself so tightly for five fucking minutes and finally relaxed into myself.

Maybe that’s why this whole thing feels less like a quest for validation and more like a field study. I’m already pretty damn taken with my Aussie Man, so the attention itself doesn’t mean anything to me. The feeling does.

What keeps rattling around in my head is the energy of it all. I’m truly fascinated by women who have found the thing that instantly changes how they feel when they walk into a room. The thing that makes them stand a little taller, smile a little differently, or feel a little more powerful, more playful, or more themselves before anyone else has even opened their mouth.

A while back, I accidentally found myself defending trucker hats and bikinis on the internet, which remains one of the more ridiculous sentences I’ve ever typed.

The blog was definitely about trucker hats and bikinis. I stand by both. It was also about what happens when you stop asking whether you’re supposed to wear something and start asking whether you actually like it.

The trucker hat and the bikini were simply the evidence.

The bigger story was about recognizing myself. Not a younger version. Not a better version. Just the version of me that feels relaxed, comfortable, rebellious, and completely uninterested in taking feedback from the cheap seats.

The same thing happened when I wrote about runway songs. Every woman should have that one song that comes on and suddenly you’re strutting through Costco like the place was built in your honor. You’re still buying toilet paper and protein bars. You’re still you. The only thing that’s changed is your energy.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized the red lipstick wasn’t really the story… the shift behind it was.

When I look around at women in midlife, the ones who intrigue me most aren’t the women desperately trying to look younger. They’re the women experimenting. The women with giant silver curls. The women who finally got the tattoo. The women wearing leopard-print glasses because they felt like it. The women who stopped coloring their hair. The women who started coloring it purple. The women who took up drumming (IYKYK), bought the leather jacket, learned to surf, launched the business, wrote the book (and about to launch their 2nd 😊), booked the trip, or finally wore the thing they’d been talking themselves out of for twenty years.

There is something incredibly attractive about a woman who is still curious about herself.

For decades, many of us were busy being useful. We were raising kids, building careers, managing households, solving everyone’s problems, and generally holding the whole damn circus together.

Then one day you look around and realize you’ve gotten really, really good at being sensible. The bills are paid. The calendar is managed. The forms are signed. Everything is always handled.

And that’s when the question sneaks in: Have I accidentally become the human equivalent of a beige waiting room?

The truth is, it’s been a very long time since I did something simply because it sounded fun.

That beige waiting room line has been rattling around in my head for weeks. I think it’s because I’ve realized I still have the capacity to surprise myself.

For a very long time, I was busy doing what needed to be done. Raising kids. Building a career. Paying bills. Managing life.

Curiosity got pushed to the back burner.

Lately it’s been showing back up.

Maybe that’s what this red lipstick thing is really about. It’s the realization that there may still be parts of me I haven’t met yet.

At 55, nobody is grading me anymore. Nobody is handing out awards for being sensible. Nobody is keeping score. And that’s surprisingly liberating. The freedom isn’t in becoming invisible. It’s realizing that most people weren’t paying nearly as much attention as we thought they were in the first place.

So now I’m curious. What’s your all-rise thing? I’m crowdsourcing ideas because I have a feeling a lot of you already know exactly what yours is. And if you happen to see me wearing bright red lipstick sometime in the next six months, mind your business!

I’m conducting research.

#RealGirlsGuidetoMidlife #AllRiseThing #Menopause #RGG

We’ve earned every wrinkle. Might as well make more laugh lines together.
Let’s connect: Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn | Website | Book

And if you’ve read the book and loved it, a quick review on Amazon helps keep it moving.