27/02/2026
“The shape that had been waiting for me all my life”… I love that!!
I keep re-reading that line, “Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life. It gave me me.” It lands differently each time. Sometimes it feels like relief and sometimes like a confession. Sometimes like something I’m not sure I’ve earned yet.
Anne Lamott has always written from inside the mess of things. Addiction, faith, envy, bad behaviour owned plainly. So when she talks about age as a gift, I hear someone who’s lived long enough to recognise the pattern in her own mistakes. And maybe to forgive herself for them.
What unsettles me is how long it seems to take to become yourself. I can see now how much of my earlier life was organised around becoming impressive. Or reliable. Or chosen. I don’t think I’d have admitted that at the time. I’d have said I was ambitious, or generous, or committed. And I was, in part. But underneath there was a steady calculation. How’s this landing? Am I enough? Am I too much? Should I soften that?
I don’t mean I was inauthentic all the time. Just that I was adjustable. Very good at reading a room. Very quick to round off the edges that might snag.
So when Lamott says age gave her time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped her step into her shape, I think about the failures more than the triumphs. The moments where the performance cracked. The relationship where I realised I’d been playing the agreeable one so convincingly I’d forgotten what I actually thought. The friendship that faltered because I couldn’t keep being the elastic version of myself it seemed to require. Those weren’t noble awakenings. They were awkward, and sometimes humiliating. But they did force something solid to the surface.
There’s a line in Glennon Doyle’s work about untaming, about women remembering who they were before they were told who to be. I used to bristle at that a bit. It felt too clean. But I understand it more now as a gradual refusal to keep translating yourself into something more digestible.
And yet, I don’t feel arrived. That’s the part I hesitate over. The quote carries a sense of completion. “I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be.” I can taste that possibility, but I’m not sure I’ve swallowed it whole. There are days I still default to old habits. I overexplain. I apologise for taking up space. I agree to things I’ll later resent. The younger versions of me haven’t entirely dissolved. They’re still in the room, whispering.Maybe age doesn’t erase them. Maybe it just gives you more authority over them.
What does feel different, and this is harder to articulate without sounding smug, is that I’m less interested in being admired. Not because I’ve transcended it, but because I’ve seen how fragile admiration is. It’s a currency that fluctuates wildly. You can’t build a self on it without feeling constantly at risk. What feels steadier is alignment. Saying what I actually think, even if my voice shakes a bit. Declining things without constructing an elaborate excuse. Letting silence sit.
There’s something quietly radical in that. Adrienne Rich wrote about the awakening of consciousness in women as both painful and necessary. I think age sharpens that awakening. You start to see where you’ve colluded in your own diminishment. That’s not a comfortable recognition. I don’t enjoy admitting how often I chose harmony over honesty. But it’s clarifying.
I’m drawn to Lamott’s phrase “the shape that had been waiting for me all my life.” It suggests continuity rather than reinvention. That the core was there, even when it was obscured by effort or fear. I find that comforting. It reframes my younger self not as misguided, but as mid-formation. Trying things on. Getting it wrong. Learning the weight of certain compromises.
I suppose what moves me most is the daring. To imagine yourself fully, not as thinner or more successful or more adored, but as more yourself, takes a kind of nerve. For years I didn’t dare imagine a version of me who didn’t hustle for validation. I thought she’d be overlooked. Or lonely. Or somehow irrelevant. Instead, she’s quieter. More solid. Less frantic. Not always braver, but less willing to abandon herself.
I’m not sure I can say age has given me me. Not yet. But I can see the outline more clearly. I can feel where I fit and where I don’t. And the gap between the private and public versions of me has narrowed, even if it hasn’t closed.Perhaps that’s enough for now. This sense of easing into my own proportions, rather than stretching towards someone else’s idea of who I should be.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserve
