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W four WN Radio. Hello and welcome to Fearless Fabulous. To you,
I am your host, Melanie Young, and thank you for joining me on
this beautiful post Memorial Day in twenty twenty four. My mission is to empower
women fifty and older to live life on their terms and live their best life
on their terms, being mindful of their health, their wellbeing, their person
and personality, and owning their worth. That's right, owning your worth,
and today's show will be It's a common thread. When I host the show
solo. Usually something has happened in the past week that triggers triggers in a
positive way, generates, let's say, inspires that's a better term inspires me
to come up with some words of wisdom that I speak to myself, and
then I decide to share with you that brings to light something that may be
on your mind. It's certainly on my mind. Maybe you're experiencing it,
maybe you're not. But I like to bring it to light because I like
to shine a light and enlighten on what it's like to be a woman over
fifty in the United States. I can't say in the world because I haven't
experienced the world enough, but I do believe it's different everywhere and it's similar
everywhere. I'm going to start. The theme of this show is being invincible
versus invincible, invincible, invincible invulnerable. We as women have all at some
stage probably felt all of these and therefore I'm going to read this poem,
of course, written by a man, and I'll comment in a minute.
It's called invisible. My body is a bottle of white glass. Why has
not somebody poured red wine into me? That I should become beautiful? My
body is a green leaf? Why have I not dried? That I should
blow away to infinity with many winds? Written by jose Garcia Villa Well Jose
I have this to say. First of all, I love beautiful glass.
Glass is not empty. Wine, glass shimmers, a vase shimmers in many
colors and dimensions. That's the beauty of crystal and glass. So it's not
plain, it's not really white. There are many beautiful arcs of colors and
rainbows that, like a woman, shows beautiful complexity. As for why has
not somebody poured red wine into me? Well, first of all, as
we all know, I'm a certified specialist to wine, and I drink wine,
and I educate wine, and I love wine. No one needs to
pour red wine into me. I'll pour my own glass, thank you very
much. That's right. I don't need someone to pour something into me to
illuminate my beauty so that I should become beautiful, because I already am,
and I can choose to do it on my own. It certainly helps to
have wonderful people around you that support that, but if you don't, you
should choose to fill your own glass with whatever you want to drink up the
beauty of life and yourself. As for why my body is a green leaf
and why have not dried that I should blow away to infinity with many winds,
Well, First of all, we are all beautiful leaves that will eventually
shrivel up and fall. It's the circle of nature and life, and we
will blow away. But in the meantime, I want to be blowing in
the wind and float and enjoy what a leaf is, which is a beautiful
excentsion of a solid tree, part of a blossom, part of a growth,
part of a shoot, part of something that creates the fruit of the
vine grapes. Leaves are beautiful. They come in different shapes, like women.
They coup a different different different shapes and a different veins, different patterns
like women. So well, I found a poem called Invisible. Interesting,
I would rewrite the entire thing and call it invincible. I'll pour my own
glass, I'll appreciate my own beauty, my crystalline beauty, and I will
be a leaf that weather green and moist, are dried and crunchy, will
be beautifully the way. Okay, So this is why we're going to talk
about invisible, invincible, and vulnerable, because I find that when you age,
you do, whether you like it or not, start feeling invisible or
people make you feel invisible. And it's okay, when did my life go
from being number one, two plus one. I'll give you some examples.
So all my life was single, I ran a company, was number one
in the business. I was the one to go to for everything, the
one who knew it all, the go to person. I was the one.
I was one of a kind. I created wonderful things. I was
the one. Then I got married, and I was thrilled to be married
forty eight to a wonderful guy. But then over the years, I feel
like I've become a plus one. I who was always on the top of
invitation lists. Now I'm at the bottom of the list. And David,
my husband, gets invited to things, and I'm simply a plus one now.
I've never looked at him as a plus one. I look at him
as an equal to me person. We have different last names for that reason.
But I've never in my life felt so plus one as I have,
particularly traveling in Europe or being treated in business. I'm a plus one now,
and I don't really like being a plus one. I like being the
one not to diminish my husband or friends. We're on equal ground. I
wasn't created from his rib I was already here on earth. But it's amazing
how old norms, even in New Times still treat women is plus one even
further illustrate, there's an article out this week by Brett Anderson, terrific food
correspondent for the New York Times. He wrote about Broma Casa is the new
steakhouse. We're actually doing this show on the Connected Table on my other podcast,
and I encourage you to look at it. Brett Anderson is a very
noted food correspondent. But the article is on how men love to go out
now and do and going. Instead of going and eating macho carnivor nights steakhouses,
they go to Japanese house restaurants or Asian usually it's Japanese and they do
the oma kassa, which omakasa is a Japanese dining experience that involves placing one's
trust in the chef's culinary skills to create a personal menu. The term omakasa
translates to I leave it up to you, which reflects the diner's willingness to
relinquish control over their meals. That is a definition of oma cossa, but
in the context of this article, it's basically men with money to burn and
big appetites for life and good food. Go out together, bros, go
out, drop bucks, drink big wine, spend the money, yuck it
up with the guys, and have Oma Cossa meals instead of steakhouses, and
they drop like hundreds and hundreds of dollars per person. So why did this
resonate with me? Well, first of all, I love Oma Cossa meals.
I think they're just the best. I wish I could afford them,
but I can't these days because they're super expensive and they're getting more so.
And as a result, people who have lots of money to burn can enjoy
them, and people like me just hope that one day we can save for
a special time. But what really killed me of this is the machoism of
this. Again, it's still a man's world, even when you downate,
like how often do you dine out? And the man gets the wine,
list, man gets the menus, the man gets the bill, even though
I tend to be paying for it right exactly. So, one of the
lines in the article, which again is in the New York Times, that
kind of gave me the I'm gonna throw at my OUNI if I was eating
it was the guy and he was a guy who says, where is it.
I'll get to it, but basically he says, I like going out
with the guys. But basically now I'm out with the wife, the wife
or the little lady, like, oh, I have to like sometimes take
her out too, because you know, I can't just always go out with
the guys. So I kind of cringed at that because he just called her
the wife, like she had no name. She was a bluss one in
his life, the other person. And it just kind of underscored again how
even when you're dining out, going to the theater, traveling, that's another
one. You're still traded as the second class person in the two person relationship.
I'll give more examples. How many of you, let's just talk about
that. How many of you travel and have to fight like crazy to demand
not getting the dreaded middle seat because your husband or your male partner or your
significantly larger partner whatever has to have the aisle seat because their lives are so
long, they have to have the window seat so they can sleep, and
they automatically give you what I call the wife's seat, which is the dreaded
middle seat because you're smaller and you can fit in it well. I have
to fight like Craig Cray whenever we travel, particularly when we're going to Europe,
because I'm always seemed to be the plus one, even though I have
my own credentials for going, I have to I have to insist that I
have an aisle seat. It means we're not necessarily sitting together, but you
know, I'm with my husband time, So for sutting on an airplane,
la la la, particularly for finding Europe or sleep anyway. Differences that make
we're not joined at the hip all the time. We're together wherever we are
in mind, body and spirit, that we don't have to be like glued
to each other so that I'm shmoosed in a middle seat. So you women
who travel and you don't want the middle seat, you stand up for your
rights to have an aisle seat. You stand up for your right to not
have to sit in the corner of a restaurant, whether you're dining alone or
at a two top, and they give you the tiny corner table and you're
shoved in or facing the kitchen or any inferior seat or location. Because you're
the plus one. You also get your own name tag and your own title.
When you go to conferences and events, you're not the plus one.
You're not the plus one on a guest list. You have your own name.
You got to fight for that, otherwise you're going to be invisible.
That is just a sign of being invisible when people look around you and over
you, at the person you're who is with you, but not at you.
And if you have not been one of those people that have had people
come up to you say hello and then move on without even acknowledging your name
to someone more interesting, better or opportunists than you, have been living a
charmed life. I'll never forget being introduced the more with a Stewart and introducing
myself and she barely gave me at the time of day, and she didn't
even say hello, She just kind of looked over at somebody else. So
one I considered it rude. Two I'll never forget it. Three I'm not
a fan. And four I learned a big lesson from that not to do
it myself, because when I worked in public relations, you're always looking over
everybody's shoulders to see who the next a list person is coming in the door,
particularly when you're talking to a B and C liss person because you label
people that way, which is really gross but true, and may a Coulpa.
I'm sure I did it as well, but I have learned over the
years not to do it because I've had friends in the industry, and I've
talked about this on this show before, friends in the industry who had high,
high power jobs at media companies, whether it's book publishing or magazine publishing
or newspapers. They were the editors and chiefs, the managing editors, the
editors at large. They commanded teams of writers and what we read and how
we read it and how we interpret it. That's a pretty powerful position.
I mean, you know, one editor in chief could determine if we were
going to be eating eggplant or watermelon for the summer, or whatever the new
true is or bromagasa maybe we're all going to be eating broma gausa. It's
the power of the pen under the editor. One by one, each of
these was tapped out, now tapped out, let go. They all basically
lost their jobs because they aged out and were no considered no longer irrelevant,
well no longer relevant and probably too expensive. And what happened to them.
One by one, they all became invisible. They slowly became invisible, to
the point where yesterday a very dear friend lover her to death. She cheered
me up. I don't know why I was feeling glom uh, I don't
know, you know, things coming? Oh, because I was feeling like
a plus one in an email situation, She cheered me up. She's in
her late sixties and she had a huge job working for a major network,
really the best of the business, several journalism awards, books, articles,
just the best in her game. And of course, like old jobs,
when you hit certain stride and pace, eventually everything winds down. And she
had to know now say, oh, I was formally with I was formally
Well, first of all, I've learned to say never say the word formally.
Okay, just drop that word from your list, because that immediately moves
you into invisible world. You're never formally. You always are. You just
may not be working at So if you were in broadcast journalism, or you
were a novelist or a public relations or a doctor and you've retired, you're
still have all the credentials, you just may not be actively doing it.
But don't use the word formally, because that immediately puts you in the world
of invisible them. I find that, you know, invisible. Feeling invisible
is usually when people just don't look at you. And you remember when people
used to look at you in comment hey good looking, and now nobody does.
That makes you feel invisible when people ignore you or you know, it's
just little things. Don't do it to other people, is what I'm going
to say. Don't do it to other people and don't make people feel you
are invisible. Stand your ground and be next word invincible. Remember I am
strong, I am woman, I am invincible. Yeah remember that song.
Well, you got to stand up. You got to stand up for yourself
and for who you are. And if someone's dissing you and treating you any
other way, to say, hey, let's hey, look over here,
let's let's talk. You know, you got to. You gotta stay on
your ground and sometimes you got to reshape who you are in your life because
you're just gonna have to because if you start talking about formally I was I
used to back in the day when I was. If you talk in the
past, people will look at you as in the past. You've got to
stay current and in tune, to stay in time and in step with everybody
else. Otherwise you're going to be put in the back seat or worse,
in storage. I just loved it. When I was on a I was
on a webinar about uh, the Wine Market Council talking about who's drinking wine
and everybody wants younger people to drink more wine, and or gen Z and
gen X drinking more wine. And they said, oh, yeah, you
know who's drinking a lot of wine the boomers. But they're all dropping off.
Literally, somebody said that, yeah, the boomers are, but they're
aging out and dropping off. And I'm like, well, I'm not dead
yet. I'm still drinking wine. I'm still spending the money. I'm still
spending more money than the eleven dollars a bottle people, I'm still spending more.
I'm not dropping off. So drop the topic and instead drop back in
to see who I am and what the potential I have to deliver to you
and your brand are right, So just remember that we're not dropping off.
When we're we're not dropping out, and we're not dropping off. We are
still invincible. Invincible is by definition, the quality of being impossible to defeat.
Or prevent from doing what is intended. Today's young people are certain of
their own invincibility. That is a plus for young people. I think it's
great that they believe they're invincible. Then why aren't older people feeling the same
way that. Let's just stop the word older people right now. Why aren't
we of a certain age also not feeling invincible? We are, and we
should and we should not let anybody make us feel any other way. Right,
And if you want to learn more, there's a book. I haven't
read it yet, but there's one called The Invisible Woman. I'm actually very
interested in this book because it basically it's by Caroline Creato Perez who basically does
case studies on how women are continually diminished in a man's world. And it's
everything from phones being too big, a doctor prescribes a drug that's wrong for
your body. Where you know a car accident, you're forty seven percent more
likely to be seriously injured. This is from a book description where every week,
the countless hours of work you do or not recognize your value. If
any of that sounds familiar, chances you are you a woman and an Invisible
Woman shows how in a world largely built for and by men. We are
systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap and the perpetual
systemic discrimination against women. A lot of people don't even know they're doing it,
you know. Like in my house, it's so interesting. I love
my husband. He's over six feet tall. I'm five to three. He
weighs over two hundred pounds. I weigh about half his weight. Let's just
say that. So he has put everything out of reach. There's really nothing
I can reach in our kitchen. I can't reach it, and if I
try, I'll probably like have my head cut because it's going to follow my
head. So everywhere I go now to haul the ladder around just to reach
things. He puts the caps on things so tight with his mighty fist that
I have to ask for help to open it, run it under water,
whatever, it's the littlest thing. It's like, I can't help it that
I have thin wrists and smaller hands, but a lot of things that are
made a lot of products that are currently made or made for big hands and
bigger grips and stronger grips, and that's men. It's interesting how many things
are like that and I've noticed it more and as the older I get,
probably because my grip is not as strong as it used to be for whatever
reasons, I don't know why. I'm doing the best I can to work
on it. But it's this inevitable thing called aging which I do have to
face every day that I need to work on strength, body strength and flexibility
every day of my life. Also in my mind. So the other is
being in vulnerable. Invulnerable means you're not vulnerable two things. Invulnerable means,
like I thought, this is a weird description, but apparently Mother Teresa was
involve vulnerable to things because she was a sainted person. Well, I don't
think anybody's invulnerable and vulnerable reads you're not going to die. Nobody is invulnerable.
Everybody is vulnerable to something and you have to acknowledge it and work around
it. Perfect example, Pope, the Pope. The Pope is not even
invulnerable. He said something this week derogatory about gays queer's It was a term
in Italian like fagiori or something, whatever it was. He's not invulnerable and
he was taken to task. So if the Pope could be taken to task
for a slip of the tongue. Everybody in the world could be taken to
task for a slip of the tongue. We're not invulnerable invulnerable here. It
is something that's invulnerable is impossible to damage or injured, like the strongest,
most rock solid concrete for reinforced steel bars or Mother Teresa's reputation from the Latin
Invulnerable is not wounding. Invulnerable means invincible or immune to attack. Well,
we've now learned everybody is vulnerable to attack, verbal or physical or other.
But back to not being invisible. So if someone is if someone or an
entity or a group is making you feel invisible, you can't always blame that
entity, group, whatever, because you're allowing them to make you feel invisible.
Just remember that it's a two way street. Feeling unworthy and invisible is
a two way street. Someone is making you feel that way, but you're
allowing them to. You're accepting it. You're maybe you're not accepting it,
but you don't know what to do. So first of all, you've got
to just stand up and fight back and say I don't like the way this
feels. Wait just a minute, can we reword that? Could you please
reframe what you just said, let's take a step back and restate and rethink
this concept. Whatnot? What are you ignoring here? What is it I'm
saying you're not listening to. Okay, these are just examples, but you
got to do that because if you don't, you'll be put in the invisible
women's section of the plane, in the store, and the theater and the
group or the table. Let's just talk about that. How many times have
you been to a dinner party and you're in the invisible end table section by
nobody because you're the plus one. Let's just talk about that. Yes,
let's just talk about that. So the best way to get around that is
to get somewhere first and claim your seat. I'm not being insensitive and I'm
not being overly sensitive. I've experienced it, and I have been told I'm
being too sensitive, usually by my husband. And maybe I am being too
sensitive, but damn if I don't see it and feel it and notice it,
because I'm living it and I am as my girlfriend lover to death.
She said, we're older, white, blonde haired women, so we're still
the lucky ones. I can only I can only slightly empathize and be more
sensitive and sensitive and sympathetic to the black women of this country who were marginalized,
even more black than latinas. I can't even imagine what it's like,
but I actually wish I could spend one day in their skin to understand what
they go through, because I know they're treated worse than me. I'm a
lucky one in comparison. I'm just a sixty five year old white women who's
not in the desirable demographics anymore of marketers. Apparently, they get it worse
and it's not fair and it's not right. And I stand for them.
I stand for all women of every race, color, creed, background,
sexual preference. No one should be marginalized or made to be felt invincible.
They all have a voice, they all have beautiful skin that should be thicker
to protect them. And no one is an empty glass waiting to be filled
by someone else. We are all beautiful vessels filled with amazing intelligence, kindness,
compassion, love and warmth, spirit creativity. We are a mosaic.
We are a mosaic of many beautiful prisms that glass. So none of us
are empty glasses waiting to be filled by someone else, to be made to
feel more beautiful. We are already beautiful, whether we fill the glass or
just enjoy it for its beautiful, pristine quality without having anything in it.
So remember that no glass is empty, no vase is empty. It's filled
with light. You can choose to fill it with other things or not,
but not it does not diminish the beauty of that glass, and that is
you. Nothing should diminish the beauty of who you are, whether you choose
to get multiple degrees, whether you choose to have children, whether you choose
to have a career or choose to stay home and take care of your family,
whether you choose to many things, you are a perfect prism of beauty
and capability and amazingness and fabulousness. And you are never invisible because that beauty
is an aura that surrounds you and sheds light, and that makes you invincible.
Because many people have not discovered that in themselves, and once they do
and they act on it and they own it and they project it, they
too will be invincible, and you will as well. So don't be the
empty glass. Be the crystalline beauty that the glass reflects in the light,
the prism of beauty that you choose to fill withever gives you pleasure and brings
you joy. And if it's a great wine, go for it. Don't
let anyone say no. Give yourself the joy and pleasure of filling your cup,
your glass, your vase, your vessel, you with the things that
bring you joy and make you feel invincible. I leave I leave you with
this thought. You are a prism with many colors and lights to share with
others. Never let anyone dull that quality. Always polish it and share it.
Never let anyone dull your polish. Always keep it bright and shiny.
You're never invisible to me or the people who matter in your life, and
you always be invincible. I'm Melanie Young. This is fearless fabulous. You
remember you have the right, the right, and the choice, and I
hope it stays that way. To live life on your terms. And if
anyone tries to diminish that, you just speak out, stand up for that
right. Otherwise you will become invisible, and none of us deserve that.
We all deserve to remain invincible and invulnerable. Thank you for joining me.
Please follow me at Melanie Fabulous on Instagram. Check out my other show with
David Ransom, The Connected Table Live Wednesdays two pm on W four c Y
Radio, and you can hear all my shows, this one and that one
the Connected Table on your preferred podcast channel. We're on more than fifty Please
connect, please comment, please share, let me hear from you, and
always remember, stay fearless and fabulous. Thank you,