Melinda French Gates: I Turn 60 Next Month. Here’s How I Feel About Getting Older
Melinda French Gates, Co-Founder and Co-Chair of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and shared a post on LinkedIn:
”If there’s one thing that women are taught to be afraid of, it’s getting older. The more we age, the less society values us. But as I approach my 60th birthday next month, I don’t feel scared or sad. I feel proud.
The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve learned about what really matters in life. I’ve become more confident, wiser, and more at peace. And that seems to be true for so many women that I know and admire.
So to celebrate my birthday this year, I sat down with a handful of changemakers of all ages—Ava DuVernay, Billie Jean King, Gayle King, Michelle Obama, Megan Rapinoe, Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon – to talk about what aging means to them and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.
We covered a lot of different topics, but it wasn’t long before a certain theme emerged: Women receive so many messages that they are not enough. And sometimes, the loudest voice is our own.
‘As women in this society, I think we all struggle with ‘not enoughness,’ and I’m still working on it,’ Michelle Obama told me. ‘When you’re a woman, a working-class kid, a person of color, there’s always a proving, right?’
Reese Witherspoon told me about a scene in ‘Legally Blonde’ that she rewrote with two of the film’s writers, in which her character realizes that, no matter what she does, her ex-boyfriend will never think she’s good enough. ‘That was such a huge thing we got into the film,’ she said, because it showed just how insecure and underestimated Elle Woods felt. Of course, she ends up proving her ex-boyfriend wrong in the most spectacular way.
Ironically, so many of us know inherently as little kids that we’re special. But as we grow up, the world has a way of chipping away at our sense of self, especially for girls. Eventually, when we enter our later years, it’s almost as if we finally remember what we knew when we were kids: We matter, and our stories matter.
Oprah told me that something profound happens to women in their 60s: You leave behind all the women you thought you had to be, and you settle into who you truly are.
Or, as Gayle put it, ‘Aging is just another word for living.’
You can watch all of these powerful conversations on the “Moments That Make Us” YouTube page.”
Source: Melinda French Gates/LinkedIn
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