January 5, 2022 • 44 mins
You may remember Stacy London, one of America’s foremost style experts and co-host of TLC’s iconic show, “What Not to Wear.”
Well now, in the middle passage of her life, Stacy is adding CEO to her resume. After an accomplished career in fashion, Stacy is now CEO of State of Menopause, a lifestyle company that is advocating for the underrepresented issue of menopause while providing helpful products.
In this episode, she speaks with Jess about her own confusion when perimenopause hit, and how she didn’t have the knowledge or language to help herself through what many women experience as a difficult time.
Stacy vulnerably shares how we can all set ourselves up for a healthier outlook on aging and the changes happening to our bodies as we grow older.
With so many Dominant Stories in culture around aging, this conversation is an important reminder that we can shift the narrative and in turn the way we see ourselves!
You can find Stacy London on social media, or visit her company’s website at stateofmenopause.com, to find products and advice.
Please rate, review, subscribe and share Dominant Stories with everyone you know.
If you want to learn more about Dominant Stories and how you can challenge and change them, visit jessweiner.com or follow Jess on Instagram @imjessweiner.
You can also email us about your Dominant Stories and how you are changing them - podcast@jessweiner.com or leave us a voicemail at 213 259 3033
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Shonda Rhymes, and we're bringing the Dominant Stories created
by Shawn Land Audio in partnership with the Deft Self
Esteem Project. I don't think of menopause as the cessation
of being able to have biological children, although I understand
that that is part of it. I really do see
this as much more of a transition for women. As
(00:22):
you said, we do start to feel less concerned with
external validation and much more concerned with our own standard
and measure of self worth. Hey, I'm Jess Weener and
this is Dominant Stories, the podcast that helps us reclaim
and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about
(00:43):
our bodies, our beauty, our creativity, and our identities. Today's
show is a topic near and dear to my heart,
my soul, and my you riss yep I said it,
and my uterus. It is all about aging. Well, we
(01:04):
know that aging happens to everybody. It really is often
women who bear the brunt of judgment, misinformation, and even
stigma about growing older. But we all could develop dominant
stories about aging. So we're going to talk about what
we can do to embrace our body image as our
bodies change. What stories are we currently telling ourselves about
(01:27):
our age and our ability, and how do we stay
feeling visible when we are often so disappeared by the
media as we age. On the show today, I have
the perfect guest to have this conversation, the incredible Stacy London.
Stacy is a woman I have long admired and you
likely have to from her time as co host on
(01:49):
the iconic TLC show What Not to Wear, and now
in her current role as founder and CEO for State
of Menopause, a company dedicated to making the state of
menopause easier. Thank you. She has written two books, Dress
Your Best and The Truth About Style. I can't wait
(02:09):
for you to hear this conversation, and of course, please
let me know what you think by subscribing and writing
a review wherever you're listening. Stacy London, when I reached
out to you to come on this show, you already
(02:30):
began to change my life. Where I said to you,
would you come on and talk to me about aging gracefully?
And you said yes. I just have to tell you
I don't believe in aging gracefully. I believe in aging period. Yeah,
you know, Look, I think gracefully is an interesting adverb
because to me, reeks of this kind of gendered femininity.
(02:55):
We don't really talk about men aging gracefully. We talked
about women aging gracefully, and so that pisces me off,
first of all. Second of all, I mean it's graceful.
It's not graceful, it's aging. I don't know where grace
certainly plays a role unless we start talking about it
from a much more superficial vantage point, like, oh, she's
aged really gracefully, meaning what that she's had enough botox
(03:17):
not to look her age. Listen, I'm off for it.
Do the botox, get the facelip, use the filters. I
don't care. But what's actually happening to you. Isn't changing
your aging to kind of dress it up in these
kind of cosmetic terms really bothers me because it doesn't
get at what the real issue is is that women
are punished for aging men are not. That's right. And
(03:39):
you know what happened when when you said that back
to me, I also realized, like, wow, look at how
easy it is to fall into those dominant stories about
how I'm supposed to age. Of course, and then I
just thought, screw it, You're absolutely right, Like we're aging
period full stop. Yeah. The one thing that I would
say where grace really us make a difference is in
(04:01):
our perspective in relation to ourselves and aging. In other words,
we don't as women generally give ourselves enough grace and
space to deal with the kind of negative self talk
that we have internalized been taught to think about aging
and be able to kind of untangle that very messy
(04:23):
web of what it means to be gracious and kind
to oneself, what it means to be gracious and kind,
and accepting of what age gives us, not rejecting of
what age takes. And that is the narrative that we've
always been taught, and changing that narrative is nothing short
of revolutionary. And that's why when I saw your announcement
(04:47):
around the launch of State of Menopause, I was just
tickled and delighted because as somebody actively in the throes
of perimenopause and started at around forty six and a half,
what I noticed when I read that like this was
your newest venture, was it really allowed me to reflect on, like, okay,
what has been my story since going into perimenopause and
(05:08):
like transitioning quite abruptly by the way into that space.
It was like nobody really asked me, where was I ready.
It was like, boom, I thought menopause was optional. So
that's how much I understood about it. And when I said,
when I tell you that, I truly did not understand
how unbelievably unprepared I was for menopause. Same for understanding it,
(05:31):
for being able to connect the dots when it came
to the issues and the effects of menopause, when it starts,
how long it lasts, what it means. Right, all of
these things were absolutely illusory to me. Like even though
all of these things were going wrong, right, I attributed
all of my perimenopausal symptoms either to the physical trauma
that I experienced after spine surgery or the emotional trauma
(05:53):
of losing my father. You can literally write off almost
every effect of menopause as thing else related to something else. Right,
So my anxiety, my stress, my mood changes, things like
that were very much easy for me to say, Oh, well,
it's fine surgery, of course I'm anxious. Of course, you know,
I was very short tempered. I was very you know,
(06:15):
not understanding that progesterone is one of the hormones that
decreases first. That's related to mood directly. It's not nature
versus nurture, of course, it's always both, And certainly the
menopause experience is experienced by people differently right how you
get to it, whether it's chronological, age, surgical, medical People
like Dr Jen Gunter, who wrote The Menopause Manifesto, said
(06:38):
even a childhood trauma plays into the way that you
experienced menopause. So I looked at the physical and emotional
trauma and realized how much that activated the very severe
menopausal symptoms that I have less of now but still
really didn't understand at all. Of the time, I felt
like I was going crazy. And part of it it
(07:00):
was that, you know, all of a sudden, I kind
of missed a news cycle. I just somehow wasn't in
the loop anymore. And you know who the hell is
Emma Chamberlain from YouTube. I mean, it felt like, whereas
I have been in the center of understanding kind of
pop culture and fashion trends and style and all of
(07:20):
the things that I have always talked about, I felt
that I kind of, you know, got left behind. And
for me, it was very hard not to dive into
this sense of negative self talk, of feeling completely worthless,
of thinking that wow, I never got married, I never
had kids, all of these kind of markers of achievements
(07:41):
for women, which is also kind of ridiculous. I like
to think of menopause as a huge opportunity, a gateway
to safeguard the next forty years of your health. And
part of that is because we were going to live
so much longer than our mothers did or our grandmothers did.
And if our average life spectancy is going to be
in our eighties or nineties, we're going to be older
(08:03):
a lot longer than we're going to be young. So
enough aging gracefully. We're just aging right, and we're aging
a lot longer than we did before. So what do
we do with this time in the middle. This is
the perfect moment for a transition and a reinvention. You
know what strikes me is that I think there's this
move for me. I'll speak for me. There was a
(08:24):
move from the external to the internal at this period
of my life in in aging, and some of that
is about focus. It was about my focus on external appreciation,
validation goals into an internal communication with my body as
things were starting to shift and change in the dominant
stories that were coming up for me during the beginnings
(08:45):
of perimenopause forty years old choosing not to have children.
Have always known that that was not a life path
for me, and then my dominant stories were like, oh,
my god, I'm really going to not be fertile, like
last chance lady, like eggs or drop in, what do
you want to do? And like, you know, all these
stories started coming up that I don't even know where
my stories, but they were the dominant stories about my
(09:07):
worth or my value about like oh, you're on the
decline of your life. Well, but you know, just to
be clear, I don't want to invalidate what you're saying,
because I think what you're saying is very real and
very much a part of this experience. We don't actually
as a society recognize the kind of realization that we're
no longer able to have children. Right. This is something
(09:29):
that even as a person who did not want children,
there is something about the fact that knowing you can't
do it is different than having the option too. That's right.
In addition, I think societally and culturally we have a
tendency then to reduce a woman's worth to her reproductive health.
We are not just ovens for buns. Women in particular
(09:52):
are absolutely being looked at through this patriarchal lens as
defective once we can no longer have biological children, And
to me, that is the deepest, most ungraceful way to
think about it. Right. I don't think of menopause as
the cessation of being able to have biological children, although
(10:13):
I understand that that is part of it. I really
do see this as much more of a transition for women.
As you said, we do start to feel less concerned
with external validation and much more concerned with our own
standard and measure of self worth. Yeah. I was thinking
about the way that I was introduced to these concepts,
(10:36):
and I was thinking about who welcomed me into the
aging process, you know, like I knew my mother hit
menopause when she was fifty, and my mother just says like, yeah,
just I just stopped, and I just never had my
period and always well, we talked about a lot of things.
We certainly talked about puberty. I tried most of my
life not to get pregnant, right, So we talked about
sex and sex education from a preventative measure. But this
(10:57):
sort of natural progression in a woman's life we didn't
talk about. And I'm curious what that was like for
you growing up, and did you have different kinds of
conversations around aging with the women in your life. No,
I mean to be completely honest with you. The one
thing that I want to say about that is that,
you know, my mom did not she had a radical hysterectomy.
I did not know that she went into menopause. I
(11:19):
did not know. She didn't tell me anything about it.
She talked to me about burning her bra not burning
up right. She talked to me about what it was
like to be able to take the pill. You know,
what what a revolutionist was in the seventies, The fact
that she could have her own credit card after in
eighteen seventy two. I mean, these are the things that
she talked about, and how far her generation had to
(11:40):
kick the can down the road for us. And now
I find it very important that we continue to change
and more this conversation about what aging and revolution looked like. Um.
And the one thing that I'll say about menopause is
that I think menopause and aging are conflated they're related,
but they are two different things. And Scientific American did
(12:03):
a study that I quote quite a bit that says
that the lowest point of happiness in a woman's life
was forty five to fifty four. And I don't think
that's by accident. We either have children or empty nest
syndrome where we never had children and maybe are feeling
that loss. We have elder care or dying parents. We
are in the middle of, at least for women, the
potential for our earning to decrease significantly at this stage
(12:27):
of life. These are heavy, hard things. Put on top
of that, anxiety, depression, mood swings, brain fog, night sweats,
hot flashes, I mean, weight gain, weight body distribution, joint pain,
muscle fatigue, and we put chin hairs in their chin hairs,
food allergies, and all of these things make it sound
like menopause is a disease and not an opportunity, right,
(12:50):
And that's the problem, right. I will never sugarcoat the
fact that the menopause experience for of post menopausal women
said that they experienced the jumps that were hard, not impossible, hard.
And if we are educated, if we have understanding of
our own agency, or choices around what works for us. Well,
(13:11):
then that hard journey is going to be a hell
of a lot easier. And that is really why I
started my company. I think that menopause has an effect
on the way that we feel about this age, not
vice versa. I love it, and I also think about
the additive layer of loneliness when you're not in communication
(13:31):
about these things. Right, well, I'll tell you Google analytics
most questions surrounding perimenopause during COVID went up. It is
not because I think more people went into menopause. I
think there was nowhere to go for help. There was
no one to ask. You couldn't go see your doctor
and create a support system around ourselves that you know,
(13:51):
the minute that I was given some tools, it made
life a lot easier for me to deal with this stage.
When you were back at some the first moments that
you were feeling these changes, and I've seen you write
a lot about this, but I was curious if you
could voice or articulate like what the narrative sounded like
in your own head at that time, if you remember,
(14:13):
like do you remember what the dominant story was about
that for you? All of it, I mean you know. Look,
I started my career as a magazine fashion stylist, as
an editor, and then I was in television right for
fifteen years and what Not to Where is the show
that I'm most known for. But I did Love Luster Run,
I was on the View for a bit, I did
Access Hollywood. I was a correspondent for the Today Show.
(14:36):
I was on Oprah and Rachel Ray and I mean
it went on and on and on. I did campaigns
for Panting, for Well, like for Dr Schulz. There was
a point where you could turn on your television there
was a thirty percent chance I would be on your screen.
And to go from that to feeling like I kind
of faded away was incredibly painful. And there was an
(14:58):
incredibly difficult time for me where I was like, I'm
not worthy. I really lost my way, and I feel
like in a lot of ways, I was put in
a box like she can only do this, she is
only a fashion person, and fashion makeover shows are no
longer in style, so she has nothing to offer. And
these were the kinds of stories that nobody told me.
(15:19):
This is what I was saying to myself, right, I
was trying to rationalize where I found myself, this idea
of growing older, of starting to look different, of looking
in the mirror and not being like, oh, you know,
I can't drink too Martini's and wake up the next
morning looking bright eyed and bushy tailed, I look like
a hag, and understanding that my skin was changing, that
where it used to be sort of bright and dewey,
(15:41):
it got sallow and dry. And I just didn't feel
like myself, which is probably the number one thing that
I hear from other women who are experiencing pre menopause, perimenopause,
or post menopause. They don't feel like themselves. One of
the things that I wrote in my book The Truth
about Style, was that you know, there are times where
(16:02):
you have to step away from the mirror, no matter
what age you are, no matter what transition you're going through,
and look for your reflection elsewhere, not in a mirror,
but in the example that I gave, I said, look
at your reflection through the eyes of the people who
love you, and understand that what they see is not
(16:22):
what you see and what you say to yourself. And
sometimes you need others who love you to remind you
of who you are. And honestly, the last six years.
That has been a real journey for me. What I
really had to think about was what do I have
to offer? What have I always been able to offer?
And how can I find a vehicle in which to
(16:44):
continue serving the needs of communities that I care about.
I got a good idea. Let's take a moment to
reach hard and we'll be back in a flash. H
(17:08):
We're back, ready to conquer your dominant stories. Here we go.
For me, part of my long time story has been
my worth is my work. And I think where it
all became conflated and like piled up for me was
(17:28):
when my desires changed around that hustle, and it coordinated
with a time where my body was slowing down or
softening up or wanting different things. And then it became
a matter of like reckoning with myself. You know, hunger
has always been a theme in my life, both metaphysical
and physical, but the the hunger that I had to
(17:51):
want something new, and I hear that in your story
as well, and it came side by side with this
is what people know me to be and my journey
is taking me in a slightly divergent direction. Do I
have permission to go there? What will it look like?
How will I be relevant? And then on top of
all of that, I'm heading into the middle passage of
my life and all of these other things are happening,
(18:12):
and so it's not just one thing, and I think
it gets wrapped into fertility, productivity, connection. My relationship to
my body has changed, not in just around these things
we're talking about, but into an appreciation of it's quite frankly,
it's functionality over its adornment. Yes, I'm so with you, right,
I have had body issues my whole life. I am
(18:34):
five Well, I don't know if I'm five seven anymore
since this fine surgery. Let's just say at five six,
and I have been eighty nine pounds in my life,
and I've been a d eighty pounds in my life.
That's a pretty broad range of sizes. And I can
look at anybody. I can. I can look somebody up
and down. I can I can know what size they are,
I can know what will look great on them. I
(18:55):
know what colors work for them. But you know, we're
always a little bit blinded by looking at our own reflection.
And for me, I've always had issues with body dysmorphia.
This is something that I've struggled with my whole life
on any channel, on any show, on any in any
project where I've had to help somebody kind of create
their own sense of style. The compassion that I naturally
(19:18):
had for people who were struggling was something that I
never gave to myself. And yes, I definitely think that
part of aging has been about that compassion, and not
for nothing. This hustle culture, this capitalist culture that you're
talking about, it is really pervasive. And this whole idea
of being lazy or just bored or tired or not
(19:41):
wanting to participate is not necessarily a sign of depression.
Being able to opt out and say hey, I need
a break, I need a rest, that is something we
don't talk about enough. I agree. I did not make
this decision at fifty while I was fifty one when
I acquired the company, because I was like, wow, I
(20:02):
need to reinvent myself to be relevant. What I realized
was that the relevancy really was about what my existential
crisis led me to. It was about what is going
to bring me joy, satisfaction, happiness, contentment in this next
phase of my life, and maybe maybe that will be
(20:22):
done in five years maybe it won't be. But what
I realized is this desperation, this fear that like I
had nothing left to give, was something so palpable and
so scary that I just started to see everything in
my life through the lens of loss. You used to
be able to get pregnant, was the least agreed. It
(20:43):
was like you used to be some of the people
wanted on television. You used to be attractive, you used
to be a size this you used to be, and
never looking and appreciating what was actually happening in the moment.
And I even still carry regret that I didn't appreciate
what happened to me in the moment when I was younger.
But the fact is, I don't think you start to
(21:05):
appreciate the present until you start having less of it.
I agree, And I think what happens to as I'm
talking to friends and menopause and we're going into paramenopause,
is yes, we're going to live a longer life. And
I think at middle passage we start to reckon with
death differently. At this point we've likely had more losses
than perhaps we had in our youth. Although I understand
(21:25):
people have lost in their youth quite a bit. So
when you say we can't quite appreciate this from maybe
a younger station in life, I really get that now,
and I want to make it easier for our next
generation to have these stories, as I imagine you do too,
because you know, all of the work that you're doing
is about democratizing this story for people. Right. Yeah, And look,
(21:46):
menopause has to be something that we don't just normalize
as a conversation, but we optimize so that by the
time Gen Z gets to be this age, this will
no longer be a conversation we need to be having.
This will no longer or be a conversation where nobody
knows what to do, how to get help, how to
ask questions, and what to be ashamed of. I mean
(22:08):
everything that you know, the things that women talk about
being ashamed of. Right, you know, there's this whole conversation
now around younger girls and getting their period and talking
about not being ashamed to go to the bathroom with
a tampon, And I'm like, well, why do we have
to be ashamed of going to the bathroom without a tampon?
You know what I mean? Here is something where you
can start saving all the money that you were spending
(22:28):
on pads or cups or tampons, and buy aarrings, choose
a new chair. I want people to think about what
is possible, not what is no longer possible. Yes, and
the thing is that you can only do better when
you know better, right, And that is true of the
way we talk to ourselves. So if you are not
(22:49):
spending any time thinking about that negative loop that is
going on, that voice in your head that is telling
you that you're not good enough, that you can't do something,
that you're not qualified, you're too old, that you have
imposter syndrome, or whatever it is. All those are thoughts
that get in the way of you doing whatever the
hell you want. You know, you and I share so
(23:11):
many things in common. I am seeing more in this conversation.
But one of the things that we share is people
come to us for advice and we're in the expert
role quite a bit all the time, all the time.
So here's my question for you, miss Stacy London. Yeah,
I find that it's a role that I love to play.
It's something that I value of being of service to people,
(23:31):
and it has been tricky for me being in an
expert role because in my own relationship to that it
has stopped me at times from being vulnerable about not
knowing and being able to say sometimes like I'm in progress.
I'm in process. I don't know, and I'm curious if
you've ever shared that feeling and what your relationship is
(23:53):
as a current and former and future expert in the
space of not knowing. Yeah, I'm a big believer now,
I'll tell you I wasn't always a big believer in
not knowing. When I went from magazines to television and
I was supposed to be considered an expert, I had
no sense of humor about myself. I was like, I
(24:15):
have to be the authority. People need to take me seriously.
I can make fun of them, they can't make fun
of me. This is my job. I'm supposed to do this.
Blah blah blah. I have this whole set of ideas
about what I was supposed to appear like on camera
and not being able to be a little bit more
relaxed and you know, open to questions or even constructive
(24:38):
criticism about what I was doing right, I was like, no,
I know what I'm doing. I'm in charge. I got
this the moment for me, when I realized, like I
have to say I don't know. I wasn't really in television.
It was when I realized, Okay, I'm going to step
into this role as CEO. I have no obvious qualification
(25:02):
via CEO, and I didn't know anything about infrastructure or
e commerce or law or all of the things that
you know you have to learn in order to run
a company. But the thing is everybody is capable of learning.
If anything, I believe more now in neuroplasticity than I
ever did before. And what I realize is that you
(25:24):
have to go in being able to say I don't know.
I surround myself now with people as smart as I
can find them, definitely smarter than me, because all I
get to do is learn. All I get to do
is take this knowledge and soak it up like a sponge.
And being able to say I don't know is one
of the strongest, most powerful things I've ever been able
(25:47):
to do. It is that kind of vulnerability that actually
kind of creates progress in relationships in business everything and
not knowing is kind of exciting. Yes, I feel the
same way, and actually being able to say I don't
know is one of the power tools that I offer
people around challenging their dominant stories because it opens you
(26:09):
to questioning. Right, So even if your dominant story is
like you're not qualified to be in this business, lots
of people have that dominant story actually being able to say,
I don't know, am I I don't know? Is that true?
It's just a gentle questioning. I find as a technique
that I used to say, like, I hear you voice,
I hear you loud and clear, but I don't know
if that's true. Why what do you mean? Give me
(26:31):
an example? Why did I want to do this? Why
do I think I can do this? Why do I
think I can't do this? Why you keep asking? Why?
You finally get to the kernel of truth? And this
idea of you know is sort of opening that door
to why bingo? Right, I don't know if that's true?
And so they're really connected and I never thought about
that before. Yeah, me neither. And I like it in
(26:54):
this kind of conversation because I think one of the
things that we say about growing older, which I do
believe is true, is all of this earned wisdom. I
get that, and I want to insert the part where
we don't also feel like all of a sudden you
hit a certain age and then doom. You're supposed to
like know it all. I think what I'm hearing in
our conversation is a discovery, is a process, is a journey?
(27:16):
Is that's where the grace and space comes in. I mean,
I think of discovery like falling in love. Right Nobody
there's no book that teaches you how to do that.
And when you are falling in love with a person, certainly,
it's layer after layer, it's moment after moment. It's an
incredible process of understanding another person. You know, for me
(27:38):
to say that, like what is my girlfriend's favorite food
was part of falling in love with her? Or you
know where her favorite place to go is? It was
part of falling in love with her. I feel the
same way about where I am in my journey right now.
Discovery is like falling in love. I think about falling
in love with your life. It is the opportunity to
(28:00):
learn and open your eyes even more to things that
you may have looked at a thousand times, but there's
always more to know that. To me, just the idea
of discovery is grace. Aging is a fact. Yes, it
doesn't have it doesn't have a descriptor attached to it.
But what you can do while you age, now, that
(28:22):
is what can be done with grace beautiful. All right,
you know the drill. It's that time. I'll be back
before you know it. Hey, hey, we're back now, let's
(28:44):
get into our convo. Let me set the stage. It's
two thousand seven. It's one of many Oprah appearances, and
you are talking to this woman about dressing for her age,
and so let me play a clip and then I
want to come back and hear what you think. Okay,
(29:06):
here is my problem. Okay, you are dressing a little
inappropriately for your age, my dear. Okay, So okay, okay,
So where is it written? If you has a dressed
a way when you get older, we can update your
style and make it look like you are ageless and
timeless and classic. So I want to make sure that
(29:29):
things like this don't happen. Okay, all right, let's go.
So the things like this you're pointing to a little people,
I think on her shirt. Um, but this is fifteen
years ago, and I'm curious where where you go when
you hear that. Now I cringe a little bit, to
be honest, with you. It's not that I'm sure that
(29:52):
that woman was probably dressing in a way that didn't
suit her body as well as it could or wasn't
as bigure flattering as it m have been. But it
also wasn't really my job to say, you know, she
asked the right question, She asked the question fault who
says right. At the time, it felt very important as
an expert to be kind of creating these rules and
(30:13):
guard rails for people to follow and educate them. And
the thing is, I think I might still say the
same thing with the caveat that you can look however
you want to look, you can age however you want
to age. And what I what I still feel is
that if we are dressing in a way that doesn't
(30:33):
seem to suit us. In other words, if people react
in a way that doesn't kind of match the way
we expect them to in the way that we present ourselves,
there's a disconnect there. And what I always think that
is an issue when it comes to women who are
getting older and whatever age they could be thirty, I
don't care just as they age that there's this sense
(30:55):
that they're still in the style that they wore in
their youth, that they hold onto the style that they
were when they felt best about themselves, even if that
style doesn't actually suit who they are now. In other words,
isn't as flattering, isn't as powerful, doesn't give them a
sense of themselves other than I wish I was still young. That,
(31:17):
to me is where the mistake that I made comes in,
is that I should have said, is this look the
look that you loved when you were twenty five? Or
is this the look that you truly love now? Yeah,
but to give yourself space and grace too. Would you
have known to do that at that time where you
were at in your life. Like I think, as those
(31:37):
of us who dole out advice, we do what we
do best in the moment we're doing it. I agree.
And I also think that like there was a formula
for what not to wear? Right, it was like we
really were asked to be experts in our field. We
had to make sort of black and white statements in
order to make it clear what our objective was. And
the thing is that that's what would be you know,
(31:59):
tricky about a show that was just telling people what
to wear. Now, that's it wouldn't fly in the same way,
because we have to honor who people want to be, right,
I learned to be more expansive, And of course there
are lots of things that I look back at and
cringe and think, oh god, none of that would fly
now me too, right, But it was what it was
(32:22):
in the moment. When you know better, you do better.
And certainly even my choice to change roles instead of
doing something that was solely based in style, to do
something that's based much more in wellness and feeling good
as opposed to just be looking good is part of
my own evolution bingo, And that word is really important
(32:44):
I think for us to remember, too, is the combination
of looking and feeling. That's a guide post for me
to say, how do I feel in this? I let
that guide a lot of my choices. Now. Yeah, well look,
I mean one of the things that I say now
about style right is like take the suit right. People
are like, oh a suit. You're always saying, get a suit.
What is it that it matters? Right? What matters about
(33:06):
the suit? Now, if you're let's say, going on a
job interview and you want to be a dominatrix by
all means, where the latex cat suit if you want
to work at like an old stogy corporate bank where
the pinstripe suit, use the language, the visual language that
is going to get you what you want. I do
(33:27):
not make the rules. I just want you to win
the game. I just want you to get where you
want to go. And if dressing in a way that
makes you feel like you are being your full person,
your full self, and you're getting where you want to
go in life, then don't let anybody stop you. Amen
insert just pumping hands in the air. I love it,
(33:49):
you know. I wanted to ask you something a little
bit switching gears, but something that you made me think about,
and I want to say before I forget, which is
also a ps part of my growing older journey is
brain fog, brain fog. It's a little brain foggy. But
I was thinking about because it's not very often actually
that I get to speak so publicly, or I've chosen
to speak so publicly about my choice and now my
(34:10):
husband and my choice to not have children. And I
was thinking about how we mark time as and I
know that a lot of my friends who have children
mark time differently. They do it by the developmental stages
of their children, right, It's like it's first steps, it's kindergarten,
it's first food, it's whatever it is, right. And I
also marked time and milestones by watching my my friend's
(34:33):
kids grow up. So all of a sudden, I'm like,
wait a minute, he's ten years old. I remember when
she was pregnant. How the hell did ten years go by?
I think it's different when you're not raising children inside
of your home. I think the relationship to time aging
progress is also uniquely different. And I just wanted to
ask you if you've noticed that as well. Absolutely, I
mean I can't believe that some of my friends kids
(34:54):
are graduating from college. Yes, I graduated from college two
days ago in my in my mind, but anyway, yes,
I do think that that's true. And I do think
that for me that was a little bit tricky because
so many of my friends had kids that I didn't
feel that I could relate to them the same way.
And a lot of my friends became a lot younger
(35:15):
than me because I had freedoms that, you know, my
friends were no longer had, and so for a long time,
I was only spending my time with younger people, much
younger people, and in a way. I think that did
some damage to me as well, because I started to
realize that their opportunities were still on the horizon in
(35:36):
a way that mine were not. And I don't mean
any particular job. I just mean the opportunities that come
with having more days in front of you than days
behind you. I had to kind of write the ship right.
I had to spend time with my friends who do
have kids. I just spend time with friends my own age.
I just spend time with my younger friends with the
perspective that I now have that I am where I
(35:58):
am and they are where they are, and that this
tendency that we have, this terrible tendency that I've always
had to compare myself with others, made so much worse
by social media, does nothing but devalue who you are
and where you are. And when we love somebody, we
have to love them unconditionally, not in relationship to how
(36:18):
they affect us. And that was what I sort of
I had to kind of re establish my relationships with
people from a different vantage point and to offer ourselves,
as we've been talking about throughout this conversation, the grace
and love to be where we are in those moments.
It is really important to remember that we can do
(36:40):
things that are challenging that ultimately wind up being incredibly fulfilling.
And even when you are negatively self speaking, that you
have the potential and the power to step in and say, well,
I don't know, I'm not sure why all the things
that you preach are things that we should be talking
about at this stage of life, particularly where we have
(37:03):
wisdom to maybe answer those questions a little bit more
deeply and a little bit more profoundly than we could
in our youth. Exactly. I have one last question for you,
and it's one of my favorite ones. I'm going to
hear what you're gonna say about this. What part of
(37:24):
your body could tell the story of your life? Oh
my god, that is a very interesting question. And I
would say the part of my body that probably tells
the most about my life is my skin. And I
know that that's a pretty big organ, actually the largest organ.
(37:45):
But you know, my body is riddled with scars from operations,
from topical steroids from my psoriasis as a child. My
skin has been at the center of my story since
I was three years old when I was diagnosed with psoriasis.
And I had no idea what that meant, except that
I was told that it was chronic, that I would
(38:05):
always have it, and that something was wrong with me.
And that is very difficult language for a child to
understand or to really process, other than to know something
is wrong with me. Right. I was covered in soo
rised this from my neck down from the time I
was eleven to thirteen, after incredibly bad battles with strap throat,
(38:26):
and I was made of scales. I wore white turtlenecks
and long black pants every day, even in the summer.
I had to cut my hair. It was much longer
than it is now. I had to cut it into
a crew cut because the cold tar that we were
using on my scalp. My mom used to scrub it
out with or acid. It was always about my skin.
(38:50):
It was, in some sense, always about the visible, which
is why the internal work of validation has been so
hard for me and so necessary. And so I would
say that my skin really does tell a story. My
scars tell a story. It's one thing to say, oh,
you know, they're badges of honor. I'm a warrior, I've
been through all that. Blah blah bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, right,
(39:13):
what it is? It's my story, That's all it is.
It's my story. And rather than put a value judgment
on it, rather than saying I'm brave or how courageous,
or oh, it's amazing that you've gotten past this, or
oh poor you boo, who look at that scar? That's terrible. Whatever,
It's just my story, just like your story is your story,
(39:35):
and the best thing that we can do with the
story is fucking tell it. And when the story doesn't
serve you, to change it. Change it in, chuck it,
change in, chuck it and challenge it. This is the
whole point of this show, Stacy. Where can people find
out more? Where where can we send people to get connected? Sure? Well,
(39:56):
of course our website State of Menopause dot com. Our
new blah is up now so you can read articles
from some of our medical experts who are on our
medical Advisory Board, as well as for products. You don't
need to know where you are in the menopause journey
to see if there is a product that will work
for you. There is a search engine so you can
shop by issue rather than just by product. We are
(40:18):
shop state of on Instagram and Facebook and obviously you
can find me Stacy London, you know pretty much everywhere.
Stacy London Real on Instagram, Stacy London on Twitter, Stacy
London on Pinterest, Stacy London Official on on Facebook. You know,
they make it hard for you to always have your name.
(40:39):
I love it. Thank you so much, thank you, just
thank you so many great gems from Stacy London. But
I think number one, we got to talk about this more.
Whether we're talking about the process of aging, the ups
and downs of aging, and of course body changes in menopause.
(40:59):
We just have keep normalizing that conversation. So talk about
it with somebody you love and trust, ask a doctor,
talk about it with your friends. I think the more
we can normalize it, the better. I also really got
the sense that we, and I know I do, need
to get more educated about these things. And it doesn't
mean it has to be a big homework assignment. You
don't have to kind of like absorb a whole whole
book about it. But I say, you know, look up
(41:20):
an article, try to get some expert specific facts because
there's a lot of stuff out there, So be diligent
as you look up and get educated. But let's get
educated and then, of course, the big part of our
conversation today with Stacy was challenging those dominant stories, the
things that say, who are you to run that company?
Or you know you're not as vital or worthy anymore
as you're aging. She has an approach where Stacy would ask,
(41:42):
why why am I thinking that? Why do I believe that?
I have an approach where I say, like, I don't know,
is that true? I'm not sure that's true. I like
to get curious about those dominant stories. But either way,
I think let's challenge those negative voices that tell us
these life changes are signaling some ing terrible and instead,
as Stacy so beautifully said, we're all aging aging period.
(42:05):
But how we do it, how we can embrace it.
That's where the grace and compassion comes in. And if
you're interested in exploring more about your dominant stories and
how you can challenge them and change them, I teach
(42:26):
workshops on this stuff, so you can always sign up
at Jess Weiner dot com. You can follow me on
Instagram at I'm Jess Weiner. I really love the community
that we're creating. I love the stories you're sharing and
the questions you're asking So if you want to tell
us about your Dominant Stories that you're rewriting and working on,
you can email us at podcast at Dominant stories dot
com or leave us a voicemail at two one three
(42:49):
five nine three zero three three. And don't stress, I'm
gonna put all that in the show notes. And next
week we're going to talk about creativity with my talented
and kind and super genius friend, Alex Blackamore. Alex is
(43:10):
an award winning music director, arranger, composer. You know he's
done some like small but successful Broadway shows like Hamilton's
Dear Evan Hansen in the Heights. Yeah, those shows. Alex
is incredible. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation.
And again, thanks so much for being here, and please
(43:31):
don't forget to write a review wherever you're listening. It's
super duper duper helps us out. And remember we're always learning,
we're always growing. Dominant Stories with Jess Winer is a
(43:56):
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
I'm Shonda Rhymes, and we're bringing the Dominant Stories created
by Shawn Land Audio in partnership with the Deft Self
Esteem Project. I don't think of menopause as the cessation
of being able to have biological children, although I understand
that that is part of it. I really do see
this as much more of a transition for women. As
(00:22):
you said, we do start to feel less concerned with
external validation and much more concerned with our own standard
and measure of self worth. Hey, I'm Jess Weener and
this is Dominant Stories, the podcast that helps us reclaim
and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about
(00:43):
our bodies, our beauty, our creativity, and our identities. Today's
show is a topic near and dear to my heart,
my soul, and my you riss yep I said it,
and my uterus. It is all about aging. Well, we
(01:04):
know that aging happens to everybody. It really is often
women who bear the brunt of judgment, misinformation, and even
stigma about growing older. But we all could develop dominant
stories about aging. So we're going to talk about what
we can do to embrace our body image as our
bodies change. What stories are we currently telling ourselves about
(01:27):
our age and our ability, and how do we stay
feeling visible when we are often so disappeared by the
media as we age. On the show today, I have
the perfect guest to have this conversation, the incredible Stacy London.
Stacy is a woman I have long admired and you
likely have to from her time as co host on
(01:49):
the iconic TLC show What Not to Wear, and now
in her current role as founder and CEO for State
of Menopause, a company dedicated to making the state of
menopause easier. Thank you. She has written two books, Dress
Your Best and The Truth About Style. I can't wait
(02:09):
for you to hear this conversation, and of course, please
let me know what you think by subscribing and writing
a review wherever you're listening. Stacy London, when I reached
out to you to come on this show, you already
(02:30):
began to change my life. Where I said to you,
would you come on and talk to me about aging gracefully?
And you said yes. I just have to tell you
I don't believe in aging gracefully. I believe in aging period. Yeah,
you know, Look, I think gracefully is an interesting adverb
because to me, reeks of this kind of gendered femininity.
(02:55):
We don't really talk about men aging gracefully. We talked
about women aging gracefully, and so that pisces me off,
first of all. Second of all, I mean it's graceful.
It's not graceful, it's aging. I don't know where grace
certainly plays a role unless we start talking about it
from a much more superficial vantage point, like, oh, she's
aged really gracefully, meaning what that she's had enough botox
(03:17):
not to look her age. Listen, I'm off for it.
Do the botox, get the facelip, use the filters. I
don't care. But what's actually happening to you. Isn't changing
your aging to kind of dress it up in these
kind of cosmetic terms really bothers me because it doesn't
get at what the real issue is is that women
are punished for aging men are not. That's right. And
(03:39):
you know what happened when when you said that back
to me, I also realized, like, wow, look at how
easy it is to fall into those dominant stories about
how I'm supposed to age. Of course, and then I
just thought, screw it, You're absolutely right, Like we're aging
period full stop. Yeah. The one thing that I would
say where grace really us make a difference is in
(04:01):
our perspective in relation to ourselves and aging. In other words,
we don't as women generally give ourselves enough grace and
space to deal with the kind of negative self talk
that we have internalized been taught to think about aging
and be able to kind of untangle that very messy
(04:23):
web of what it means to be gracious and kind
to oneself, what it means to be gracious and kind,
and accepting of what age gives us, not rejecting of
what age takes. And that is the narrative that we've
always been taught, and changing that narrative is nothing short
of revolutionary. And that's why when I saw your announcement
(04:47):
around the launch of State of Menopause, I was just
tickled and delighted because as somebody actively in the throes
of perimenopause and started at around forty six and a half,
what I noticed when I read that like this was
your newest venture, was it really allowed me to reflect on, like, okay,
what has been my story since going into perimenopause and
(05:08):
like transitioning quite abruptly by the way into that space.
It was like nobody really asked me, where was I ready.
It was like, boom, I thought menopause was optional. So
that's how much I understood about it. And when I said,
when I tell you that, I truly did not understand
how unbelievably unprepared I was for menopause. Same for understanding it,
(05:31):
for being able to connect the dots when it came
to the issues and the effects of menopause, when it starts,
how long it lasts, what it means. Right, all of
these things were absolutely illusory to me. Like even though
all of these things were going wrong, right, I attributed
all of my perimenopausal symptoms either to the physical trauma
that I experienced after spine surgery or the emotional trauma
(05:53):
of losing my father. You can literally write off almost
every effect of menopause as thing else related to something else. Right,
So my anxiety, my stress, my mood changes, things like
that were very much easy for me to say, Oh, well,
it's fine surgery, of course I'm anxious. Of course, you know,
I was very short tempered. I was very you know,
(06:15):
not understanding that progesterone is one of the hormones that
decreases first. That's related to mood directly. It's not nature
versus nurture, of course, it's always both, And certainly the
menopause experience is experienced by people differently right how you
get to it, whether it's chronological, age, surgical, medical People
like Dr Jen Gunter, who wrote The Menopause Manifesto, said
(06:38):
even a childhood trauma plays into the way that you
experienced menopause. So I looked at the physical and emotional
trauma and realized how much that activated the very severe
menopausal symptoms that I have less of now but still
really didn't understand at all. Of the time, I felt
like I was going crazy. And part of it it
(07:00):
was that, you know, all of a sudden, I kind
of missed a news cycle. I just somehow wasn't in
the loop anymore. And you know who the hell is
Emma Chamberlain from YouTube. I mean, it felt like, whereas
I have been in the center of understanding kind of
pop culture and fashion trends and style and all of
(07:20):
the things that I have always talked about, I felt
that I kind of, you know, got left behind. And
for me, it was very hard not to dive into
this sense of negative self talk, of feeling completely worthless,
of thinking that wow, I never got married, I never
had kids, all of these kind of markers of achievements
(07:41):
for women, which is also kind of ridiculous. I like
to think of menopause as a huge opportunity, a gateway
to safeguard the next forty years of your health. And
part of that is because we were going to live
so much longer than our mothers did or our grandmothers did.
And if our average life spectancy is going to be
in our eighties or nineties, we're going to be older
(08:03):
a lot longer than we're going to be young. So
enough aging gracefully. We're just aging right, and we're aging
a lot longer than we did before. So what do
we do with this time in the middle. This is
the perfect moment for a transition and a reinvention. You
know what strikes me is that I think there's this
move for me. I'll speak for me. There was a
(08:24):
move from the external to the internal at this period
of my life in in aging, and some of that
is about focus. It was about my focus on external appreciation,
validation goals into an internal communication with my body as
things were starting to shift and change in the dominant
stories that were coming up for me during the beginnings
(08:45):
of perimenopause forty years old choosing not to have children.
Have always known that that was not a life path
for me, and then my dominant stories were like, oh,
my god, I'm really going to not be fertile, like
last chance lady, like eggs or drop in, what do
you want to do? And like, you know, all these
stories started coming up that I don't even know where
my stories, but they were the dominant stories about my
(09:07):
worth or my value about like oh, you're on the
decline of your life. Well, but you know, just to
be clear, I don't want to invalidate what you're saying,
because I think what you're saying is very real and
very much a part of this experience. We don't actually
as a society recognize the kind of realization that we're
no longer able to have children. Right. This is something
(09:29):
that even as a person who did not want children,
there is something about the fact that knowing you can't
do it is different than having the option too. That's right.
In addition, I think societally and culturally we have a
tendency then to reduce a woman's worth to her reproductive health.
We are not just ovens for buns. Women in particular
(09:52):
are absolutely being looked at through this patriarchal lens as
defective once we can no longer have biological children, And
to me, that is the deepest, most ungraceful way to
think about it. Right. I don't think of menopause as
the cessation of being able to have biological children, although
(10:13):
I understand that that is part of it. I really
do see this as much more of a transition for women.
As you said, we do start to feel less concerned
with external validation and much more concerned with our own
standard and measure of self worth. Yeah. I was thinking
about the way that I was introduced to these concepts,
(10:36):
and I was thinking about who welcomed me into the
aging process, you know, like I knew my mother hit
menopause when she was fifty, and my mother just says like, yeah,
just I just stopped, and I just never had my
period and always well, we talked about a lot of things.
We certainly talked about puberty. I tried most of my
life not to get pregnant, right, So we talked about
sex and sex education from a preventative measure. But this
(10:57):
sort of natural progression in a woman's life we didn't
talk about. And I'm curious what that was like for
you growing up, and did you have different kinds of
conversations around aging with the women in your life. No,
I mean to be completely honest with you. The one
thing that I want to say about that is that,
you know, my mom did not she had a radical hysterectomy.
I did not know that she went into menopause. I
(11:19):
did not know. She didn't tell me anything about it.
She talked to me about burning her bra not burning
up right. She talked to me about what it was
like to be able to take the pill. You know,
what what a revolutionist was in the seventies, The fact
that she could have her own credit card after in
eighteen seventy two. I mean, these are the things that
she talked about, and how far her generation had to
(11:40):
kick the can down the road for us. And now
I find it very important that we continue to change
and more this conversation about what aging and revolution looked like. Um.
And the one thing that I'll say about menopause is
that I think menopause and aging are conflated they're related,
but they are two different things. And Scientific American did
(12:03):
a study that I quote quite a bit that says
that the lowest point of happiness in a woman's life
was forty five to fifty four. And I don't think
that's by accident. We either have children or empty nest
syndrome where we never had children and maybe are feeling
that loss. We have elder care or dying parents. We
are in the middle of, at least for women, the
potential for our earning to decrease significantly at this stage
(12:27):
of life. These are heavy, hard things. Put on top
of that, anxiety, depression, mood swings, brain fog, night sweats,
hot flashes, I mean, weight gain, weight body distribution, joint pain,
muscle fatigue, and we put chin hairs in their chin hairs,
food allergies, and all of these things make it sound
like menopause is a disease and not an opportunity, right,
(12:50):
And that's the problem, right. I will never sugarcoat the
fact that the menopause experience for of post menopausal women
said that they experienced the jumps that were hard, not impossible, hard.
And if we are educated, if we have understanding of
our own agency, or choices around what works for us. Well,
(13:11):
then that hard journey is going to be a hell
of a lot easier. And that is really why I
started my company. I think that menopause has an effect
on the way that we feel about this age, not
vice versa. I love it, and I also think about
the additive layer of loneliness when you're not in communication
(13:31):
about these things. Right, well, I'll tell you Google analytics
most questions surrounding perimenopause during COVID went up. It is
not because I think more people went into menopause. I
think there was nowhere to go for help. There was
no one to ask. You couldn't go see your doctor
and create a support system around ourselves that you know,
(13:51):
the minute that I was given some tools, it made
life a lot easier for me to deal with this stage.
When you were back at some the first moments that
you were feeling these changes, and I've seen you write
a lot about this, but I was curious if you
could voice or articulate like what the narrative sounded like
in your own head at that time, if you remember,
(14:13):
like do you remember what the dominant story was about
that for you? All of it, I mean you know. Look,
I started my career as a magazine fashion stylist, as
an editor, and then I was in television right for
fifteen years and what Not to Where is the show
that I'm most known for. But I did Love Luster Run,
I was on the View for a bit, I did
Access Hollywood. I was a correspondent for the Today Show.
(14:36):
I was on Oprah and Rachel Ray and I mean
it went on and on and on. I did campaigns
for Panting, for Well, like for Dr Schulz. There was
a point where you could turn on your television there
was a thirty percent chance I would be on your screen.
And to go from that to feeling like I kind
of faded away was incredibly painful. And there was an
(14:58):
incredibly difficult time for me where I was like, I'm
not worthy. I really lost my way, and I feel
like in a lot of ways, I was put in
a box like she can only do this, she is
only a fashion person, and fashion makeover shows are no
longer in style, so she has nothing to offer. And
these were the kinds of stories that nobody told me.
(15:19):
This is what I was saying to myself, right, I
was trying to rationalize where I found myself, this idea
of growing older, of starting to look different, of looking
in the mirror and not being like, oh, you know,
I can't drink too Martini's and wake up the next
morning looking bright eyed and bushy tailed, I look like
a hag, and understanding that my skin was changing, that
where it used to be sort of bright and dewey,
(15:41):
it got sallow and dry. And I just didn't feel
like myself, which is probably the number one thing that
I hear from other women who are experiencing pre menopause, perimenopause,
or post menopause. They don't feel like themselves. One of
the things that I wrote in my book The Truth
about Style, was that you know, there are times where
(16:02):
you have to step away from the mirror, no matter
what age you are, no matter what transition you're going through,
and look for your reflection elsewhere, not in a mirror,
but in the example that I gave, I said, look
at your reflection through the eyes of the people who
love you, and understand that what they see is not
(16:22):
what you see and what you say to yourself. And
sometimes you need others who love you to remind you
of who you are. And honestly, the last six years.
That has been a real journey for me. What I
really had to think about was what do I have
to offer? What have I always been able to offer?
And how can I find a vehicle in which to
(16:44):
continue serving the needs of communities that I care about.
I got a good idea. Let's take a moment to
reach hard and we'll be back in a flash. H
(17:08):
We're back, ready to conquer your dominant stories. Here we go.
For me, part of my long time story has been
my worth is my work. And I think where it
all became conflated and like piled up for me was
(17:28):
when my desires changed around that hustle, and it coordinated
with a time where my body was slowing down or
softening up or wanting different things. And then it became
a matter of like reckoning with myself. You know, hunger
has always been a theme in my life, both metaphysical
and physical, but the the hunger that I had to
(17:51):
want something new, and I hear that in your story
as well, and it came side by side with this
is what people know me to be and my journey
is taking me in a slightly divergent direction. Do I
have permission to go there? What will it look like?
How will I be relevant? And then on top of
all of that, I'm heading into the middle passage of
my life and all of these other things are happening,
(18:12):
and so it's not just one thing, and I think
it gets wrapped into fertility, productivity, connection. My relationship to
my body has changed, not in just around these things
we're talking about, but into an appreciation of it's quite frankly,
it's functionality over its adornment. Yes, I'm so with you, right,
I have had body issues my whole life. I am
(18:34):
five Well, I don't know if I'm five seven anymore
since this fine surgery. Let's just say at five six,
and I have been eighty nine pounds in my life,
and I've been a d eighty pounds in my life.
That's a pretty broad range of sizes. And I can
look at anybody. I can. I can look somebody up
and down. I can I can know what size they are,
I can know what will look great on them. I
(18:55):
know what colors work for them. But you know, we're
always a little bit blinded by looking at our own reflection.
And for me, I've always had issues with body dysmorphia.
This is something that I've struggled with my whole life
on any channel, on any show, on any in any
project where I've had to help somebody kind of create
their own sense of style. The compassion that I naturally
(19:18):
had for people who were struggling was something that I
never gave to myself. And yes, I definitely think that
part of aging has been about that compassion, and not
for nothing. This hustle culture, this capitalist culture that you're
talking about, it is really pervasive. And this whole idea
of being lazy or just bored or tired or not
(19:41):
wanting to participate is not necessarily a sign of depression.
Being able to opt out and say hey, I need
a break, I need a rest, that is something we
don't talk about enough. I agree. I did not make
this decision at fifty while I was fifty one when
I acquired the company, because I was like, wow, I
(20:02):
need to reinvent myself to be relevant. What I realized
was that the relevancy really was about what my existential
crisis led me to. It was about what is going
to bring me joy, satisfaction, happiness, contentment in this next
phase of my life, and maybe maybe that will be
(20:22):
done in five years maybe it won't be. But what
I realized is this desperation, this fear that like I
had nothing left to give, was something so palpable and
so scary that I just started to see everything in
my life through the lens of loss. You used to
be able to get pregnant, was the least agreed. It
(20:43):
was like you used to be some of the people
wanted on television. You used to be attractive, you used
to be a size this you used to be, and
never looking and appreciating what was actually happening in the moment.
And I even still carry regret that I didn't appreciate
what happened to me in the moment when I was younger.
But the fact is, I don't think you start to
(21:05):
appreciate the present until you start having less of it.
I agree, And I think what happens to as I'm
talking to friends and menopause and we're going into paramenopause,
is yes, we're going to live a longer life. And
I think at middle passage we start to reckon with
death differently. At this point we've likely had more losses
than perhaps we had in our youth. Although I understand
(21:25):
people have lost in their youth quite a bit. So
when you say we can't quite appreciate this from maybe
a younger station in life, I really get that now,
and I want to make it easier for our next
generation to have these stories, as I imagine you do too,
because you know, all of the work that you're doing
is about democratizing this story for people. Right. Yeah, And look,
(21:46):
menopause has to be something that we don't just normalize
as a conversation, but we optimize so that by the
time Gen Z gets to be this age, this will
no longer be a conversation we need to be having.
This will no longer or be a conversation where nobody
knows what to do, how to get help, how to
ask questions, and what to be ashamed of. I mean
(22:08):
everything that you know, the things that women talk about
being ashamed of. Right, you know, there's this whole conversation
now around younger girls and getting their period and talking
about not being ashamed to go to the bathroom with
a tampon, And I'm like, well, why do we have
to be ashamed of going to the bathroom without a tampon?
You know what I mean? Here is something where you
can start saving all the money that you were spending
(22:28):
on pads or cups or tampons, and buy aarrings, choose
a new chair. I want people to think about what
is possible, not what is no longer possible. Yes, and
the thing is that you can only do better when
you know better, right, And that is true of the
way we talk to ourselves. So if you are not
(22:49):
spending any time thinking about that negative loop that is
going on, that voice in your head that is telling
you that you're not good enough, that you can't do something,
that you're not qualified, you're too old, that you have
imposter syndrome, or whatever it is. All those are thoughts
that get in the way of you doing whatever the
hell you want. You know, you and I share so
(23:11):
many things in common. I am seeing more in this conversation.
But one of the things that we share is people
come to us for advice and we're in the expert
role quite a bit all the time, all the time.
So here's my question for you, miss Stacy London. Yeah,
I find that it's a role that I love to play.
It's something that I value of being of service to people,
(23:31):
and it has been tricky for me being in an
expert role because in my own relationship to that it
has stopped me at times from being vulnerable about not
knowing and being able to say sometimes like I'm in progress.
I'm in process. I don't know, and I'm curious if
you've ever shared that feeling and what your relationship is
(23:53):
as a current and former and future expert in the
space of not knowing. Yeah, I'm a big believer now,
I'll tell you I wasn't always a big believer in
not knowing. When I went from magazines to television and
I was supposed to be considered an expert, I had
no sense of humor about myself. I was like, I
(24:15):
have to be the authority. People need to take me seriously.
I can make fun of them, they can't make fun
of me. This is my job. I'm supposed to do this.
Blah blah blah. I have this whole set of ideas
about what I was supposed to appear like on camera
and not being able to be a little bit more
relaxed and you know, open to questions or even constructive
(24:38):
criticism about what I was doing right, I was like, no,
I know what I'm doing. I'm in charge. I got
this the moment for me, when I realized, like I
have to say I don't know. I wasn't really in television.
It was when I realized, Okay, I'm going to step
into this role as CEO. I have no obvious qualification
(25:02):
via CEO, and I didn't know anything about infrastructure or
e commerce or law or all of the things that
you know you have to learn in order to run
a company. But the thing is everybody is capable of learning.
If anything, I believe more now in neuroplasticity than I
ever did before. And what I realize is that you
(25:24):
have to go in being able to say I don't know.
I surround myself now with people as smart as I
can find them, definitely smarter than me, because all I
get to do is learn. All I get to do
is take this knowledge and soak it up like a sponge.
And being able to say I don't know is one
of the strongest, most powerful things I've ever been able
(25:47):
to do. It is that kind of vulnerability that actually
kind of creates progress in relationships in business everything and
not knowing is kind of exciting. Yes, I feel the
same way, and actually being able to say I don't
know is one of the power tools that I offer
people around challenging their dominant stories because it opens you
(26:09):
to questioning. Right, So even if your dominant story is
like you're not qualified to be in this business, lots
of people have that dominant story actually being able to say,
I don't know, am I I don't know? Is that true?
It's just a gentle questioning. I find as a technique
that I used to say, like, I hear you voice,
I hear you loud and clear, but I don't know
if that's true. Why what do you mean? Give me
(26:31):
an example? Why did I want to do this? Why
do I think I can do this? Why do I
think I can't do this? Why you keep asking? Why?
You finally get to the kernel of truth? And this
idea of you know is sort of opening that door
to why bingo? Right, I don't know if that's true?
And so they're really connected and I never thought about
that before. Yeah, me neither. And I like it in
(26:54):
this kind of conversation because I think one of the
things that we say about growing older, which I do
believe is true, is all of this earned wisdom. I
get that, and I want to insert the part where
we don't also feel like all of a sudden you
hit a certain age and then doom. You're supposed to
like know it all. I think what I'm hearing in
our conversation is a discovery, is a process, is a journey?
(27:16):
Is that's where the grace and space comes in. I mean,
I think of discovery like falling in love. Right Nobody
there's no book that teaches you how to do that.
And when you are falling in love with a person, certainly,
it's layer after layer, it's moment after moment. It's an
incredible process of understanding another person. You know, for me
(27:38):
to say that, like what is my girlfriend's favorite food
was part of falling in love with her? Or you
know where her favorite place to go is? It was
part of falling in love with her. I feel the
same way about where I am in my journey right now.
Discovery is like falling in love. I think about falling
in love with your life. It is the opportunity to
(28:00):
learn and open your eyes even more to things that
you may have looked at a thousand times, but there's
always more to know that. To me, just the idea
of discovery is grace. Aging is a fact. Yes, it
doesn't have it doesn't have a descriptor attached to it.
But what you can do while you age, now, that
(28:22):
is what can be done with grace beautiful. All right,
you know the drill. It's that time. I'll be back
before you know it. Hey, hey, we're back now, let's
(28:44):
get into our convo. Let me set the stage. It's
two thousand seven. It's one of many Oprah appearances, and
you are talking to this woman about dressing for her age,
and so let me play a clip and then I
want to come back and hear what you think. Okay,
(29:06):
here is my problem. Okay, you are dressing a little
inappropriately for your age, my dear. Okay, So okay, okay,
So where is it written? If you has a dressed
a way when you get older, we can update your
style and make it look like you are ageless and
timeless and classic. So I want to make sure that
(29:29):
things like this don't happen. Okay, all right, let's go.
So the things like this you're pointing to a little people,
I think on her shirt. Um, but this is fifteen
years ago, and I'm curious where where you go when
you hear that. Now I cringe a little bit, to
be honest, with you. It's not that I'm sure that
(29:52):
that woman was probably dressing in a way that didn't
suit her body as well as it could or wasn't
as bigure flattering as it m have been. But it
also wasn't really my job to say, you know, she
asked the right question, She asked the question fault who
says right. At the time, it felt very important as
an expert to be kind of creating these rules and
(30:13):
guard rails for people to follow and educate them. And
the thing is, I think I might still say the
same thing with the caveat that you can look however
you want to look, you can age however you want
to age. And what I what I still feel is
that if we are dressing in a way that doesn't
(30:33):
seem to suit us. In other words, if people react
in a way that doesn't kind of match the way
we expect them to in the way that we present ourselves,
there's a disconnect there. And what I always think that
is an issue when it comes to women who are
getting older and whatever age they could be thirty, I
don't care just as they age that there's this sense
(30:55):
that they're still in the style that they wore in
their youth, that they hold onto the style that they
were when they felt best about themselves, even if that
style doesn't actually suit who they are now. In other words,
isn't as flattering, isn't as powerful, doesn't give them a
sense of themselves other than I wish I was still young. That,
(31:17):
to me is where the mistake that I made comes in,
is that I should have said, is this look the
look that you loved when you were twenty five? Or
is this the look that you truly love now? Yeah,
but to give yourself space and grace too. Would you
have known to do that at that time where you
were at in your life. Like I think, as those
(31:37):
of us who dole out advice, we do what we
do best in the moment we're doing it. I agree.
And I also think that like there was a formula
for what not to wear? Right, it was like we
really were asked to be experts in our field. We
had to make sort of black and white statements in
order to make it clear what our objective was. And
the thing is that that's what would be you know,
(31:59):
tricky about a show that was just telling people what
to wear. Now, that's it wouldn't fly in the same way,
because we have to honor who people want to be, right,
I learned to be more expansive, And of course there
are lots of things that I look back at and
cringe and think, oh god, none of that would fly
now me too, right, But it was what it was
(32:22):
in the moment. When you know better, you do better.
And certainly even my choice to change roles instead of
doing something that was solely based in style, to do
something that's based much more in wellness and feeling good
as opposed to just be looking good is part of
my own evolution bingo, And that word is really important
(32:44):
I think for us to remember, too, is the combination
of looking and feeling. That's a guide post for me
to say, how do I feel in this? I let
that guide a lot of my choices. Now. Yeah, well look,
I mean one of the things that I say now
about style right is like take the suit right. People
are like, oh a suit. You're always saying, get a suit.
What is it that it matters? Right? What matters about
(33:06):
the suit? Now, if you're let's say, going on a
job interview and you want to be a dominatrix by
all means, where the latex cat suit if you want
to work at like an old stogy corporate bank where
the pinstripe suit, use the language, the visual language that
is going to get you what you want. I do
(33:27):
not make the rules. I just want you to win
the game. I just want you to get where you
want to go. And if dressing in a way that
makes you feel like you are being your full person,
your full self, and you're getting where you want to
go in life, then don't let anybody stop you. Amen
insert just pumping hands in the air. I love it,
(33:49):
you know. I wanted to ask you something a little
bit switching gears, but something that you made me think about,
and I want to say before I forget, which is
also a ps part of my growing older journey is
brain fog, brain fog. It's a little brain foggy. But
I was thinking about because it's not very often actually
that I get to speak so publicly, or I've chosen
to speak so publicly about my choice and now my
(34:10):
husband and my choice to not have children. And I
was thinking about how we mark time as and I
know that a lot of my friends who have children
mark time differently. They do it by the developmental stages
of their children, right, It's like it's first steps, it's kindergarten,
it's first food, it's whatever it is, right. And I
also marked time and milestones by watching my my friend's
(34:33):
kids grow up. So all of a sudden, I'm like,
wait a minute, he's ten years old. I remember when
she was pregnant. How the hell did ten years go by?
I think it's different when you're not raising children inside
of your home. I think the relationship to time aging
progress is also uniquely different. And I just wanted to
ask you if you've noticed that as well. Absolutely, I
mean I can't believe that some of my friends kids
(34:54):
are graduating from college. Yes, I graduated from college two
days ago in my in my mind, but anyway, yes,
I do think that that's true. And I do think
that for me that was a little bit tricky because
so many of my friends had kids that I didn't
feel that I could relate to them the same way.
And a lot of my friends became a lot younger
(35:15):
than me because I had freedoms that, you know, my
friends were no longer had, and so for a long time,
I was only spending my time with younger people, much
younger people, and in a way. I think that did
some damage to me as well, because I started to
realize that their opportunities were still on the horizon in
(35:36):
a way that mine were not. And I don't mean
any particular job. I just mean the opportunities that come
with having more days in front of you than days
behind you. I had to kind of write the ship right.
I had to spend time with my friends who do
have kids. I just spend time with friends my own age.
I just spend time with my younger friends with the
perspective that I now have that I am where I
(35:58):
am and they are where they are, and that this
tendency that we have, this terrible tendency that I've always
had to compare myself with others, made so much worse
by social media, does nothing but devalue who you are
and where you are. And when we love somebody, we
have to love them unconditionally, not in relationship to how
(36:18):
they affect us. And that was what I sort of
I had to kind of re establish my relationships with
people from a different vantage point and to offer ourselves,
as we've been talking about throughout this conversation, the grace
and love to be where we are in those moments.
It is really important to remember that we can do
(36:40):
things that are challenging that ultimately wind up being incredibly fulfilling.
And even when you are negatively self speaking, that you
have the potential and the power to step in and say, well,
I don't know, I'm not sure why all the things
that you preach are things that we should be talking
about at this stage of life, particularly where we have
(37:03):
wisdom to maybe answer those questions a little bit more
deeply and a little bit more profoundly than we could
in our youth. Exactly. I have one last question for you,
and it's one of my favorite ones. I'm going to
hear what you're gonna say about this. What part of
(37:24):
your body could tell the story of your life? Oh
my god, that is a very interesting question. And I
would say the part of my body that probably tells
the most about my life is my skin. And I
know that that's a pretty big organ, actually the largest organ.
(37:45):
But you know, my body is riddled with scars from operations,
from topical steroids from my psoriasis as a child. My
skin has been at the center of my story since
I was three years old when I was diagnosed with psoriasis.
And I had no idea what that meant, except that
I was told that it was chronic, that I would
(38:05):
always have it, and that something was wrong with me.
And that is very difficult language for a child to
understand or to really process, other than to know something
is wrong with me. Right. I was covered in soo
rised this from my neck down from the time I
was eleven to thirteen, after incredibly bad battles with strap throat,
(38:26):
and I was made of scales. I wore white turtlenecks
and long black pants every day, even in the summer.
I had to cut my hair. It was much longer
than it is now. I had to cut it into
a crew cut because the cold tar that we were
using on my scalp. My mom used to scrub it
out with or acid. It was always about my skin.
(38:50):
It was, in some sense, always about the visible, which
is why the internal work of validation has been so
hard for me and so necessary. And so I would
say that my skin really does tell a story. My
scars tell a story. It's one thing to say, oh,
you know, they're badges of honor. I'm a warrior, I've
been through all that. Blah blah bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, right,
(39:13):
what it is? It's my story, That's all it is.
It's my story. And rather than put a value judgment
on it, rather than saying I'm brave or how courageous,
or oh, it's amazing that you've gotten past this, or
oh poor you boo, who look at that scar? That's terrible. Whatever,
It's just my story, just like your story is your story,
(39:35):
and the best thing that we can do with the
story is fucking tell it. And when the story doesn't
serve you, to change it. Change it in, chuck it,
change in, chuck it and challenge it. This is the
whole point of this show, Stacy. Where can people find
out more? Where where can we send people to get connected? Sure? Well,
(39:56):
of course our website State of Menopause dot com. Our
new blah is up now so you can read articles
from some of our medical experts who are on our
medical Advisory Board, as well as for products. You don't
need to know where you are in the menopause journey
to see if there is a product that will work
for you. There is a search engine so you can
shop by issue rather than just by product. We are
(40:18):
shop state of on Instagram and Facebook and obviously you
can find me Stacy London, you know pretty much everywhere.
Stacy London Real on Instagram, Stacy London on Twitter, Stacy
London on Pinterest, Stacy London Official on on Facebook. You know,
they make it hard for you to always have your name.
(40:39):
I love it. Thank you so much, thank you, just
thank you so many great gems from Stacy London. But
I think number one, we got to talk about this more.
Whether we're talking about the process of aging, the ups
and downs of aging, and of course body changes in menopause.
(40:59):
We just have keep normalizing that conversation. So talk about
it with somebody you love and trust, ask a doctor,
talk about it with your friends. I think the more
we can normalize it, the better. I also really got
the sense that we, and I know I do, need
to get more educated about these things. And it doesn't
mean it has to be a big homework assignment. You
don't have to kind of like absorb a whole whole
book about it. But I say, you know, look up
(41:20):
an article, try to get some expert specific facts because
there's a lot of stuff out there, So be diligent
as you look up and get educated. But let's get
educated and then, of course, the big part of our
conversation today with Stacy was challenging those dominant stories, the
things that say, who are you to run that company?
Or you know you're not as vital or worthy anymore
as you're aging. She has an approach where Stacy would ask,
(41:42):
why why am I thinking that? Why do I believe that?
I have an approach where I say, like, I don't know,
is that true? I'm not sure that's true. I like
to get curious about those dominant stories. But either way,
I think let's challenge those negative voices that tell us
these life changes are signaling some ing terrible and instead,
as Stacy so beautifully said, we're all aging aging period.
(42:05):
But how we do it, how we can embrace it.
That's where the grace and compassion comes in. And if
you're interested in exploring more about your dominant stories and
how you can challenge them and change them, I teach
(42:26):
workshops on this stuff, so you can always sign up
at Jess Weiner dot com. You can follow me on
Instagram at I'm Jess Weiner. I really love the community
that we're creating. I love the stories you're sharing and
the questions you're asking So if you want to tell
us about your Dominant Stories that you're rewriting and working on,
you can email us at podcast at Dominant stories dot
com or leave us a voicemail at two one three
(42:49):
five nine three zero three three. And don't stress, I'm
gonna put all that in the show notes. And next
week we're going to talk about creativity with my talented
and kind and super genius friend, Alex Blackamore. Alex is
(43:10):
an award winning music director, arranger, composer. You know he's
done some like small but successful Broadway shows like Hamilton's
Dear Evan Hansen in the Heights. Yeah, those shows. Alex
is incredible. I can't wait for you to hear this conversation.
And again, thanks so much for being here, and please
(43:31):
don't forget to write a review wherever you're listening. It's
super duper duper helps us out. And remember we're always learning,
we're always growing. Dominant Stories with Jess Winer is a
(43:56):
production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
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