Amena Brown:
Hey, you all. This is the week of my birthday. So probably as you're listening to this, I am somewhere celebrating. Because that's what I do. I have only had one year in my adult life so far that I can think of that I worked on my birthday. And if you have not listened to my episode here called That Time I Quit My Job, you should go back and listen to that. Because I think in that episode, I share a bit of the story of why I was working on my birthday. But normally, I treat my birthday as a holiday. Outside of that year, I take the day off. I don't like to work on that day. I actually was supposed to work on my birthday last year. And then of course, ended up not working because the event got rescheduled and I was home.
Amena Brown:
So this episode is my #40AF episode. And if you've been listening to the podcast, you have probably listened to my interview with Kristy Gomez, where she told me the story of what her experience was like as she turned 40 and what her 40s have been like. And as I was turning 40, I longed for stories like this to hear from women, to hear from Black women, and Women of Color in particular. And so I thought it would be fitting the week of my birthday to share what my 40AF story is since I turned 40 last year during the pandemic. So, normally when I do these episodes, I am wanting to organize this around a few questions.
Amena Brown:
I want to talk about what my 30s were like, I want to talk about what did I think my life would be like when I turned 40, what my life was actually like when I turned 40, what has been the theme of my 40 so far, and if I could give advice to a woman about to turn 40, what I would tell her. So these are the questions that Kristy and I talked about, and I wanted to answer them as well. And you will hear more episodes here of me interviewing other Women of Color about their 40AF stories. And if you have a 40AF story you want to tell me, I would love for you to comment on socials.
Amena Brown:
I want to thank each of you for your comments. I see you commenting on social media, I see you sharing the episodes in your Instagram stories and on Twitter, just know that it means the world to me. Because I'm talking to all of you, but I don't get to see all of you and interact with all of you, at least not yet. Eventually, we will be having HER with Amena Brown live events when it's safe to do so. And we can all get together. In person, I'll get a chance to see you. But in the meantime, getting to see you talking about this in your Story. Some of you have been DMing me, seeing your comments, just know it means the world to me. I try as best I can to respond to all of you. Sometimes I'm not able to. But know if you didn't hear from me, please charge it to my head or me being in the bed laying down somewhere. Not that I am not appreciative. So thank you so, so much for that. So I'd love to hear your 40AF stories, too.
Amena Brown:
What were my 30s like? I got married when I was 31. And if I would really start the story at the beginning of my 30s, and I wrote about some of this in both of my books, actually. But I can probably give you a more raw version of that. You're on the podcast. So when I was turning 30, I turned 30 in New York City with my best friend Adrienne. And we both thought that we were never going to get married. Like dating had just not been going super great for either of us. And we were just like, this is it. We're going to be nuns, but we're going to be cool nuns. We're going to be like the cool aunt with all the memorabilia from the places we've traveled. That was sort of the vibe of me coming into my 30s. Unbeknownst to me, I actually already knew the man that I was going to marry. And so I got engaged on my 31st birthday and then we got married three and a half months later.
Amena Brown:
So I think the initial part of my early 30s was just adjusting to married life. At the time that my husband and I got married, I was still performing on the road in mostly white Christian environments. And my husband was a youth pastor at a church a little bit south of Atlanta. So I think we spent those first few years of marriage just trying to get adjusted to what both of our jobs would require from us. We started pretty quickly traveling together and performing together. And so I definitely think part of my 30s was adjusting to that in the early parts. And then us finding a wonderful rhythm together of how we could do this thing on stage together. We were recording albums together. I know I'm very terrible at telling you all I have albums. But if you've ever heard any of my poetry albums, all of the music that you hear there is my husband's creation.
Amena Brown:
So we had a really great opportunity in my 30s for us to get a chance to create a lot together, which was wonderful. I think I spent a lot of my 30s working, to be honest. I feel like I had a lot of like hectic hustle kind of schedule. And in a lot of ways, because 95% of my work was event based and was travel based. So it wasn't just event based, I was very rarely doing events in my home city of Atlanta, it was almost always travel. And the thing about travel that I've actually really been reflecting on a lot since the pandemic, because for the most part, I haven't been traveling for work during the pandemic, I think there were a couple of times we had to do like some shoots and different things like that. That we had to like go somewhere in driving distance, shoot for the day, come home, masks and all the everything, sanitizer, Lysol, everything. But other than that, I haven't been traveling at all and haven't taken a flight since March of 2020.
Amena Brown:
So I feel like my 30s was mostly very hectic, very on other people's schedules all the time. Just traveling to this city, to that city. I remember Easter weekend was always a very busy weekend because of the market that I was in at the time. So sometimes I would get booked to perform poetry at like a Good Friday service at a church on one side of the country, do that service, go to bed and then get up either in the middle of the night or super early the next morning, take like the super early flight, or take a red eye where I flew overnight to get into the other city to do sound checks, rehearsals with another church and then perform at what felt like a thousand services on Easter. I mean, it was typically somewhere between five and seven services but it was like a lot of services. And so that was my life.
Amena Brown:
I was excited in my 30s to be at a point where I could do this full time, and I was making pretty good money at the time doing that. I think the other thing about it, though, is my schedule really didn't have like any sort of middle ground. It was very all or nothing kind of experience. So I was either so busy and had so many dates that came in that I was just like, I don't even know how we going to make it to the end of whatever this run is. And then there would be these seasons that would come in the middle of the year where nothing had come in. We would sometimes have a whole three months in the summer where we had no gigs. And so we would go from feeling like super tired, super busy doing all the things to sort of having this lurch of nothing coming in financially and also not as much to do. And that would totally freak us out, especially the first couple of years that we were married.
Amena Brown:
And then after a while we tried to sort of take advantage of that time when it came because inevitably it always did. Sometimes in the summer, sometimes around the holidays, sometimes at the beginning of the year. You never knew when it was going to come but you knew you were going to have some months where you weren't traveling. And so the goal of all of that hustling, hopefully, was that you were sort of stacking the money so that when the slow times came, you could afford to just chill out or go on a vacation or be with your family or see your friends or work on other creative projects that you wanted to finish. So that feast or famine part I remember being very challenging for me in my 30s.
Amena Brown:
I will say I experienced a landmark event in 2017 that sort of shifted me into my late 30s and changed a lot of what was going to become my 40s too. So this is something that I've talked about kind of vaguely in some other things. I've written about this vaguely a little bit in a book before and talked about a little bit here. But for this episode, I wanted to share a little bit more about that in case there any of you that may be dealing with this too. But in my early 30s I found out that I had fibroids. And if you're not familiar with fibroids, fibroids are benign tumors that can occur in the uterus. And I found out I had them in my early 30s. I didn't really know anything about that.
Amena Brown:
I had sort of a very quick conversation with my gynecologist at the time because I was just finding out about that right before I got married. And so she was like, well, you should go on your honeymoon, enjoy your honeymoon, but when you come back, we need to talk about it. And so I ended up having to have surgery to remove my fibroids in 2017. And by that time, my fibroids had gotten so large. Like when I look at pictures of myself from this era of time, and if any of you saw me at events around that sort of 2015, 2016, 2017 timeframe, I had to dress to basically hide how large my fibroids were. So the surgery was very intense. It is very intense, very invasive procedure, very hard on the body.
Amena Brown:
I'm also as much as I can be into sort of holistic and more natural ways to heal the body. And so I had also done those things. And those things have been helpful to a point, but I still arrived at this point of needing to have surgery for the sake of my health. And that moment right there, like getting home from the hospital, having complications, having to go back into the hospital, and then having probably what was supposed to be six to eight weeks of recovery, but ended up really being 8 to 10 weeks of recovery. And when I say 8 to 10 weeks of recovery, I mean, like you can't drive during that time, you can't exercise, you can't lift anything above a very small number of pounds. So I had a lot of time to think about my life and process.
Amena Brown:
How did I get here? How did this happen? What are the changes I need to make in my life to try to not end up here again. And one of the things I discovered is I was actually living a very stressful life. Actually, I remember my mother-in-law sitting me down when we were all together as a family. But she sat me down just she and I and she looked at me and she said, "I'm really worried about you. You seem like you are a very, very stressed." And at the time, that she said it to me, this was before I had surgery, I was really frustrated about the conversation because I was thinking to myself, like, yeah, I am an entrepreneur. I'm a performing artist. My husband and I own this business together. Like yeah, like I live a stressful life. There's nothing about this, that is an easy thing in any way.
Amena Brown:
But after I had the surgery and had time to really reflect on the question that she was asking me, I thought to myself on a scale of 1 to 10, prior to having surgery, how stressed would I have said I was? And I thought to myself, I think I would have said I was somewhere between an eight and a nine. And the body is not really made for you to live at that level of stress for the long term. The body is made for us to survive stresses that are going to come to us in life. We're not going to have a life that completely has no stress. We'll have stress sometimes. But the body isn't really made to survive that level of stress for a long period.
Amena Brown:
And then what happens over time, if you live a high stress life like that, like if you're listening to me right now, and your stress level is somewhere between an 8 and 10 all the time, what happens is it becomes normal to you, and then it actually registers to you like it's a four. But it's really a 9 or a 10 for some of us. And so I realized in that recovery time that when my mother-in-law had asked me that question, I was actually a lot more stressed out than I even knew I was because it was so normal to me. So I spent that recovery time. This was the year that I turned 37. So I spent that recovery time thinking to myself, what are the things in my life that are causing me stress? And the main thing that came up was work. It was the work I was doing, there was something in there that was causing me stress.
Amena Brown:
So one of the changes that I had to make is I had to start saying no to things that were not necessary. So there were some volunteer things that I was doing at that time, and I just had to say no to those things. I had to go back to some people and say, hey, I know I made this commitment to you and said that I could do this or that. But I can't do it now because this is what I have to do for my health. Which is very humbling for me because I'm very much a doer. I'm very much a person who would almost like drag herself to keep her word, which is in part a good quality to have, but you want to also be able to keep your word to yourself. And your word to yourself is that you're going to take care of yourself, you'll be gentle with yourself, you'll be looking out for you too. And if you're dragging yourself through whatever to keep your word to people. But in the process of that you're not keeping your word to yourself, then it's not fair to you, right?
Amena Brown:
So I had to start saying no to those things. One of the other things that I realized was a stressor for me is how I was traveling for work. When you're traveling for a living, and I can really only speak to when you're traveling for a living as a speaker or performing artists, sometimes there's a little tension, especially I'll say, for the market I was traveling in at the time, which was a Christian environment or a church environment, might be an even better description for that. There's sometimes were some tensions between what the people that were planning the event expected from you, and what you could actually deliver or wanted to deliver.
Amena Brown:
So sometimes, let's say, if I was booked to perform at a church event on a Saturday morning. What I had been doing before having surgery, is if I was going to perform there on a Saturday morning, and the cheapest flight for me to get there was at 6:00 a.m., then I would take that 6:00 a.m. flight, even though I wasn't paying for the flight. But I would take the 6:00 a.m. flight, which meant I was getting up at probably 3:00 a.m. in order to leave my house and get to the airport and get there on time, do all that, get through traffic, if there's traffic, whatever. And I'm getting there into whatever city at, could be anywhere from 7:30 to 9:00 or 10:00, depending on how far I had to fly.
Amena Brown:
And I'm getting there just in time to leave the airport, run right to soundcheck, eat a quick little late breakfast, get to the hotel, maybe change clothes, freshen up, speak. And then depending on the engagement, if I had to speak more than once that day or whatever, but pretty much after I finished talking, I would fly out go home. Well, I realized that a part of the problem was I needed to stop doing those 6:00 a.m. flights, if I didn't have to. I had to request from whoever it was that was booking me to come in the night before, so that I could get in at 7:00 p.m. the night before. Get to the hotel, drink some water, get some really good sleep so that I'd be fresh to do what it was they asked me to do that next morning.
Amena Brown:
But sometimes what happened is I would get booked to do an event. And even if I would request to come in the night before, the people planning the event might think I was just at my hotel chilling. That I have time to go to dinner with these people or I have time to attend this social function, which isn't technically a part of what I've been booked to go there to do. But they just think it could be a cool idea if I could hang out with so and so or if I could come to whatever session it was. And I also think for people who maybe don't do road life, I think sometimes people that were planning events thought that the road life was very lonely or thought that our lives as people who did road life were very lonely.
Amena Brown:
So they would say things like, yeah, when you fly in you should just come to one of the sessions, you can just relax. You don't have to do anything, you could just let us pour into you. I would always kind of chuckle a little bit because I was like, yeah, road life itself can be lonely, but my life is not lonely. I actually have like wonderful people in my life. I have wonderful community in my life. So this is not a space where I come to relax. I go on a vacation to relax or I go to my best friend's house and relax. I go to my mama house and relax. I don't come to this space where it's mostly strangers and people I'm just needing to relax, I came here to work.
Amena Brown:
So me not coming to this dinner or me not coming to the whatever social function is attached to this event is actually for me to be better and fresher doing what it is you actually asked me to do at the event. So I had to start saying no in some of those moments, and letting myself not be worried about if that was awkward for the other person I'm talking to, and saying those things up front when people would request me for events that I am going to come in the night before. I will not be at the such and such activities. But I will be there on time for soundcheck and I will be there on time from my time to be on stage. And a lot of times, because you all can probably tell if you all going to listen to this podcast, a lot of times I stayed for a long time after I would perform because I actually loved talking to people at the event when I could.
Amena Brown:
I loved like doing book signings, I mean, all things that we did willy-nilly before the pandemic. But I would stay, I would do book signings and just talk to people if they wanted to talk after the events, I loved that part, just getting to connect with the audience. Just really deciding and doing a better job deciding what is actually necessary. And if it's not necessary, then maybe we don't need to do it. And I think the last thing that I had to assess in that recovery time was what about this space I'm working in, what is actually stressing me out. Because I can plan for the logistics in trying to improve some of those aspects. But I also really was at the beginning, in my late 30s, of discovering that it wasn't just the logistics of the work I was doing, it was actually the space where I was working that was causing me high amounts of stress. And that was stressful for a couple of reasons.
Amena Brown:
I think one of the reasons it was stressful on just a basic level is being a Black woman in a predominantly white space is just stressful. Period. Whether it's church space, whether it's nonprofit, whether it's corporate, being the only black woman in that space is stressful. And really, for a lot of us as women of color, being whoever we are, in predominantly white spaces, has typically high levels of stress for us, even more stressed and sometimes we know or acknowledge in the moment. So that was definitely a part of the foundation of why it was stressful.
Amena Brown:
I think also, I was beginning to realize that, in particular, the industry that I was in which at that time was predominantly white, Christian, and predominantly very conservative too, theologically and politically in some ways, was also getting stressful for me, because I was discovering there were things that were important to them or things that they believed in that I didn't. And I wanted more creative space. I wanted more inclusive space. And I realized I was longing for something that was never going to happen inside of that space. And so it was stressful to reenter there, because I was being asked maybe to speak about something that I don't believe or speak on something, and then what I have to say about it doesn't match the beliefs of the people there that have started the event or started the organization or whatever it was.
Amena Brown:
And just realizing that my voice, I felt like my voice was growing and becoming in a lot of beautiful ways. And that in those ways, that voice wasn't welcome in its fullness in these spaces. So I feel like my 30s was this journey to this halt, right here at having the surgery. And after that surgery, that caused a great shift that was sort of leading me right there into what the beginning of my 40s was going to be.
Amena Brown:
What did I think my life would be like when I turned 40? Well, I didn't think we were going to be in a pandemic. Let's start with that. I did not think that, I don't know how many of us thought that. But I didn't think that because my birthday is in May. So I think a lot of us were thinking in the beginning like, we'll be on lockdown for maybe two weeks, maybe four weeks, things will be back to normal, right? And like over a year later, we're still not back to normal. When I think about what I thought my life was going to be like when I turned 40 I think about two things. Maybe just one thing, really, but probably two things, honestly.
Amena Brown:
One of them is that I thought that I was going to be the mother of like an elementary school kid by the time I was 40. That's what I thought. I always had that in my mind. I thought I was going to spend my 30s child rearing, basically. And then by the time I got into my 40s I'd be dealing with like an elementary school kid or transitioning into like middle school and the beginning of high school kid. And when I got into my late 30s and I started kind of settling in with me when I turned 38 like, you might turn 40 and you might not have kids. And what does that mean? And that sort of dovetails to me how I approached turning 30.
Amena Brown:
So in my 20s, my person that I wanted to please or that I wanted to approve of me was my 30-year-old self. And there were so many decisions and adventures and I'm sure mistakes that I made, that I was thinking in my mind, I wonder if my 30-year-old self is going to be proud of this. Or I think my 30-year-old self is going to be super proud of me that I made this choice, that I didn't do this or that I did do that. And so then by the time I got to 30, I was like, yeah, I'm in there, except the fact that I'm not married. And I thought I was going to be married by the time I was 30. So here we are. But I already had such a sense of adventure that my 30s, even though I felt like, man, I wish I would have gotten married by then. But I was also like, well, I haven't, and I may not get married.
Amena Brown:
So if I don't get married, then what do I want my life to be about because my life is about more than the relationship that I'm in. And even though ironically, I ended up getting married within a year, a year-ish of that birthday, I think having that mentality helped me enter marriage with this greater sense of adventure and not feeling like because my husband and I were getting married, that that's my identity now is only to be his wife. But instead, I was sort of able to enter that phase of life like, I'm married to this man that I love. I actually love keeping company with him. I love hanging out with him, whether we go to Walmart, or we go across the world somewhere. Like, I actually really enjoy him as a person.
Amena Brown:
So it's not that my whole identity has to be built on that. It's that I had a wonderful life before we got married. And now I'm married to him, being married to him adds to my already wonderful life. That was sort of how I entered being married. So when I realized in my late 30s, was sort of that same moment of like, okay, I've been envisioning. But for me, I'll say it wasn't the age this time. I sort of had in my head like, what would Amena who becomes a mom want me to do in this moment? Or like, would Amena that's going to become a mom be proud of me? And I remember I was working through this in therapy in my late 30s. And just reimagining with my therapist, what if I don't have kids? What will my life be like? And sort of coming back to that remembrance that whether or not I have kids, my life is wonderful.
Amena Brown:
And that was sort of what I had to come to in my 30s. Whether or not I get married, or even at that moment find whoever my person is, even date somebody really, honestly. But that's for another episode. Whatever that is my life was wonderful before I married my husband. It wasn't that marrying my husband is what made my miserable life wonderful. It was that marrying him made an already wonderful life even more wonderful, right? So I think my therapist and I were working through that, and I just started feeling it come up in my late 30s. And started working through what's the adventure that can be there for you in your 40s to experience versus you walking into this decade thinking about the things you thought you would have experienced? Or thought you would have air "achieved" by this time?
Amena Brown:
So I thought my 40s was going to be about, I won't say boring. I don't think I thought that. But I thought my 40s was going to be pretty routine, I thought it was going to be without actually a lot of adventure, because I thought probably going to have some kids by then, probably going to be going to PTA meetings, or if they do extracurricular activities, probably going to be spending my time doing that. Going to be organizing what we do with our business and our travels around their schedules. And realizing as I was getting close to that birthday, that that wasn't going to be the case. I have not talked publicly a lot about what that journey has been for us behind the scenes. I know that you all hear me talking a lot, and that probably makes it seem like I am not a very private person.
Amena Brown:
And those of you that have been following my career for a while, you see me perform and stuff, I'm not sure that I seem like a private person, but I am really a very private person about my personal life and things like that. I'm an introvert at the end of the day. So there are parts of my life that are good and wonderful and beautiful that I just love to keep to myself. And there are parts of my life that have been terribly hard that I did share with folks, but they were folks that we are very, very close to. They weren't things that I shared publicly. So I'm not ready to share some of all this journey right here, but one day, maybe I will. And this will probably be the place that I will come back here and be like, okay, remember, episode 32? Well, if you haven't listened to it, go back listen to that, because now I have more tea to share.
Amena Brown:
But I'm not ready honestly to share some of the tea that goes with that. But that is what I thought my 40s were going to be. And in my late 30s, I definitely felt myself freaking out that I was realizing turning 40 wasn't going to look like I thought it was going to look. What was my life actually like when I turned 40? Well, it was a pandemic. Okay. It was a whole pandemic out here. So Matt and I, Matt's my husband, Matt and I had originally planned ... I had my dream dream since I've been an adult, really, has been that on my 40th birthday, I wanted to go to Italy. So originally, that was the plan, Matt and I were going to do that.
Amena Brown:
I don't know if any of you all have this experience. But I am one of those people that sometimes I get like a gut feeling, a gumption, a premonition, a something. I get a feeling to do something or not to do something. And I got a feeling prior to the pandemic that we shouldn't go to Italy. And so we talked about it. Because we were just at the point where it was like getting to be time to like book flights and find hotels and do all that. And I just told Matt, "I don't know. I don't feel like we're supposed to go." So we didn't. Had no idea that even if we had booked all that stuff, we would have still been grounded here, unable to travel.
Amena Brown:
So then when I realized, okay, well, I'm not going to go to Italy. My next plan was to go to my mojo city, which if you all have been listening to the podcast, you know I talked about that in my HER Favorite Things episode, that my mojo city is New York. And so I was like, well, for some reason, I don't feel good about traveling internationally. Maybe I'll travel domestically. And then of course, the pandemic happened, so did not get to go to New York, either. So my actual birthday, I cried. Not on my birthday, though. But in the weeks leading up to my birthday, I had to like shed some like disappointed tears, because I realized it was really hard to think of ways to celebrate without having a restaurant to go eat at or a party that you could safely plan and be with the people that love you or a place you could go travel.
Amena Brown:
I had to just sit down one day and just talk to Matt and cry my eyes out about feeling so disappointed about that. And then once I cried my eyes out, I was able to reimagine like what my birthday could be like. And I think that maybe is my rhythm, really. It's like, I need to cry. I need to process the sorrow, the grief, the disappointment. And then when I process that it sort of opens my brain to reimagine what can we do with what we have, right? So I tried to think about if it weren't a pandemic, and I couldn't travel, what would I do for my birthday? And I was like, well, I would have gotten a pedicure, a manicure, I would have gotten a spa facial. I would have eaten at one of my favorite restaurants. I would have dressed up. I would have put my makeup on. I would have did my hair. All those things.
Amena Brown:
And so I did a lot of research you all, and I learned how to give myself a very luxurious pedicure, manicure facial. I just spent the weeks before my birthday like ordering various things. We just like use some of the budget that we had planned to use for the trip. And I just ordered my little tools I needed to really do my luxe manicure, pedicure, facial. And so the night or a day really before my birthday, that's what I did. And then the day of my birthday, honestly, was a really wonderful birthday. And I think in part, I was just determined to celebrate. Because in the years between surgery and this birthday, like I had just been through a whole lot. So I was just grateful to be here to celebrate that I'm here that I'm well. I just felt like there was a lot of life to celebrate and I wanted to do that.
Amena Brown:
My therapist had said something to me. She said, "Sometimes when hard things have happened to you, what ends up happening is you kind of mark time based on these hard things that have happened." And she was like, "So you end up being like this is the first Christmas that, this is the second Christmas that, this is the first birthday since blah, blah, blah." And she was like, "It's understandable to do that for a time." But she was like, "I don't want you to lose out on celebrating yourself because every birthday, anniversary, holiday or whatever is the mark of how much time has passed since a bad thing happened to you." She was like, "I think it's okay for you to say this is my birthday." And that's a chance to like, celebrate me and celebrate what I've survived and that I'm still here. Your anniversary with your husband, that's a time to celebrate this relationship that you love and where you feel loved. And so that was very much the energy around my birthday.
Amena Brown:
When I think about what my life was actually like, I have to tell you all that the year, this year so far, because I'm turning 41 this year, so this year of being 40 has been professionally, probably the best year of my career, you all. I mean, only like a few months after turning 40, I got a podcast deal with Seneca Women and iHeart, which is how you are listening to this right now. And I also signed a deal with Olay to be one of the faces of their Face Anything campaign. I'm one of nine women who are featured in the campaign, all brilliant and amazing women. And to have had these two big opportunities come to me after I turned 40, I feel like in my faith context, that felt like a big reminder from God that, yeah, my life in my 40s turned out to be very different than I imagined. But that didn't mean it couldn't be great and a surprise and wonderful.
Amena Brown:
I remember when I was doing the shoot for Olay, we did the shoot for my portion of the Face Anything campaign, which was part commercial and part print ads as well. And I did the shoot here in Atlanta with a wonderful team that was working with Olay. And I remember getting to the shoot, and I had to do all the wardrobe stuff, try on all these different outfits. And the outfit that ended up fitting me the best was this dress that I would never have walked in a store and bought, okay, never would have bought this dress. It was white. It was fitting like all my curves and everything. Like it almost fit me to the point that I think I would have been too self-conscious to wear it. But I put it on and it fit me like a glove.
Amena Brown:
I just went home after like a very long day of shooting. We probably were shooting almost 12 hours between video and photography. And I remember getting home and just thinking to myself, girl, you just did things that models do at 40 years old with your 40-year-old curves, with your 40-year-old belly, and I'm so proud of it. I'm so proud of it. Like, my year of turning 40 turned out to be so wonderful and so different than I expected. I can't say it's better than I expected, because I don't know what that other life would have been like if I would have had that life. But I think when we think about our life, and we think about these things that we hope our life is going to be, we only have like an A or a B. We only have like an either/or. Either my life's going to be this or my life's going to be terrible, right?
Amena Brown:
We don't always have in our minds like, well, maybe my life won't be that. But it could still be great or wonderful, or this amazing experience. And that's really what I experienced. Like, my life is not this thing that I imagined it was going to be when I turned 40. But it's dope. It's dope. My next question is what has been the theme of my 40 so far? And the first thought that came to my mind, the first thing that I hear in my mind is I hear India Arie singing the Serenity Prayer. And if any of you are India.Arie fans, this is actually on a track called Loving on her album Testimony:Volume, 1 Life & Relationship. And she's singing those words at the beginning of a Serenity Prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. If you haven't heard her singing in this, you have to listen to it.
Amena Brown:
But hearing her sing, it's like I don't know what she was feeling when she sang it, but it just sounded like she poured all of this life experience into when she sang that. She was pouring like the joy and the sorrow and the good times and the hard times all into that. And if I could put a theme on my 40 so far, it is that balance. I think in my 30s I was definitely a person that felt like my hard work could fix it. My hustle could change it. Me praying harder would make this certain thing or that certain thing different. Me reading my Bible more minutes or more hours or more pages or whatever it was would make this or that different. And that's not to say that I don't believe that prayer is powerful.
Amena Brown:
But I believe sometimes I would sort of enter the space of prayer as my way of controlling things, which is kind of a weird way to enter prayer. But sometimes I know I've done that maybe you have to. And I feel like the years leading up to turning 40 have taught me that sometimes there is some really hard stuff that happens, and you can't pray it all away, and you can't fix it. There were some spaces where I was working, and I wanted them to be anti-racist, and I wanted them to be inclusive of the LGBTQ community, I wanted them to be inclusive spaces for everybody. And it didn't matter how many conversations I had, those spaces were not going to change. And so I had to accept that that is not going to change.
Amena Brown:
And then there were some things that I did have to have the courage to change. Like when I was telling you all like learning how to say no, and not feeling like I have to please people all the time, even in professional situations. Especially, beyond what the contract says, but another talk for another time. But those are things that I can have the courage to change. To change the way I work, to live a life that is of a decreased stress level. And then I love the last part of that, which is the wisdom to know the difference. That there's just going to come up both of those in life. Just going to be some things that happen and I can't change it. And there'll be some things that I can put in the work to make them different or make them better. But I believe this decade of my 40s is bringing me the wisdom to know the difference.
Amena Brown:
If I could give advice to a woman about to turn 40, what would I tell her? I would tell her or you, if you're listening, and you're about to turn 40, or if you're in your late 30s, And you're like, oh man, what's happening here. I would say, first of all, when you think about your 40th birthday, do something that you actually love, and be around the people that you actually love and that make you feel loved. I don't feel like any birthday you should force yourself to do things because that's what your family members want, or because that's what your friends said they'd like to do. But especially on these birthdays that end in zero, or sometimes for some people, even the ones that end in five, really think about what do you like to do.
Amena Brown:
And if you have family members that are determined to plan a surprise party for you, for example, and you hate surprise parties, just go ahead and say to them, look them in the eyes for real and be like, I actually wanted to go to a hotel by myself. And I love you. And I want us to have dinner or breakfast or whatever after I have my time by myself, but I want that time by myself. I was even talking to one of my really, really good friends when she turned 40. And she and her husband have a little boy. And she was like, I don't know. I think I just want to spend my birthday with like my husband and my son. And I was like, that's beautiful too. Just do something that you love. Plan to do that.
Amena Brown:
Within whatever you can afford to do, or like in my case, we're in the middle of a pandemic, so I had a lot of limitations. But I spent that birthday with my favorite person, which is my husband. My husband put this wonderful video together of all these people I love singing happy birthday to me and I FaceTimed with people that I loved. I mean, even in that moment, I let myself be loved on. And I think you should rein in your 40th like that as much as you can. And not because it's like bad luck if you don't or because that's the rest of your year or the rest of your decade. I don't really put a lot of stock in that. But I do think there's a lot of good energy to doing something for yourself.
Amena Brown:
And the other thing I would say, if you're about to turn 40, I would say you know release yourself from the expectations that society puts upon us about what any of our ages have to look like. I think there is a lot of pressure on women because of the patriarchy, honestly. But there's a lot of pressure about your relationship status, about what your uterus is or isn't doing. For those of us that have uteruses. You know what I mean? I think there's a lot of pressure about what we're doing relationship wise, what we're doing about having children. And depending on what environments you're in, if there's more value placed upon that than your actual satisfaction with your life, or the fullness of your life, that if you're in a relationship with someone who loves you, that's dope.
Amena Brown:
If you have children, and they're in your family, you're loving them, you're raising them, that's dope. And those things are dope inside of your whole life. That those things themselves are not the only thing that define you. That you get to build your life upon whatever you decide to build it on. But I hope that you build it in the fullness of what that means, whoever you are and however you are. And I guess the last thing I would say is, don't be afraid of being surprised of some things that are unexpected happening to you. Sometimes some of the things that are unexpected are the worst, they are terrible, okay. Like, one day I'll come back and regale you all with some of those stories that have greeted me in my late 30s and early 40s.
Amena Brown:
But you'll also have some unexpected blessings and I think it's good to have room for those. I think it's good to be open to that process as well. And aging, even though we have been taught by so many things and whatever from other people, aging is beautiful. It's a beautiful process. It's you coming into your skin more, it's you knowing who you are more, it's you being willing to still learn, even after you've learned all these other things. It's beautiful. It's not something that we have to fear. It's a part of becoming who you are. And that's what you want in your life. You don't want to become what somebody else expected of you. You don't want to become smaller than you actually are. You want to be the full badass you. That's what I'd say.
Amena Brown:
Anyways, I wanted to thank you all for listening. Normally, at the end of these episodes, I have an outro, a segment of sorts that I do to give a crown to another Woman of Color. I want to take this time to give a crown to you if you're listening. In general, and especially those of you that are in your 40s and beyond, or maybe approaching your 40s, I want you to give yourself a crown, whatever that looks like for you. I want you to say some good words to yourself today. I want you to think about what may be your expectations about the next decade of your life that's approaching.
Amena Brown:
I don't want you to think about all of the things that you haven't done or all of the "expectations" that you haven't met. I want you to think about what have you accomplished or even beyond that, like who are you that you're proud of, and how can you celebrate her today? So whoever you are listening, you deserve it. Give yourself a crown. HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions, as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.