MIDLIFE, AGENCY, AND THE REFUSAL TO DISAPPEAR: MY WORD OF THE YEAR FOR 2026

I hope you had a wonderful holiday and a good start to the New Year.

In addition to it being a new year, today (January 5th) is also my birthday. I turn 52.

What surprises me most is that it doesn’t feel like a milestone that needs explaining, softening, or reframing. I’m not panicking about getting older or being firmly seated in my 50s. It just feels… honest.

As many of you know, instead of resolutions, I choose a Word of the Year. When I started thinking about this year’s word, I reflected on the past few years, years that challenged my health, my happiness, and my comfort in my own skin.

When I announced my word of the year for 2025 last year, I had come off a very rough year where I struggled with a health issue that led to being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, difficult business setbacks, and an overall feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction. I started 2025 feeling ground down but hopeful for change. As I prepared for 2026, I realized something important: I’m in a very different, much healthier place now. My health is the best it’s been. I’m aging well. I feel good. I feel grounded. I feel like myself again.

And that’s when it hit me:

I’m not done.
I’m not diminishing.
I’m sharpening.

My Word of the Year for 2026 is Vitality.

Once it landed, I understood why. It’s also why I chose the image I did for this post; this is a recent photo of me at my fittest.

VITALITY IS NOT ABOUT BEING YOUNG

There’s a moment in midlife, especially for women, when something subtle shifts. The world doesn’t stop being kind, but it does start looking past you. Society is conditioned to treat aging women as peripheral.

You feel it in small ways.
In assumptions.
In invisibility.
In how relevance is quietly reassigned.

And here’s the strange thing: internally, I feel more alive than I did decades ago.

I’m more curious.
More grounded.
More physically capable.
More emotionally honest.
More interested in the world, not less.

So choosing vitality isn’t about chasing youth.
It’s about refusing erasure.

I don’t want to disappear, not because I’m afraid of aging, but because I’m not done becoming.

VITALITY IS AGENCY

Here’s what I’ve come to understand:

Women don’t age well because they’re trying to look young.
They age well because they’re trying to maintain agency in a world that loves to take it away.

Vitality is choosing to stay present in your own life.
It’s tending to your body not out of fear, but respect.
It’s maintaining curiosity, strength, engagement, humor, style, and energy.

It’s saying: I’m still here, and I’m paying attention.

VITALITY CHANGES WHAT YOU TOLERATE

The moment I chose this word, something else happened.

I started noticing where my life felt vital, and where it didn’t.

Which conversations energized me.
Which obligations drained me.
Which habits nourished me.
Which ones dulled me.

Vitality doesn’t ask, Is this impressive?
It asks, Does this give me life?

And that question is clarifying in a way no resolution ever is.

VITALITY ISN’T LOUD. IT’S ALIVE

At this stage of life, I don’t need to be the most beautiful or the most visible person in the room. That’s not the point.

What matters more to me now is being impressive in a quieter way, strong, vibrant, engaged, and fully alive in my own skin.

I love spending time with people who radiate ambition, curiosity, and possibility, including younger women. Not because I’m trying to be one of them, or because I need their youth reflected back at me. It’s because we share a wavelength, not an age. Their energy matches my internal momentum. Their curiosity echoes my own. Their hunger for life feels familiar, because I’m still hungry, too. That’s the heart of midlife vitality: You don’t stop wanting things.
You just stop apologizing for it.

WHAT CHOOSING VITALITY HAS CHANGED

Once I named vitality as my word, it started doing its work almost immediately.

Here’s what I’ve noticed so far:

1. Vitality asks one simple question: “Does this give me life?”
It becomes a filter. A sorting mechanism. A truth serum.
Suddenly I notice the conversations I dread, the obligations I keep out of habit, the work I’ve outgrown, the clothes that make me feel invisible, the ways I talk to myself that dull rather than support me.

Vitality makes me intolerant of the dull, the draining, and the shrinking.

2. Vitality encourages the release of anything that feels like dead weight.
Not because I’m running away, but because I’m running toward myself.
Midlife is a shedding decade anyway. Choosing vitality simply accelerates that process with clarity.

Outdated self-narratives.
Roles I no longer need to play.
Perfectionism that steals my spark.
Emotional labor that isn’t reciprocated.
The urge to stay small, quiet, or overly accommodating.
Performing youth, or performing aging.

Vitality asks: What keeps me alive?
Everything else can go.

3. Vitality shifts identity from surviving to expanding.
Most women spend decades in survival mode, caregiving mode, achievement mode, approval mode, endurance mode.

Vitality reframes that identity from “I get through things” to “I grow through things.”
It makes me think like someone still in motion, still building, still evolving, still sharpening.

4. Vitality insists that I stop giving my time, energy, and body away cheaply.
It says no to emotional depletion.
No to relationships that exhaust me.
No to shrinking to fit.
No to being the strong one for everyone but myself.
No to style that hides me.
No to self-abandonment.
No to “I’ll just put myself last for now.”

Vitality isn’t gentle.
It’s quietly uncompromising.

5. Vitality pulls me toward alignment, not obligation.
Toward what feels nourishing, stimulating, energizing, meaningful, beautiful, connected, alive.

Those things start glowing.
Everything else fades into grayscale.

6. Vitality values vibrancy over perfection.
I’m not trying to be young.
I’m trying to be undeniably alive.

Vitality is the antidote to invisibility.
It’s the opposite of aging-by-erosion.
It’s a declaration that I’m still evolving, still becoming, still present.