You do not expire.

Thirty-six in March, and the app got quieter. It doesn't say so; it just shows you to fewer people. At work I train the new hires and watch them get promoted past me. Fine. Here's what I did. I stopped checking the app on my phone at night and moved it off the first screen. I asked for the title I'd been doing the job of for two years, in a meeting, at normal volume, and I got it. Neither of those needed me to be younger. The people who come to me when something has actually gone wrong never once asked my age. They asked if I was free. I'm keeping that list, and I've stopped keeping the other one.

Here's the premise, said out loud so you can see how thin it is: that a woman is something that depreciates, like a car off the forecourt. Nobody who has actually needed one believes it. Looks change on everyone, men included. But a woman who keeps her word, who sat with you through the worst year of your life, who tells the truth kindly, is worth more every year, not less. My aunt is seventy-one and the whole family still runs on her. When my father was in hospital she was the one who knew which nurse to ask. Nobody at that bedside was checking a date. That's the room to measure yourself in, if you must measure at all.

I stopped dyeing my hair last year. I expected to feel like I'd given something up. Instead I felt like I'd stopped apologising. Six months of grey coming through, and the odd thing was the compliments went up, not down; two from strangers at the market, one from a woman about my age who said she was thinking about it. I told her to go for it. The grey isn't a countdown. It's a record: every hard thing got through, every person I stayed for, every year I didn't quit. I wear it the way you'd wear anything you earned in front of witnesses. Next is the reading glasses, on a chain, worn like jewellery, because that's what they are.

I picked the piano back up at forty-four. I'd shelved it at nineteen because it was the wrong time, and then it was the wrong time for twenty-five years. A teacher on Thursdays, half an hour, in a room above a shop. The first month my hands were embarrassing. By the third I could get through the piece I'd stopped on. Nobody's going to hear me play it, which is the point. I'd been told, more or less, that the part of my life where you start things had closed. Turns out that came from people who'd stopped starting things themselves. Thursday's still on the calendar. So is the next piece.

Watch who people go to when it's real. Not the loudest woman in the room, and not the youngest. The one who's been through something and came out steady. The one whose kitchen table has heard every kind of bad news and is still standing. Every family has her, every office, every group of friends, and she's almost never under thirty-five. That isn't a consolation role. It's the centre of the whole thing. So the thing to do with the years is not to hide them. Take one younger woman for a coffee and tell her the thing nobody told you. Watch what it does for both of you. You're not running out. You're becoming the one they come to.

Here's where I've landed, at fifty-two, with the deadline long past and nothing expired. Whatever you were told about your window, the people who told you were guessing, and most of them were younger than you are now. I was made on purpose, and not for a season. That's not a feeling; it's a fact I decided to stand on, the way you stand on a floor. Then I did the ordinary things. Walked out of the room that cost more than it gave. Said the plain sentence at normal volume. Picked the old plan back up and found it was still there, and so was I. Later than they said, and better than they said. I'm in no rush. There's more than one of everything.