“Well, You’re Around That Age…”

Ok, ready to come on a bit of a wild ride…. hold tight…

The other day, a woman, a friend, a client, a mother, a wife shared a story with me that stopped me in my tracks. She’d recently gone to her GP to talk about how she’d been feeling and symptoms she had been experiencing — and the GP — a young male doctor — listened briefly and then said

“Well, you are around that age.”

Um, what?!? I honestly had only heard this to be an urban legend. I didn't think this was actually still happening. I was outraged and flabbergasted that this STILL is happening to woman within the mainstream medical system (and in so many other settings as well). No curiosity, no deeper questions, no exploration — just a tidy little box to put her in.

Let’s take a hot minute to unpack this.

That one sentence — “you’re around that age” — carries a thousand quiet dismissals. It tells women that their discomfort is expected. That their changing bodies are an inconvenience. That their lived experience is ‘normal enough’ to be ignored.

And honestly? It’s not okay.
Let’s go there for a second — full feminist mode activated.

Because this isn’t just about one offhand comment. It’s about the deep, systemic conditioning that tells women their pain threshold should be higher, their concerns smaller, and their intuition less valid. It’s the centuries of “hysteria,” “PMS,” and “you’re just emotional” being used to quiet women down. It’s how medicine was built largely on male physiology, yet women are expected to fit neatly into the same diagnostic boxes. We’ve been gaslit by systems that profit from our silence — told to smile through burnout, to keep functioning even when we’re falling apart. And when we finally do ask for help, we get handed a pat on the shoulder and a line like, “Well, you’re around that age.”

Here’s what’s really going on.

As women, our physiology is always in motion. Hormones ebb and flow. Stress loads build and shift. Minerals deplete. Sleep and emotional labour take their toll. There are seasons where we feel grounded and others where we feel completely unmoored — that’s not “just getting to that age” that’s being human. But none of that means you have to accept feeling off, or disconnected as “normal.”

The deeper truth:

When you feel off, your body is communicating with you. It might not always show up on a standard blood test, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. Hormonal imbalance, nutrient depletion, chronic stress, lymphatic stagnation — these are functional imbalances, not diseases. They need to be understood, not dismissed.

So if you’ve ever been told “you’re just that age”…

Take a deep breath.

You’re not broken.

You’re not imagining it.

And you don’t have to settle for just fine.

There’s always more to explore — through nourishment, rest, movement, and reconnecting with your body’s rhythm.

Because ageing isn’t a diagnosis. It’s an invitation to listen more closely.