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"There were signs that something momentous was taking place, but initially, I failed to see the pattern. First, beginning a few years ago, salespeople in trendy boutiques no longer bothered with me. Evidently, they saw me as someone who wouldn't\u2014or shouldn't\u2014buy their skinny jeans or strappy camis that are ideally worn braless. Then I began to require makeup, especially a tinted moisturizer, to get that lovely no-makeup glow. And finally one morning, as I rocked out to the Blondie song \\\"One Way or Another,\\\" I realized it was the soundtrack of a Swiffer commercial blaring from the TV. This anthem from my high school days was now being used to market cleaning supplies! Even worse, I owned a Swiffer and felt strongly enough about it to have recommended it to friends.\\n\\nI began to feel vaguely uneasy, but the reason hadn't yet gelled. My life had unfolded more or less as I'd hoped it would: I'd enjoyed my lunatic 20s, then calmed down in my 30s and gotten married. My husband and I had twin little girls; now, at 40, I had a good job and great friends, and we were healthy, solvent and, most of all, happy. And yet I didn't feel like me.\\n\\nThen one day, shortly after my 40th birthday, all became clear. I was on the subway, on my way to work, when a sexy, stubbly man leaned in and asked me for the time. \\\"It's 8:40,\\\" I replied tersely, careful not to offer a hint of encouragement in my tone. He thanked me and returned to his book.\\n\\nI was shocked. And mortified. The sexy, stubbly guy who'd asked me for the time simply wanted to know the time! He wanted information, not sex. Imagine!\\n\\nWho the hell did I think I was, you may wonder? Well, exactly who I had always been: a hot chick, damn it! Big hair, big boobs, big personality\u2014someone who, not so long ago, had reason to adopt a defensive posture when men asked her superficially innocent questions in public. I had never been a supermodel, but my general appeal was time-tested. After a few decades of being treated like a pretty girl (and so believing that I was one), it became part of how I navigated the world.\\n\\nBut in that instant, I got it. Boy, did I ever get it. I was no longer \\\"all that,\\\" perhaps no longer even a little of that, whatever that is. I didn't feel like me anymore because I wasn't me anymore. So the question was, Who or what was I now?\\n\\nI'm not just talking about looks, of course, or one guy's opinion, although that was the most obvious sign that something was changing. I had quietly moved into a different category of human being: the not-young woman. The problem was, my self-image had yet to catch up with the reality of what the world saw when it looked at me, which is why this shift felt unsettling. While I'd been busy working and having twins and not sleeping and yelling at my husband and maybe not taking such good care of myself\u2014and, oh, yes, enduring that pesky passage-of-time thing\u2014I'd become a decent-looking (if exhausted) 40-year-old working mom with radically different responsibilities and priorities than I had when I was younger. So if I wasn't me, I was suddenly a new version of me, one I had to get used to.\\n\\nOf course, as I \\\"matured,\\\" so did everyone else I knew. One time on the train (again on the train!), I saw Mike, a guy I'd known 15 years ago when he was a bandmate of someone I had dated back then. He looked the same: short, with thick retro-nerd glasses and a motorcycle jacket. He had his guitar strapped to his back; perhaps he'd made it as a musician, despite the odds.\\n\\nI snaked across the crowded car to say hi, but the closer I got, the clearer it became that this wasn't Mike, but Mike 2.0, the 2010 model of Mike. It was the guy who was now playing the role of the guy I used to know\u2014the arrogant friend of someone else's boyfriend, with a few modern updates like an iPod instead of a Walkman. It was entirely possible that he was wearing Mike's actual motorcycle jacket, as I imagined that Mike's wife had donated it to The Salvation Army while he was out of town selling bathroom fixtures or whatever he does now to pay for, say, his daughter's piano lessons.\\n\\nWhen I realized Mike wasn't Mike, I saw a flash of myself through his eyes. Because, of course, he didn't see the early-'90s Stephanie coming toward him in the throng but some harmless lady in yoga pants and sneakers, carrying a child's rolled-up collage with glitter and feathers peeking over the top. He probably thought, I must be blocking the subway doors because I can't imagine this woman would have anything to say to me. It turns out, he was right.\\n\\nI had to find a way to laugh at all of this, and so I began jokingly calling myself Formerly Hot\u2014I knew what I had been, but I was no longer sure what I was becoming. Formerly Hot seemed to describe it best, and so I carried my new self-definition around with me like a sweater and threw it around my shoulders whenever I had that chilly feeling of being an \\\"adult tween\\\"\u2014too old to be young but too young to be the kind of person who asks about the availability of parking before agreeing to go to a particular destination. Once I had a name for it, I found myself tripping over evidence of my transition everywhere I went. I noticed that marketers had stopped trying to sell me cutting-edge fashion and technology and instead were trying to get me to go on a Disney cruise or consider baking with Splenda. Physically, I felt fit and well (if a little lumpy and misshapen from childbearing), but I had definitely lost some energy. I wouldn't call myself crotchety, yet suddenly I was irked by the oddest things, such as having to sleep on a futon when visiting friends.\\n\\nMaybe I had this epiphany when I did because my late 30s were the first chance I had to take a breather. This pattern is probably true for many women like me, who got on the hamster wheel and kept running until career success or giving birth or something else made us slow down. But we've been collecting responsibilities, and our parents are getting creaky, and maybe we've gotten married and had kids. (It's nice being a cool mom, but time is still passing.) I took each of these things in stride as I experienced them, but then one day, they reached critical mass. Perhaps that's when we start to feel the rumblings of a shift.\\n\\nThe milestones I reached, however, were only part of my initiation into Formerly territory. The major tip-off for me was when I began to not feel like the person I once was. My self-image as a young, relevant, in-the-mix woman started to wobble, affecting the way I behaved. Perhaps because I didn't exude the same vibe anymore\u2014and maybe because I looked like an overwrought working mom with no time to tweeze her eyebrows\u2014people treated me differently, and so I acted differently. It was a self-reinforcing cycle.\\n\\nMy looks, the most visible part of this whole process, weren't radically changed. The people who saw me every day didn't notice anything. I looked fine. I wasn't especially bothered by individual physical changes\u2014my upper arms beginning to flap when I broke into applause, my butt sagging to the point that it needed a bra of its own and, of course, random hair sprouting where I didn't want it. But these changes, along with the nagging sense that my disquietude was about something bigger than my looks, all added up to the fact that I wasn't so young anymore. *That* bothered me. A lot.\\n\\nAnd it bothered me that it bothered me. Was I really so vain that I cared about what complete strangers thought? Why, yes\u2014yes, I did! Which was yet another blow to my self-definition. After overcoming an eating disorder as a young adult, I'd been proud to be someone who didn't dwell inordinately on my looks. I certainly cared and liked to look good, but I didn't get nuts about it. Now it seemed that this was only because I looked good without having to get nuts about it, n ot because I was so secure. Ouch.\\n\\nEven as I knew that I still looked fine, and if I didn't, it wasn't the end of the world, it occasionally felt like it was. The larger life changes\u2014going off to college, getting married, becoming a parent\u2014have been scrutinized to death. Not so the more subtle life shift like the one I was experiencing (friends talked of being formerly spontaneous, formerly overeager to please, formerly idealistic), which is deceptively difficult to deal with, superficial though it may appear to be.\\n\\nThe truth is, being a Formerly is kind of terrific, in a way I never expected it would be. I feel happier than I've ever felt, even as I'm losing some of the things I thought were essential to a happy life. There are legions of Formerlies, and we're an amazing constituency. We know our own mind, we're (mostly) done caring too much about what other people think, and we can have a laugh at our own expense. I'm young enough to have fun and old enough to know what fun really is, as opposed to tossing my head back in faux frivolity, as I sometimes did when I was actually hot and supposed to be having the time of my life. If I'm not having fun\u2014at a party or a job or in a relationship\u2014I can leave, something that never would have occurred to me when I had so much to prove. I'm surrounded by friends who have my back, and the family I've built is the one I've always craved. It's a tremendous time of life, the weird limbo between young and old notwithstanding.\\n\\nAnd so I've come to terms with leaving behind the hot girl I was. Yes, I still feel pangs of adjustment, but having so many women around me going through the same thing makes those easier to handle, as does having a little bit of perspective. Conveniently, that comes with age. So do lots of other good things: wisdom, financial security and a lot of life experience. For that, I'm not just Formerly Hot: I'm Currently Happy.\\n\\n*Excerpted from* My Formerly Hot Life: Dispatches From Just the Other Side of Young *by Stephanie Dolgoff (Ballantine) \u00A9 2010*\\n\\nHave a laugh! Look for Stephanie Dolgoff's funny insights on the [Healthy Self blog](/health/blogs/healthyself) at Self.com."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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