The Cure for Loss of Confidence & Sexiness

I’m not sure how it all happened but I seem to spend an awful lot of time thinking about what makes a woman over forty sexy. It’s led me to the topic of confidence and an understanding of how they’re all intertwined. In other words, confidence is sexy.

How’d I figure that out, you’re maybe thinking. In a word, menopause. It ripped my confidence out of me and left me flapping helplessly in the wind. I got to experience what life was like without my usual bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed-can-do attitude.

It was worse than I could have ever imagined.

It was like getting up one morning and realizing you’re out of milk. You saunter over to corner store and boom, find yourself in the middle of a hold-up.

Gun to your head, a growling voice barks, “Your confidence or you life, lady.”

You scream and lunge for cover. You’re not fast enough. By the time, you get out of there, you’re battered, bruised, and broken. You count your lucky stars though. It’s just your confidence that’s shot to shit.

Or so you think.

It wasn’t long before I realized I’d lost more than confidence. It hit me one morning when I couldn’t even get the old Greek waiter at my usual diner to flirt. I mean, the guy flirts with hamburger patties but suddenly I was invisible.

I knew I was in trouble.

Then I committed the ultimate confidence crusher. I pretended to be someone I wasn’t (a teenage sex kitten, if you can imagine) and got involved with a guy who was infatuated with that person-I-was-not. And then I hated myself for being not-me, but hated him more for liking not-me. (Logic only a woman could understand.)

Then, out of the blue, I got my rude awakening. A friend called me up one day explaining that this “so called boyfriend” of mine had just tried to solicit her for some group sex. And did I know about this?

I looked at the phone as though it had just turned into a rattlesnake. I nearly screamed.

That’s when I realized, after a certain age (ie, forty), you just can’t “fake it ’til you make it.”  In one fell swoop, I had lost my confidence and my sexiness along with it.

It was a fork-in-the-road moment when I got that the only way to get my confidence back was by accepting the new me—menopause warts and all.

You know the ol’ adage, “love the skin you’re in” (or is that a tagline for some product?). I had been trying to recreate the pre-pre-pre-menopause me and she just wasn’t there anymore.

I picked up the slightly worn purple snakeskin heels sitting side-by-side in their original box I had bought for my first date with the “so called boyfriend.” The strappy shoes looked so innocent, like two naughty schoolgirls sitting bolt upright, trying to cover up all the mischief they’d been doing.

The not-me had gone ga-ga over those shoes. But now the new-me, the real-me, knew better. They’d led me astray. They’d cost me a fortune. They hurt like hell.

And they were everything I wasn’t anymore.

I searched under a pile of dirty clothes and found the pair of eco-ergonomic-super-comfy-all-natural-orthopedic-type shoes my hippie girlfriend in San Francisco had convinced me to buy. I wouldn’t be caught dead in them.

Until now.

I slipped them on, a moan of comfort gurgling out of me. I bounced over to the mirror in big strides like I was doing a moon walk.

Strong look, I thought to myself, like I could command an army or walk a million miles without a whimper, or shop happily for three days.

Real shoes for a real woman, and damn-it-all, I’m that real woman! At which point, I began to feel pretty good about myself. And I even noticed a real-woman seductive swagger to my stride.

Which all goes to show you, if the shoe fits, wear it. Let yourself feel sexy all over again.

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