I have been 18. 28. 38. And then, all of a sudden, 48. Fingers crossed, I will be 58, 68 and hopefully 78. And then, well, I guess the jury is out after that. As I write this now, I am 51. But my first encounter with Invisible Woman Syndrome happened at 48. There has been some processing since. And acceptance. But let’s go back to 48.

I had my day of being what society deems ‘a young woman’, flitting around life, the world, and my own backyard in my 20s and 30s (and probably even my early 40s if you will humour me for a moment. We all have our own version of ‘young woman’, don’t you know. It’s about how you feel). I am not going to glorify any of those decades and pretend that it was all cinnamon hearts and peppermint sticks, but there certainly were some very fabulous chapters spanning a fun few decades. The attention that comes with being young and desirable (two adjectives that go hand in hand), can be Intoxicating. Empowering. Addictive. Let’s add travel into that colourful cocktail. Travelling can make you feel untethered in the best possible way. Free. Open. Daring. It can introduce you, many would argue, to your most authentic self. When you mix travel with the inevitable allure of how a woman looks and often feels in her 20s and 30s (and even early 40s — isn’t 40 the new 30, after all?), well, this most certainly takes the gloss and sheen of being a ‘young woman’ to a whole new level.

When in these prime years of attention, young women believe it will last forever. Their spotlight will never dim. It doesn’t register that the look of their mothers, older colleagues, that server in the pub, is even a remote possibility for them. I felt the same way. When you are young, aging seems like something that happens to other people —you feel untouchable and powerful, and so you should. This is your time.

I have always felt young at heart. Not in every way. I actually have a very old soul on many levels. But I do have a certain energy and an innate refusal to be a full fledged adult in some of society’s most sought after expectations. I have also maintained a healthy level of fitness, I drink water like a camel and I have applied night cream, without fail, since the age of 10. Thus, I have taken some precautions. However, the natural aging process seems to have found an ally with gravity, the stresses of life, the effects of blood boiling colleagues, and then your basic smiling, frowning, and just being a living, breathing human being. It doesn’t seem to matter how many leafy greens have been consumed, aging comes for all of us. For me, it happened to be when I was in Bolivia. This was my reckoning. This was 48.

I was on the tail end of a fabulous, action-packed 5-week trip in South America. I had been zigzagging back and forth across Chile and Argentina and every day was big. White water rafting. Cliff jumping. Hiking. Horseback riding. Kayaking. Drinking. City tours. Hot weather. Cold weather. Long travel days. More drinking. Dorm nights in hostels. Lonely days. Too-many-people days. Sad goodbyes. Good riddances. Overnight buses. Midnight planes. Crowded vans. Not one night of sleeping alone in a room. It was stimulation overload. I went from all of that to hiking and camping the precariously windy 11-day Patagonia O Trek in Chile which was fabulous, challenging and exhausting physically, mentally, and socially. I had probably met 100 different people in almost a month and as an empath who feels every vibration, I was beyond fatigued. Sleep deprived. I was also sicker than a dog, although I truly do not understand that expression. Why a dog’s unhealthy state sets the bar for humans is beyond me. Also, dogs eat a lot of things they shouldn’t and seem to bounce back relatively quickly from the messes they get themselves into. I simply don’t get why we compare ourselves to them when we are grotesquely sick. Somebody fill me in on the origin story. Back to our main feature. I had 10 days left before flying back to Toronto and I was desperate to end this adventure. This is when travelling can be truly painful. And questionable.

My last week of this trip was to be spent in San Pedro de Atacama, a town surrounded by desert in northern Chile. Four of those days were to be in neighbouring Bolivia, driving through the desert to reach the Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni Salt Flat), a must-see, must-do experience. After a few days in Atacama exploring the desert and all it offers — which is a lot (and there will be more on this to come in my next book, yes, I have started it) — I set off on a very low budget jeep tour sourced through the hostel I was staying at. (As a side note, the hostel manager, being my age, took one look at me upon arrival and magically sourced a private room for me, trying to diffuse my very obvious mounting meltdown. My evident fatigue and rapidly declining physical and mental state were quite simply off the charts.)

I repeat. I had signed up for a very low budget tour for my 4-day Bolivian salt flat experience. I am certainly no princess (as you may have read in The People You Meet) and I’m not sure there are anything but low budget tours in Bolivia, but for the purpose of this story, please know that I was loaded into a very uncomfortable jeep that was in need of both shocks and repairs. It was a jalopy of sorts. Air conditioning was certainly not taking up any part of the console and the desert is, well, hot. The jeep was also crowded. In terms of my fellow passengers, there was a good-looking brother-sister duo from Paris who were lovely chain-smokers in their early 20s and who, due to their very short and slight bird-boned bodies, fit nicely into the hatch of the jeep where there was a sliver of space and where most of the supplies for the trip were being stored. I’m quite sure there were no seatbelts back there. I’m not even sure there were actual seats. They never complained, but I know it was not fun for them. Sitting beside me in the middle backseat of the jalopy was Daniel, a tall and not at all small 30-something American-South African guy, a red-head with a load of freckles. Daniel did not fit comfortably in the jeep whatsoever, but he had a great sense of humour and was one of those that just rolled with it. Daniel became my lifeline and truly deserves to be in the credits should anyone ever decide to make a film out of these adventures of mine. Sitting on the other side of Daniel was always one of two influencers. The influencers were two 25-year-old girlfriends travelling together from Eastern Europe. I cannot remember which country they were from, my apologies. One of them was covered in tattoos. Covered. Head to toe. Face, neck, all of it. Piercings everywhere. Everywhere. No judgement, it was just hard to know where to look. I had to find her eyes every time we spoke. She was still very beautiful. Both girls were beautiful. And had beautiful bodies. They were not of the warm and fuzzy variety personality-wise, but we managed. The influencers took turns riding shotgun with our driver, who was also our guide, while the other slummed it in the backseat with me and Daniel. They both always travelled with a pillow, which took up even more space, causing Daniel and I to be forcibly glued together by our sweaty legs. And, I believe the reason that no one else was ever offered the front passenger seat was because they were prone to car sickness, but after four days of this, well, I’d argue that one in court. The driver was a 30-something Bolivian guy who didn’t speak much English, barely cracked a smile and seemed like he would do quite well in the military. That was his vibe. Militant.

Imagine travelling in a jeep for four days where you are being thrown around in a hot, cramped, continuously-on-the-verge-of-breaking down vehicle for about 12 hours a day. At the end of each day, you stay in less than average accommodations in the middle of nowhere Bolivia with at least one other person in the room, if not three. Now try being a very, VERY exhausted 48-year old woman battling a nasty cold and flu who has had it mentally and physically after almost five weeks of exhausting (but fabulous, it’s a privilege, not a right) travel, and truly just wants to go home. Let’s now add three beautiful women all 25 years of age and under into the mix, whose everyday wear consisted of athletic tights and sports bras that obviously accentuated their perfect young bodies while climbing in and out of the jeep multiple times a day. And now, we arrive at Invisible Woman Syndrome. Welcome.

On the many trips I have done around the world, I have always found some sort of rapport with guides, drivers, hotel staff, tour operators — whatever role they were playing in my adventure, I found a way to connect with them and make them feel lIke I appreciated them being there. Let me tell you, this doesn’t always happen with travellers treating such people this way, which is a huge pet peeve of mine and is a conversation for another day. These connections are not laced with intent for anything other than having fun and acknowledging their existence. I mean, maybe the odd time there is some harmless flirtation here and there, but I have always shown legitimate interest in all stakeholders involved in my adventures. I am also not shy in pointing out that I have some charisma, and I have an innate interest in people and learning about their lives. More than anything, I like to have a laugh and am looking for that with just about everyone. But. When you are a tired, sweaty 48-year-old-woman in your dirty, baggy, practical, pocket-laden travel pants and are the ONLY woman of this description while among three very fresh-faced, attractive, spandex-clad, bare-midriffed 20-something females, well … it’s a wonder I was not left behind in the Bolivian desert, only to be found living with my pet flamingo while trying to earn a buck or two selling chocolates at a random roadside rest stop.

There was no rapport to be had with the driver. To him, I simply did not exist. Over the four days, we had zero conversation. Zero interaction. Zero acknowledgement. Zero. This was a first for me. He did however, have mega-watt smiles and jokes for the three young ladies, and his tough, intimidating personality suddenly softened in their presence. Around them, he was like butter. Melted butter. Fun butter. But not with me. I could have been a ghost. Thank god for Daniel. To his credit, as a 30-something man with a pulse, he was not complaining about being in the company of these three beauties, but he also made sure I was in the jeep after every exploration break before the driver sped off again through the desert. Talk about a buddy system. I owe him my life. And just so you know, Bolivia is absolutely stunning. One of the most beautiful places on earth. The colours are otherworldly. Greens, blues, pinks, oranges, reds, yellows. Sand dunes. Mountains. Rock formations. Cliffs. Hot springs. Canyons. Meadows. It is something else. There could be worse places to live with your pet flamingo.

And so, while battling through fatigue and a relentless cold and flu, the type where you are relegated to the status of a dog, my ego was entering a new frontier. I had crossed into Invisible Woman Syndrome. And once you know you are a member, there is no going back. Please don’t appease me by saying whatever justifications we think we are instantly supposed to say to ensure someone never feels anything difficult, like, “oh, you are totally overreacting, you are still fabulous!”. That’s total BS. The cold hard truth was that even if I had been in tip-top form with a clean bill of health and no swath of Kleenexes surrounding me, there would have been no difference. At 48, I had become invisible.

A month later, I was gallivanting around Europe and had forgotten about this encounter. Or maybe I was in denial. Regardless, I felt like my usual self. I had a pulse, I was alive, and people knew it. Later that same year, I was in Mexico and voilà, there it was again. Invisible Woman Syndrome. Perhaps there is a connection with me and Latin America. Maybe it ages me. Like in Bolivia, I realized I was moving through spaces in a very different way than I ever had before. Maybe not completely. There was a flicker or two of ‘the old gal’s still got it’ while in the surfing community of Puerto Escondido, but there were definitely other times where I knew I was truly, truly invisible. I was flying well under the radar in a way that was new to me. You will always stand out when you don’t look anything like the local population you are traveling amongst, but when you are a middle-aged woman, well, the ‘space’ you take up suddenly shifts. The interactions change. I don’t recall anyone treating me rudely, just differently. Maybe more respectfully in some ways. Maybe with more detachment in other ways. Maybe slightly dismissive from time to time. And with this understanding and acceptance, something incredible happened. It dawned on me that I was experiencing a new sense of freedom. A new kind of power. A new kind of authenticity. I was gliding around relatively unnoticed. And when you are unnoticed, you can actually get into new kinds of mischief. Different kinds of decisions can be made. You care less about pleasing or performing. You can just be. This is actually quite liberating. And fun. While being less of the observed and more of the observer, there is a whole new level of information to be gathered. Watch out, because women with wisdom, life experience and observational information are powerful. This also goes hand in hand with the ‘zero f*&cks given’ mentality that starts to seep into women in their 50s. And so, once I accepted it, I started to really dig it. I realized there was a new sheriff in town. A new sheriff with a very new gait.

I’m not glorifying Invisible Woman Syndrome. I’m human. There is a bit of a punch to the gut when the world blatantly shows you you have lost your ‘young woman’ shine. It is a cold reality. It is a reminder that there is an expiration date for all of us. Especially women. Certainly women. I’m also in no way implying that women 40, 50 and beyond aren’t still attractive and fabulous and beautiful and don’t garner attention. I think in some ways, they become more alluring and more beautiful in much better ways than the shallowness of physical structure, good genetics and less time spent on earth. If you can get on the other side of Invisible Woman Syndrome, there is actually something quite glorious happening. The spotlight may have changed, but there is still a spotlight. Because when no one is watching, that is when the magic is brewing. Be on the lookout for the Invisible Woman. In many ways, she will become more visible than you could possibly imagine. She’s just getting started.