Four Accomplished Women Discuss Age Pressure As Part of SK-II’s #INeverExpire Campaign

By 30, you feel like there's a deadline,

and you have to be at a certain place in your career,

you want to have a certain amount of money

in your bank account.

There's this pressure on social media

to constantly be sharing our perfect vacations

and our perfect relationships, and our perfect pregnancy,

and our perfect baby.

All of that has made us gauge our value

on our age and where we're at.

As some one who found myself divorced

in my early 30s, I felt, I did feel like I had expired.

I felt like, oh my gosh, I haven't locked down the person

that I'm gonna make babies with,

and if I'm single for five years, I'm damaged goods.

My grandma's always, like,

Yeah, but you gotta think about your age,

when are you gonna have a baby,

when are you gonna give me great grandchildren?

My Persian grandma was, like, the top of her class

in medical school.

By the time she was 30,

she had opened up her own OBGYN practice,

was married, and had four sons.

And I'm like, okay, cool, how do I live up to that?

But my mom had me when she was 38.

She and my dad were married 10 years before they had kids.

I think what people don't realize

is that even I your 30s, we're still just getting started.

Yeah. Totally.

Totally.

There's only one way to live, and it's forward.

And every year I'm celebrating that I'm alive,

and you can't do this thing backwards,

so I'm embracing everything that comes with it.

People always ask me, how are you so confident?

I'm like, this didn't happen overnight.

It took me 30 years to be so comfortable in my own skin.

As much as we are like, oh we've made it,

we're past age pressure,

we're still gonna have those feelings,

because it's programmed in us to have them.

But now we have the tools to deal with them

in a healthier manner

instead of crumbling under that pressure,

and having it dictate your life.

I was told once that life is a marathon, and not a race,

and I've always been racing from the time I was a kid.

And I'm finally learning to slow down and to focus.

We have time to achieve what we want.

We don't have to do it all before 30.

Age pressure is an important discussion,

but I think talking about the feelings

that people go through is so important,

because you feel alone in that fear and that anxiety,

and that uncertainty.

Just trust that eventually it will make sense.

There will be--

You're gonna suck for awhile is a gospel.

Nobody says that, it's like--

No one says that.

Everything's hard for awhile,

you're not gonna be great at everything off the bat,

if you are, bless you, but for 90% of us, it's hard.

You have all the time in the world,

and that everything that you need to learn

will be presented to you,

in mostly challenges and difficult times,

and trust that what life throws at you

is exactly what you need,

and that the whole experience of life is an education.