
Stop Pretending You’re Not in Midlife with Mary Beard
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Classicist Mary Beard is the author of Women & Power: A Manifesto and has a cult following because she doesn’t fit any kind of mold. She definitely speaks up, and she says whatever she thinks whenever she wants. But it wasn’t always like that. In this episode, she talks to Reshma about how she had writer’s block for most of her 20s and 30s. It wasn’t until midlife that she figured out how to write in a way that resonated with women. In her manifesto, Mary uncovers the ancient roots of misogyny in the Western world. Basically, she points out the first historical record of a man telling a woman to shut up, and in light of the 2024 election, this is the conversation we need to put it all into perspective.
You can follow Mary Beard on Instagram @wmarybeard.
You can follow our host Reshma Saujani @reshmasaujani on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/reshmasaujani/?hl=en
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Transcript
SPEAKERS
Reshma Saujani, Mary Beard
Reshma Saujani 00:14
Welcome to My So Called Midlife, a podcast where we figure out how to stop just getting through it and start actually living it. I’m Reshma Saujani, so they say that women in midlife don’t have power. All our best ideas, all our best moments, are behind us. In fact, there’s even what I call a midlife penalty, like the biggest pay gap for women are women above the age of 50. I am all about recognizing that women in midlife, we got a shitload of power, but we have to go get it, and that is why I am obsessed with our next guest. Mary Beard is an English Classicist specializing in ancient Rome. She’s probably the most famous Classicist of all time. She’s the author of one of my favorite books, women in power, a manifesto. And look, I’m going to be completely honest, I totally fangirl over her like I have been dying to meet her for a very long time. I got turned on to Mary Beard from my mentor, Hillary Clinton. She told me about her book, and she was like, Reshma, you got to read it. So if you know about her work, you’ll understand exactly what I’m saying. In 2018 The Guardian wrote an article about the cult of Mary beard. So I know I’m not alone, and I think this quote from the article sums up her appeal so well. It says everyone who has met Beard seems to have a story about encountering her for the first time, usually involving her rigorous intellect, her total lack of formality and her sense of mischief. In today’s episode, Mary reminds us that the effort to silence women has existed since the beginning of time. Our voice is our power. So speak up mid lifers, if we want to change the world, if we want to change the reality for women, we got to use our voices, and we got to do it in a way that feels right to you. Mary has a cult following because she doesn’t fit any kind of mold. She definitely speaks up and she says whatever she thinks, whenever she wants. So she’s taught me that it’s time we do the same thing. So let’s get into it.
Reshma Saujani 04:10
Mary, are you in DC?
Mary Beard 04:12
Yes.
Reshma Saujani 04:13
Oh, what are you doing there?
Mary Beard 04:15
I’m here for eight months doing I’ve got a fellowship at the National Gallery.
Reshma Saujani 04:19
Ah, well, what a fun, fun week to be in DC, all right, let’s get started. I am like, I’m a huge fan. I am like, so excited. I have been waiting for this interview forever, since the moment you were like, I can’t believe she said yes, and we’re gonna have so much fun. Okay, so the way I like to open up is we ask our guests about their midlife mindset. And so my first question is, how has midlife been for you, and what’s your mindset about midlife?
Mary Beard 04:50
Well, that’s quite difficult, because I’m 69 and nearly 70, you know, and I think I’m coming out of midlife probably, and going into older age.
Reshma Saujani 04:58
Now you’re just right there still in the club, Mary.
Mary Beard 05:03
Some ways for me, it’s been wonderful. I’ve got to feel more confident. I’ve got to feel more resilient. And I remember very vividly, this was 10 years ago. Now, I got some pretty nasty death threats on social media, and I reported the police, because that’s what you do. I kind of said to my daughter, look, I’m not worried. I don’t think they are going to come and blow up our house at 945 tomorrow. And she said, Just think how you’d feel about that threat if you were 30 years younger. And I thought, Look, I’ve come, in a sense, to get over some of the anxieties that I used to have, some other fear about where I was in the world. Now that’s not to say that. You know, I go out every day feeling super confident. Of course, you know, you wouldn’t be human being if you didn’t have some anxieties. But I’d rather enjoyed midlife. You know, I have all kinds of political objections to what happens to.
Reshma Saujani 06:19
To women in midlife. It’s, actually wild.
Mary Beard 06:22
But personally, I’ve enjoyed being a menopausal woman. I know this is your secret about that, you know, I just must, I know that I’m very lucky, but I’ve enjoyed, you know, not having to menstruate.
Reshma Saujani 06:38
Yeah, it’s just a period getting to that point. You know, it’s so fascinating. You say that, Mary, because all the women in my life, like, fucking miserable, right? Like midlife sucks. It’s hard, multitude of reasons. But then everyone I interview is like, it’s great, like, this is the best time of my life. And I’m like, okay, I that is the journey of this podcast is to figure out what, yes, what you’re all doing to feel that way. Let me ask you a question before we get started. Before we get started. Is there anything you’re doing that’s been a game changer for you in this decade?
Mary Beard 07:08
I mean, in some ways, I suppose it was only in midlife that I learned how to write in a way that people wanted to read. You know, me being really important husband, and I spent most of my 20s and early 30s, you know, really, with writer’s block, finding it very hard to write, you know, finding it hard to speak. You know, I would go to seminars, or I’d go to lectures, and I’d want to contribute at the end and put my hand up and say, Look, I have a point here, and never managed to do it. So it’s only been in midlife that I found how to write and how to how to speak. I found a voice. Now, I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know. I wish I could tell you how it happened, but it has. And I think for me, a lot of people think that, oh, it must have been, you know, doing a lot of media, doing television, that was the game changer. It wasn’t really, I mean, I’ve, I’ve enjoyed that. You know, what meant most to me was that I could speak out in public, in private, in seminars, in a way that felt like me, and that I could write something that I was confident there were some people out there would want to read and that’s my game changer.
Reshma Saujani 08:26
Yeah. I mean, do you think it’s, I’d like to explore this a little more? Like, is it life experience? Because I’m gonna tell you this, I love your book. Women empower. I’m obsessed with it. I tell everyone to read it. And I was reading it again this morning for probably the fifth time. And I literally, I know this is going to sound weird, but I want to eat your words. I love them so much I know that it’s like there’s no other way to communicate, like how I literally want to eat them. So this is like, it is, it’s amazing. And I say this as as a speaker, as an order, right? Who uses speech to really move and build mountains. And so it’s fascinating to me that you say that like it was in midlife that this gift almost came to you. So what do you think that? What do you I mean? Is it life experience?
Mary Beard 09:12
I think that at a certain point I realized that I could say what I wanted to and it could sound like me, and I spent years of my life, you know, particularly in the academic job in the university, being, I think, not a very good lecturer. And partly I wasn’t very good, because I was always copying somebody. I was always kind of pretending to be a man doing this, you know, say, Well, ladies and gentlemen, this morning we go to, you know, I’d hear myself in my ears, and it was like someone else was speaking now at a certain point. And I think it came when I was about 40. I guess I suddenly realized I didn’t have to do. It like that, if I you know, I could get up and speak for me. I could hear my own voice. And I think that’s what I noticed now about television. And I one thing that I now feel confident about and feel confident about is that when I look at the television, I see me, and I hear me, and for me, that’s been, that’s been the thing that’s really made the most difference.
Reshma Saujani 10:27
I really resonate with this, because when I ran for office for the first time, I too, I went on YouTube and I typed in great female order, because I thought, I will just copy someone, because I know men who can give a great speech, Kennedy Clinton, Obama, but what does a woman sound like? And I would just write down my speech. I would memorize it, and I put it in my back of my pocket, and I sound like a fake. Yes, like I sound like a fake. And I don’t think this is why I lost my elections, but I think that I just I didn’t feel comfortable, no, and then I just totally agree, totally threw it on the garbage right, and I just authentically am just myself. Maybe I swear, maybe I don’t pronounce the word exactly the right way, but like, but there’s and it’s shifted everything for me.
Mary Beard 12:36
Yes.
Reshma Saujani 13:30
I want to get to your manifesto women in power. And I want to I was so moved by it. And so you trace the roots of misogyny to Athens and Rome, and you talk about the first time in recorded history, we have an example of a man telling a woman to shut up, and it was in Homer’s Odyssey. So for our listeners who haven’t read Odyssey, can you retell the story?
Mary Beard 14:50
Yeah, yes, I will.
Reshma Saujani 14:51
And explain what it tells us about women’s voices.
Mary Beard 14:55
The Odyssey is the story composed in the eighth. Tree BC, by someone we call Homer, and it tells the story of how Odysseus, one of the Greeks heroes of the Trojan War, gets back home to his wife and family in Ithaca from Troy. But there’s a parallel story of what’s happening at home with his wife, Penelope, but it’s also their son, Telemachus. And part of the story is about how while Odysseus is away, Telemachus grows up. So it’s both a homecoming movie, and it’s the story of the how the boy becomes a man, and the very first book of the Odyssey. We are in the palace at Ithaca, and Penelope is upstairs. She’s working her loo, and she hears the bard below starting to sing songs about what a terrible time those Trojan those heroes of the Trojan War, the Greek heroes of the Trojan War, are having trying to get back home, and they’re going through disaster, and it’s terrible, etc, etc. Penelope goes downstairs from her upper room and says to the Bard, look, do you think you could actually sing something a bit more cheerfully reasonable, sensible, middle aged women’s request, you know, turn, you know, put a better record on, please. Bard, as she says that Telemachus, he’s still a teenager at this point, comes up to her. He’s very wet behind the ears. He’s not very smart. She’s savvy. And he says, Mother, public speech is man’s business. Go upstairs. I’m the boss in this household, and up she goes. And what I think is amazing is that I had read that several times in my first of all, I guess when I was a teenager and through my 20s and 30s, it really wasn’t until I came to think about women in power, and tried to think about the roots of Western misogyny that I noticed that, you know, I’ve read that passage and thought Telemachus tells mum to go upstairs, you know, I suddenly kind of thought blinding Flash that is extraordinary. You know, that he that this kid has shot his mother up, and how many more times in the history of the West.
Reshma Saujani 17:50
Does that happen? Yeah, you say it doesn’t you say it doesn’t matter much what line you take as a woman, if you venture in male territory, the abuse will come. It’s not what you say. It’s simply that you’re saying it. Yes, you write. It is still the case. When a listener hears a female voice, they do not hear a voice that connotes authority, or rather, they have learned how to hear authority in it. They don’t hear what you call muthos. Can you explain the people who have not read your work what muthos is and why men don’t hear it in our voice.
Mary Beard 18:25
I mean, muthos is the word that termicus used that I when I was summarizing, I said public speech, the word that gives us myth, but here it’s not being used in that sense. It’s about speaking, but it’s speaking. It’s speaking to be listened to. It’s a kind of public speech. And I think I found the ultimate answer to that question quite difficult. Why? Why do women’s voices not seem to carry that public authority that men’s voices do. I’m not sure I can answer that, but I can see the history of that, and I can see the impact it has right now. I mean to tell a story against myself again, it was quite shock. I mean, I was shocked by me. I remember, this was about 15 years ago or so now, I guess when I first got on an airplane, and that, that little bit of speech that comes from the pilot, you know, we’ll be welcome. Everybody will be traveling at 35,000 feet. It will be good, and all the rest. And it’s much the same each time it was spoken by a woman. And I remember for a tiny split second, I thought, why is a member of the cabin crew giving this and I thought, oh, you know, and there was other. It’s a woman pilot. I wanted there to be women pilots forever. But even I, you know, who have been so vociferous on this, a hero woman do it. And what do I think? I think it is the cabin crew.
Reshma Saujani 20:19
Not the captain.
Mary Beard 20:21
Not the captain, and we know that. I mean, you probably know this better than me. You know we know that what women politicians often do. Margaret Thatcher is the the absolute classic case in the UK, who, in order to sound authoritative, to voice coaching lessons so that her voice got deeper, deeper, she sounded like a man. So she sounded like a man. And when I gave the lecture, that was the first kind of germ underlies the women in power book, the first lecture I got, oh, women from the BBC, from all over the place, saying, I have been on leadership courses, and one of the things that we’re told to do is make our voice deeper still. Now, why should it be that a deep voice.
Reshma Saujani 21:17
Is a more authoritative voice.
Mary Beard 21:19
Right, why? Is it I am. I don’t know the answer to that, but we hear it as that.
Reshma Saujani 21:25
So, Mary, but do you think it’s that? It’s because it really is that, oh well, you just don’t sound authoritative, or they just don’t want to hear our voice.
Mary Beard 21:33
I think it’s an inextricable combination of the two, because.
Reshma Saujani 21:39
I’m just thinking about the you write in the book about how this plays out in modern history, and the example of Elizabeth Warren trying to read the letter of Coretta Scott King.
Mary Beard 21:49
Yes.
Reshma Saujani 21:50
And she’s silenced.
Mary Beard 21:52
She’s Sung. That happens in every walk of life. I mean, I think one of the things that’s been interesting about the book is that, you know, I very much hoped that I was a bit afraid about this, that it was look as if I was talking about people like Elizabeth Warren, and we’re talking about, you know, women who’ve, you know, have actually got, to some extent, a public platform and are to some extent listen To, but other than sometimes strategically Shut up. But women from every walk of life have said to me that happens. It happens in my supermarket where I’m the manager. It happens everywhere. And I remember very much looking back at these quite informal, very friendly seminars where, when I was a younger academic, I found it very hard to speak. I can still remember if I did actually make a point. I remember what everyone I’ve met knows this feeling too. I remember there being a bit of a silence, and then a man would say, what I was trying to say was, and it somehow would be as if you had never intervened. It was as if you that nobody was noticing, yeah, what you had said, it’s as if you’re being negated. And I noticed then, in the kind of I don’t get so much Twitter abuse or ex abuse, whatever now, but I do remember this picks up absolutely what you said about it being not. It’s not so much what you say that makes people abuse you. It’s that you’re saying it, saying it. And so I first of all, because I’m, I’m quite a reply on social media. I tend not to block people. I tend to reply and to say, No, that isn’t what I said. Or, you know, my argument was a bit different from that, or whatever, and I would do that. And it took me some time to realize that the argument wasn’t the point. And when I then went and looked at the really vile bits of abuse that I got, some of it was like other women have had, you know, pretty violent. But I think, rather, I don’t want to say on serious, every death threat is serious, but I think fantasy, they were fantasy death threats I was getting, but also I was getting things which absolutely hit home to the woman’s right to speak. They would say things like, we’re going to come and cut your tongue out.
Reshma Saujani 24:35
Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. Either you’re sidestepped when you’re in a meeting, or you get a death threat or a rape threat, and I want to is there anything that we can do to immediately change that? Like is the answer. Keep talking.
Mary Beard 24:52
There are some tactics that you could learn, that we can learn, and I think that that to some extent I have, I. Um, part of that is just a bit of humor and ridicule. You know, I think women feel a bit embarrassed, often partly because, you know, they have been social, often, have been socialized differently from men, um, so the kind of idea of ridicule, you know, it’s like the it’s still much harder for a woman to use humor as a stand up comic than a man. I mean, they some women are doing that brilliantly, but it’s harder and in kind of relatively formal meetings, I found that what I’ve got to say, I start to slightly play with the guys. I used to say things like, Look, can you just let the woman speak for once, right? Just call them out on it.
Reshma Saujani 25:52
Yeah. I tell them to count to 10.
Mary Beard 25:54
Yeah, and just, kind of, you know, let Joy please level the playing field here, guys and I remember once something that that my colleagues still remember. We were having some very contentious academic debate about academic policy, and two of my male colleagues went out to the Lou they went to the laboratory, at the same time the bathroom. When they came back, I said, do you know what really, I can’t stand it’s men going to the men’s room to fix the business and because that is what they’ve been doing, that is.
Reshma Saujani 27:29
So I have to ask it. So you know so many of the metaphors that we use as feminists, right about accessing female power are break the glass ceiling, storm the Citadel. So we’re seen as we’re taking something away from the Met. You describe the story, write about your book that like when it’s about a story about women gaining positions in the police force, and the title of the story is like women power grab. And I just you know, and you see it all the time. And I just wonder, did we undo ourselves by using the wrong laying. Which do I need to like you? I mean, do we need to like throw out all the futures, female, girl, boss, like you. I mean, should Hillary have not have had the glass ceiling like I mean, do we need to just change the language as we grab our as we take our power?
Mary Beard 30:14
I wonder, I have got to feel increasingly anxious about the glass ceiling metaphor, partly because, as you say, it is, it is the kind of grabbing, breaking, smashing through. Watch out. This is going to be nasty, right? You might get cut help. Yes, this is a kind of the violent image, I think also it’s an image that leaves a lot of women cold. I mean women in politics, women in high ranking professional careers, they know exactly what that means. And if you’re working on the factory floor, the glass ceiling is so far away that it doesn’t mean much to you. So I think it’s I think there are many ways where reasons for it being. You know, perhaps the, not the best metaphor. But I’m not sure what metaphor we want.
Reshma Saujani 31:07
I know. I think we need new language, but I know that the fact is we’re fall they realize very quickly that if we can convince men who are feeling vulnerable that they’re taking something from you, we can get them to come out and and I think if we just simply do the math, it’s like we just need some of them, and like we’re falling into their prey. Yeah, right. And I’m starting to, I’m starting to realize that one of the things that you wrote is like, if you were going to write this book again from scratch, you would find more space to defend a woman’s right to be wrong, at least occasionally, like men get to be wrong all the time. They get to pull BS, laugh it off. Someone else calls them. But women, we have to be so ridiculously prepared and then some and we don’t get second chances. No, we don’t. You know. Can you tell me a little bit about what it means to you about a woman’s right to be wrong?
Mary Beard 32:03
Yes, I think it. It’s one of those things which often goes under the radar. You don’t when you think about how women are in some way still put down or disadvantaged or whatever. You know, people don’t often come out first with they’re not allowed to be wrong, but I’ve seen mostly in British politics, but you can replicate it here. I’ve seen the idea that women, as you say, they give no second chances, and that you’re living in a world in which women are sort of allowed into the hierarchy, very conditionally. As soon as they put a foot wrong, they’re out, whereas men, because they belong there, they get told off. Perhaps, I remember once there was extremely useful for me. Comparison between Diane Abbott, who was the first black woman, MP, in the UK labor MP, and I compared her with Boris Johnson, you know, needs, I’m afraid, no introduction, and they both had around one of our election campaigns, I can’t, can’t remember which they both had an absolute car crash of a radio interview. And, you know, I’m sure Diane would be the first to admit she’d done really badly. You know, it wasn’t that it was a good interview at all. The Press just slaughtered her that this woman is not fit to be in power, etc, etc. You can imagine what it is Johnson gets kind of let off with a few sort of bloke ish laughs saying, Oh, come on, Boris, do your prep better next time, you know, because for him, they assumed there was going to be about her next time Albert was being told, you finished yourself. Now she didn’t finish herself. But the the inequity of the treatment of their mistakes was, I thought, you know, super revealing.
Reshma Saujani 34:17
How do we change that? Because, you know, it’s women too. It’s we, us judging women more harshly.
Mary Beard 34:23
Yes, and, you know, I think, Well, I think one thing we can do is recognize that we are also we’re implicated, you know, that it’s, it’s, it would be, I think, quite a lot easier if you know women were over entirely untainted by these assumptions. And you know, we could, we could critique them, and we’re, we’re part of this. We do the judging as well, just like my story about hearing the woman pilot and me mistaking her for the cabin crew. And I think, I mean, in some ways, I suppose. Yes, I was very doubtful about calling women in power a manifesto, because I thought when, when you have a manifesto, people think that you have answers, you know that you will end by saying, what? Okay, 1 2 3 4, this is what we’ve got to do. And actually, I think it doesn’t end like that.
Reshma Saujani 35:18
No, it doesn’t. Mary, are you writing another book? That’s why, one time, oh yes, it doesn’t end that way.
Mary Beard 35:24
I’m not holding back. You know, if I’d sat there and thought, all right, I can see what needs to be done, I would have, I would have written it. I mean, I wasn’t. I wasn’t kind of keeping something up my sleep for a sequel. And I think, you know, as an academic, you know, I’ve got a Get Out pills here and say, look, I think part of what you need to do, the first part of solving the problem is seeing what the problem is, right. And I think that insofar as women empowers, a manifesto, it is, I hope, showing you and exploring the problem.
Reshma Saujani 36:05
It absolutely does, yeah.
Mary Beard 36:07
And it’s also, I think, convincing you that, you know this isn’t a problem of the last 20 years, you know, this is a problem, certainly in Western culture, and probably, I suspect of those cultures that I know less about, and I haven’t grown up kind of with all the cultural baggage that Western culture has given me. So I can see that this goes right back to the beginning. I see that when you walk into an art gallery, you see women put down. You see women, women all around us are made subservient.
Reshma Saujani 36:47
Yeah, and in certain ways, you can see it. I want, okay, but one of the things I will say I found satisfying is that you did say what the answer is not. So you said the answer is not patience. Because gradualism takes too long. The answer is not exploiting the status quo. We should all be like men. And the other observation that you make is sometimes like, for example, you said, it’s also understanding where the power may not be anymore. So maybe when you do see a lot of women in parliament. That means power is not there anymore. I thought that those were really powerful observations. Yes, all right, well, I want to end by bringing it back to midlife. So, like, you know, we’ve heard some from so many women who say, like, this is the time. It’s basically what you’re saying, like, where they just give less fucks and they go after what they want. And so for women who haven’t gotten there yet, what’s your advice to help them get there?
Mary Beard 37:47
Well, in English, there’s a kind of there’s a Latinate English phrase, which saying, don’t let the buggers get you down the I think resilience is terribly important. I think you do hit so, you know, unpleasant bits of midlife I don’t have my hair colored. I made that decision. I’m very happy like this, but the kind of stuff that I get on Twitter, you know, X, you’re a witch. Where’s your cat? Where’s your broomstick? And there is a sense in which, although I’ve said, Look, I found my voice in midlife, it’s also the case that quite a lot of women and me, to some extent, you can feel invisible. And there’s a very common feature of British television, which I’m sure is a feature here, which is there are a lot of not just midlife men, old men, wrinkly, gray haired, bald, who, again, have the authority to appear on television. There are very few women who kind of go through that? The women on television tend to be the young. When they start to look older now they find themselves onto radio, you know, not tell you. And you know, and I think I have managed that. Why have I managed that? I’ve managed it because, to some extent, I’m slightly eccentric, and that gives me a license to to be and to appear were women who are kind of less eccentric than me. I mean, eccentricity is, is a bit of an armor, a bit of a weapon and but I think you have to be resilience now is a is a pretty unfashionable virtue to have, you know, and people I know rightly say, why should you have to be resilient? You know, we should make people nicer, not make women or any other minority group or disadvantaged group. It shouldn’t be. Up to them to be resilient. It should be up to everybody else to treat them better. And I, of course, I see that logically, but I think in the end, you know, the revolution comes by people not being battered down by feeling that you can, you know, you can say what you want and you won’t be shut up. You know, the Elizabeth Warren kind of, you know, butter, Elizabeth Warren moment.
Reshma Saujani 40:22
That’s right, Mary, I’m lifting my weights every day. That’s why I’m doing this podcast, right? Because this is about building strength.
Mary Beard 40:32
Yes, yeah, you know. And it’s saying sorry, no, you know, yeah, I’m sorry. I don’t. And when I was I was kind of hugely ridiculed after one television program by a notorious British, British TV critic, you know, who said, you know, she could make herself look better if she was going to come into our living rooms. We were watching her on a on a telly eventually, I said, and I was in my mid 50s there. So what do you think a middle 50s woman looks like? Right? She looks like me. And even quite a lot of conservative newspaper readers from very conservative papers came on my side because they said, Look, we, we want to look like us. We don’t want to have to pretend not to be us.
Reshma Saujani 41:23
Oh, Mary Beard, you just delivered.
Mary Beard 41:28
Thank you.
Reshma Saujani 41:29
This was, this is exactly the the dream meeting that I hoped it would be.
Mary Beard 41:33
Thank you. It’s been very enjoyable. Thank you very much.
Reshma Saujani 41:50
Mary Beard is a classicist and an author. If you haven’t read her book, Women In Power, I highly recommend it. That’s it for this week. Thanks for listening, bye. There’s more of My So Called Midlife with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content, like midlife advice that didn’t make it into the show. Subscribe now in Apple podcast, I’m your host, Reshma Saujani, our producer is Claire Jones. This series is sound designed by Ivan Kuraev. Our theme was composed by Ivan Kuraev, and performed by Ryan Jewell, Ivan Kuraev and Karen […]. Our senior supervising producer is Kristen Lepore. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neel. Executive Producers include me, Reshma Saujani, Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Series consulting and production support from Katie Cordova. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review and let us know how you’re doing in midlife. You can submit your story to be included in the show at speakpipe.com/midlife, follow My So Called Midlife, wherever you get your podcast, or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership, thanks for listening. See you next week, bye.