Launching with Intention and Love

Welcome to Patina!  This is a project that has been brewing for several years now, born of a desire to create an elevated space to explore and celebrate a stylish, vibrant and healthy midlife.   And it seems appropriate to bring Patina to life on a day we celebrate love in all its forms.  You see, this is a passion project and a labor of love that I hope will inspire, encourage and motivate women to embrace midlife and all of its transitions and changes; to move into the next chapter with confidence and an open mind and heart, and to see themselves as valuable and important, with much to contribute.  My goal is to create a community and to be a resource for the 50ish+ woman, and to have a lot of fun along the way!  From fashion and style to health, wellness, culture and more, Patina will curate a forum for the modern, mature woman who understands that how she thinks and feels is much more important than the number of candles on the cake.

I am not a professional writer, fashion industry insider or health coach, but I do love all of these things.  And pivoting to blogger/content creator at the age of 51 is both invigorating and terrifying all at once.  I am an attorney by training and have owned a legal search firm for the past 15 years, which has been great, but I have always wondered “what if” I had taken a different path. And at some point, I realized that it was not too late to find out.  I had veered off a bit when I started a jewelry design business, but it was (and remains) a creative side-hustle, and I wanted more. I wanted to shift gears and focus on creating something entirely new. I’m talking about reinvention, and that’s one of the themes I want to explore and celebrate here. We are dynamic creatures, living and evolving as we go, and by the time we reach 50 we have acquired tremendous life skills.  For many of us, our day to day priorities have shifted, with kids growing up and leaving the nest.  We are entering a stage when we can start to focus at least a little bit less on what others need and more on what we desire.  As one friend put it, “we spent years doing what we had to do, and now get to focus on what we want to do.”

In addition to reinvention, I want to explore the idea that we should push ourselves out of our comfort zones so that we can continue to grow, discover and experience life in new ways.  I confess that I am WAY out of my comfort zone here- I am generally a private person, so opening up on the blog and making myself vulnerable is not easy, but I feel so strongly about the mission that I am willing to put myself out to make it happen.  I think it’s so important to stay engaged and continue to try new things, and research shows that this can be very beneficial for your brain health as an added bonus!

While not a trained expert on these topics, I am eternally curious and tend to immerse myself when learning.  I am coming from first-hand experience when it comes to midlife health and the challenges of shifting hormones, and what a challenge that can be!  I am a life-long lover of fashion, and can remember styling little outfits from as early as I have memories.  I love giving style advice both to friends as well as to strangers in fitting rooms (they always seem to seek me out), and I have a bit of a ridiculous shopping habit, but I hope that will benefit my readers here, as I have done much of the work of figuring out where to go for all of your style needs!

Ultimately, I think midlife can be a time of great liberation and joy.  For many of us, we have let go of the self-consciousness and insecurity we carry around in our youth.  There was a time I wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without at least some make-up on, and now I don’t think twice about it.  We care much less about what people think of us, and are not defining ourselves or our happiness by the external.  At this point in life, we have learned that true, real contentment must come from within.  We have lived enough to have experienced life’s most profound highs and lows, and we know that we can survive pretty much anything life throws our way.  We are accomplished, seasoned and wise. 

Thank you for coming along on this journey with Patina- I look forward to celebrating all the beautiful layers with you…

With love xx

Dina