Read the full transcript of Dana Bowman’s talk titled “The Benefits of Aging With Grace” at TEDxUTulsa 2025 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Gray Hair Incident
My talk begins with a story about how my gray hair made a woman mad. So I was at the store about four months into my gray hair journey and an acquaintance spied me from down the aisle and she did that, you know, tilty head, smiley thing and started to approach. Then she got up to me and she leaned in and she said, “Your hair.” I smiled back because there’d been a lot of smiling involved at this point and she leaned in a little further and she said, “How could you do that to your hair?” Now my hair and I had just gotten back from a book trip in New York. We’d been on television, we’d done radio, we’d done podcasts. We were out, so to speak.
It was like my own silver hair cotillion and I thought we were doing okay, but then she leaned in yet one more time and she said, “How could you do that to yourself?” Incidentally, or perhaps not so, her hair was the same color as mine. In 2014, I got sober and the Dana pre-2014 would have responded to this whole incident differently. I probably would have said something self-effacing and I might have even apologized because that was my thing back then. You know, the questions in that aisle had seemed kind of angry and you say sorry when you make somebody mad, right? But instead, I processed and I looked at her and I said, “Because I like it, I think it looks nice.”
And I would have added, “I am the silver fox,” but I think we had established that there wasn’t much of a sense of humor going on in that aisle, so I let it go. And then I told her to have a nice day, despite my hair, and I left. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that incident and because of that, I started paying attention. My hair color has merited so many comments from complete strangers, both men and women and both good and bad. One of my favorite ones is, “How does your husband feel about the gray?” Which is funny because no one has ever asked me how I feel about his hair, okay? I had no idea this was going to freak so many people out, my children included. It seemed like this was a flag for something, a marker, a point of no return.
I was constantly being asked about my methods and my motives and I was told I was so brave, which as we all know is code for “you crazy,” okay? And it was so serious. It was kind of like I was the Joan of Arc of hair, okay? Total authenticity here, a large reason why this happened in the first place is because I’m cheap. I’m cheap, y’all. And so this happened because I was tired and cheap. So it was my own grassroots movement, if you will. A gray roots movement. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I will be here all TED Talk. The change of my hair color led me on to this whole new change of life. It was a stage in which I was told I could play only two roles.
The role of the crone, which my children would say I had cornered since like 2012, or the role of the feeble. Oh there’s another role, but that’s the role of the invisible woman and we don’t talk about her. I said no. So I guess with great hair comes great responsibility.
In 2023, Oxford University Press published a study about men and women ages 55 and older being disregarded and underrepresented in clinical trials and medical research. In 2022, the Washington Post had already published an article about women of all ages being underrepresented in clinical trials and medical research. So logically, if you are both a woman and older, you’re doomed.
But don’t older women, I’m just throwing this out here, don’t older women have medical issues? And don’t we have kind of a biggie, you know? It affects our mental health and our hormonal health and any other health we got going on in there. And it starts with an M and ends with a really long pause. There’s a social networking forum called Gransnet and they did a survey of over a thousand men and women ages 55 and older and they asked them this question: “To what extent, if at all, do you agree that people become invisible as they age?” 70% of the women who responded agreed and 23% of those 70 strongly agreed. Men were about 32%. The women cited this occurring for them at around age 52, men 65.
Here are some of the descriptors that the women used in the study, okay? “I felt passed over.” “I felt ignored.” “I felt patronized even by my loved ones.” And then there was this specific and depressing phrase that happened more than once, “People let doors shut in my face.” The culmination of all this research from the survey led the researchers to name this phenomenon. They called it Invisible Women Syndrome.
Gender Disparities in Medical Devices and PPE
The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health published a 2022 study about the implantation of medical devices such as medical mesh to repair hernias. The researchers in this study, three women, found that over 67% of failure from these devices, failures that ended up causing injury and illness and even death, was with women. But what was even more shocking is there wasn’t any follow up research on this pretty large gender gap.
Women were excluded from clinical trials and medical research. The WGH in 2021, which is Women in Global Health, published a 2021 policy report about the pandemic.
In it, women were stating in droves that their PPEs, their personal protective equipment, weren’t working. They weren’t fitting. So their gloves, their headgear, their masks, their gowns, they weren’t fitting. During the chaos and the tension of a global pandemic, women needed them to work. But PPE standards had been set in the 1950s with a re-standardization in the 1970s. And anything after that had pretty much followed a shrink it and pink it mentality. The study had its own hashtag, hashtag fit for women. I messed with it a little bit. Okay.
If the medical community, if the medical community, a community centered around the idea of a pretty solid understanding of the biological sciences, if the medical community is leaving us out of this conversation still, what does that tell us? Hashtag I can’t even? I think this is a good time in the TED talk to show you a little more data. So I have another chart for you. I have this one. See? No. No. No. The data, the research, the research on the lack of research, the lack of compliance, the lack of understanding, the lack of awareness. It’s been out there since at least the early 2000s. If not before, that’s over 20 years of information.
But let’s switch gears because we need to talk about what really matters here. My looks. Okay.
Allure magazine in 2017 decided to scrub the phrase “anti-aging” from its marketing campaigns and other companies followed suit. It was very exciting. Okay. I would have really liked to have been in on that marketing meeting where they tried to come up with suitable phrases for substitution and they did. They did. Okay. So first they went for the sporty. Okay. Pro-aging. Then there was the metaphysical. Timeless aging. Then there was the weird preserve aging which never took off. And then finally there’s the slightly insulting. Intelligent aging. But if any of you have ever walked down a beauty products aisle, and it’s still called a beauty products aisle by the way, both sides of the aisle are packed. It’s purposefully overwhelming. On one side of the aisle I’m being told I need to age timelessly, gracefully, effortlessly.
And on the other side I’m told I need to fight it, defy it, erase it. But please also do that gracefully. And heck if you can’t do either of those things at least have the good manners to paint over it. Y’all I’m exhausted. Why does my aging have to be so many things? Why does my aging have to do so many things? I have enough to do as it is. Did anyone ever look at a toddler and say, “Hey wee toddler you are younging so gracefully because you’re worth it”?
I have just one more chart, just one, that I think is an accurate measurement of how some of us might feel at this point. I am not a revolutionary kind of girl. I am not one to rock the boat. I’m an English teacher, okay.
The Gift of Sobriety and Getting Real
But ten years ago I did kind of do a radical thing. I got sober and my sobriety taught me so much about courage. Otherwise I would not be here right now. But what it really did is it gave me the best gift ever. The gift of getting real. Even when I am real tired. I could have started to feel very alone with all of this. But I realized isn’t aging the least alone demographic out there? 50 is coming for y’all, okay. It’s coming. And so beyond what the basic like learning about this and trying to look into it, I started to realize the science had something to say.
The Science of Aging
Did you know brain research tells us that our brains get better in certain areas as we age? Important areas like resiliency and reasoning and emotional intelligence.
Our brains start to more fully function and balance out across both hemispheres as we get older. A teenage brain, only certain portions of it light up to address things in process. So for example, if there’s a problem to solve, just the prefrontal will light up. In the case of my teenage sons, just a very small portion of the prefrontal. But my brain, my brain, my fabulous balancing brain, it’s learning how to clasp its little brainy hands and find its center. I have yoga brain, okay. Oh, and we score better on any vocabulary test that you could throw at us out of any age group to which my teenage sons would say, “Bruh.” Okay, say it with me please. “Bruh.” Right.
The National Geographic and AARP actually did a study on happiness and aging and they found that we’re getting happier as we get older. People in our 50s and our 60s and our 70s and beyond, we’re happier each decade. The least happy age group, by the way, 40s. So just hold out, okay. And aging happiness is so cool because it’s twofold. It’s twofold. First of all, we are able to be happy not based on situation or circumstance but simply as a matter of being, an essence. And secondly, we’re able to stop and look at that happiness, realize that it’s occurring, notice it. I can smell the happy roses and in my opinion, that is the true definition of joy.
But do we hear about this stuff? No. We hear about wrinkles and dementia. It’s almost as if aging and the perception of it in our society is that it’s a slow slide into obscurity, a daily deletion. There is nothing positive about it at all. It’s regarded as a disease in itself. And then you add the focus on outward appearance, especially for women. If you’re going to get older, do it pretty. And that’s an additional hurdle.
Finding Community in Aging
Beyond what science has to say here then, I asked my soul to chime in. And my soul took me right back to my recovery as pretty much everything does in my life now. There are over 20.9 million people in recovery from addiction. That’s amazing. I am not alone. That’s over 50 Tulsa’s. And the number one sword that I learned that I had to battle my addiction, defy it if you will, was knowing that I had a rock-solid community that had my back one day at a time. And I thought, it’s kind of the same with my hair.
Instead of my hair being this outer separate thing that is perceived by, judged by, and feared by others, couldn’t it be something I experience with others, even the young? The first step towards a radical act is finding community. I bet you’ve heard that a lot tonight, right? It’s because it’s true. We are not alone. The United States is older today than it has ever been. But really, this is a story for all of us. This is a story that all of us will tell. And we could start telling it now. And it’s how we tell that story to ourselves and to others that matters. Because gray matters. Thank you. .
