While the problems of the world are certainly troubling, they shouldn’t stop us from being happy in our individual lives. In fact now, more than ever, we should do what lights us up, what inspires us, what gives us a sense of true purpose. And we shouldn’t feel at all guilty about it.

While I’m just stepping into my 50s, I can totally relate to this idea of living more authentically and having more innate wisdom than I ever have, and wanting to share the knowledge gained from experience with other women.

Only by being vulnerable could I shift what needed to move inside of me, softening edges that had been hardened by my own history of anxiety and the trauma of past relationships. Only by showing weakness and being honest about finding ways to overcome it rather than pretending it isn’t there could I allow someone else to love the parts of me that I myself struggled to accept.

So this is my message to all the black sheep of the world: Know that you are seen, valued and loved, even if your path wasn’t always the easiest. Know that what didn’t kill you has made you stronger. Know that if you find the love and validation you lacked early in life within yourself, you will be more powerful than you ever imagined.

As soon as I would walk through the doorway to my one-bedroom apartment in Lower Pacific Heights, I would burst into tears and cry well into the evening. Dinner was anything I could scrounge from the refrigerator — one night it was the last sad bit of a rind of Parmesan cheese and a hard-boiled egg.

Like nearly everyone else on the planet, I’ve had my heart smashed into a million pieces and then stomped on with steel-toed boots and kicked off a cliff for good measure. It happens to the best of us and the worst of us, and yet somehow — because we all live in our own unique version of reality — it always seems to come as a shock when that person who we love so much decides they don’t love us back and wants to say goodbye for good.

Given the panicky, hovering mother who had raised me — who was herself afraid to fly on planes or travel by car over bridges, and was always warning me how dangerous just about everything was — I should have been terrified, knowing all the dangers waiting to befall me out there in the world. Strangely, I wasn’t. I had an initial, fleeting moment of fear that was quickly replaced with elation and a sense of freedom the likes of which I’d never felt before. I felt like I had wings. Adventure was out there waiting for me and it was all mine. I didn’t have to share it with anyone else.

Now, in the beginning of the year in which I will turn 50, I realized that I have reached a point in my life in which I give zero fucks. After some examination, I’ve realized that it’s actually a superpower. And it’s something all women cultivate as they age — a combination of both a growing innate feminine wisdom, self-confidence and the increasingly ability to be the source of one’s own happiness.

I was not born into a life that inspired taking risks or embarking on new adventures. Nor did it inspire magical thinking. I grew up in solidly middle-class suburban Philadelphia, the awkward daughter of children of Sicilian-Italian immigrants. Norristown, Pennsylvania, certainly was not a fertile breeding ground for the expat surfer, experienced traveler and nature geek I am now, living my best life in a charismatic and diverse community of people on Portugal’s rugged western coast.

When you grow up with low self-esteem because you were a fat kid who was often bullied, you tend to make bad choices in relationship partners. This may seem obvious to any semi-enlightened person in hindsight, but no one had yet told me this when I was 29 years old in a bar called Chances in San Francisco’s Lower Haight district and I let Michael Duchamp buy me a drink.

I have always been a big girl. And that bigness colored my relationship with pretty much everything in my life with a negative tone, until I realized that it didn’t have to. First I was just tall —so much so that my kindergarten photo when I was five years old was put in the school yearbook with the 7-year-olds in second grade. It stuck out, though, even though I somehow fit in.