Halle Berry is used to being “so beautiful.” He wants women to want more

As any woman in or approaching midlife (including this creator) can let you know, there is a certain sense of invisibility that comes with it, irrespective of how “pretty” you might be or were. For Halle Berry, now 58 and arguably considered one of the beautiful women on this planet at any age, this invisibility manifests itself in not feeling known for all of her other qualities.

“I always knew I was more than just a shell I walked around in. I dreamed that someone would tell me something other than: ‘Oh my God, you’re beautiful,'” says the Oscar winner for the film an extremely popular interview with Fortune magazine while speaking at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit on October 15. “I wanted to hear different words. I know I’m more than that, so as I get older, I’ve decided to age gracefully and naturally.”

“I think it’s a shame that we as women are told that we have to find a way to stay ‘forever young’ (or) ‘forever 30,’ as if we can’t be human and do what we were born to do.” Berry continued. “We are born to get older and die. But in some way, as women, we’ve to do the unthinkable; we’ve to discover a way to do it and unfortunately we turn into monsters in trying to do it. That’s why I want to be an advocate for the thought of ​​allowing yourself to age gracefully, knowing that you simply are more than simply the shell you walk around in.”

After a long time of being a Hollywood star, Berry is no stranger to reinventing herself; a task that always proved difficult in a beauty-obsessed industry. Its latest evolution concerns the role of the entrepreneur, startup menopause-focused wellness brand Re-Spin. Having been an advocate for “change” in recent times, even lobbying for health care laws, Berry proudly declared on stage on the summit, “I’m in menopause… How liberating is that?”

Elaborating on the subject for Fortune, she explained: “You know, historically speaking, women just get older as they get older, right? Men are becoming sexy – they are graying, they are silver foxes. We’re just old, right? We are haggard and society tells us or has told us that our time is up; we should go out to pasture. We’re done with the years of having children – we were seen as the main purpose of being here – having children – and when we’re done with that at the age of 35, 40, we’ll have nothing left.

“Well, I know we’re just getting started,” she continued. “We’re just getting started, but women don’t understand it yet because society tells us otherwise. So they don’t want to talk about being middle-aged because it means there’s no room for them; they are not wanted. So it’s about us as women reclaiming that narrative, right, and changing the way we are perceived throughout our (lives).”

For someone like Halle Berry – a girl blessed with beauty, fame and fortune – this may occasionally seem easy to say. But irrespective of who you might be, she says the important thing to being confident in aging is maintaining not only our physical selves, but a holistic view of the nonphysical traits and interests that every of us brings to the table.

“When you only focus on your physical self, it’s really hard, if that starts to change, to feel confident – ​​and it will change. Everyone needs to know this: it will change,” she emphasized. “But if you’ve been focused on this your whole life, you’ll feel like you’re completely out of control and you’ll start to feel like you know your value is declining. But when you know that you are something more and you work on your inner self – you continue to read, develop, learn, be curious and educate yourself, start new companies; you know, follow your passions, follow your dreams – when you do all of that, you have no choice but to feel good about yourself,” she added.

For women especially, Berry hopes to emphasize that aging is not only inevitable, but potentially exciting.

“Getting older is a privilege. “Getting older is a privilege and we should look at it that way,” she said. “We should feel this way as we get older. We should feel like we are the crown jewels of our society.”