Last week I dreamed I was in first grade again. In the dream, however, I was no longer a child. Instead, I was returning to first grade as a sixty-year-old.

First grade was different this time around, and not because I was five decades older than my peers—the age difference was, to my dream self, unremarkable. What was different was that there were ads. I don’t recall where exactly the ads showed up—if they were projected onto the walls or slipped deviously into the alphabet line-up tacked over the chalkboard, but you couldn’t miss them.

“A first-grade class is no place for ads,” I thought. And then I thought, “Wow, I am really smart for first grade.”

The next night I dreamed I was a television news anchor. My first night on the job, I smeared the entire surface of my face with a slick, lemon-colored lipstick that imparted an eerie glow to my skin. But just as being a sixty-year-old in first grade wasn’t problematic, neither was delivering the news to an edgy America with a radioactive yellow glow emanating from my face. No, the real problem, as I saw it, was that I’d forgotten to put on eyeliner.

There are probably a hundred ways to interpret these two dreams, and if you’d like to take a shot, I welcome your input. But here’s what I’m going with: while on the surface they seem to have nothing to do with one another, on an unconscious level, I believe they are related. I think both dreams point to stories I carry in my head about capability, presentability, and how I represent myself (or sell myself) to the world.

Let me explain.

As I get older, I find that the external, familiar ways of evaluating myself are increasingly closed off. I no longer work an office job, so there are no performance reviews telling me whether I’m being an acceptable employee, a role model to my co-workers, or a drain on the corporate system.

Since I’m married, I’m not in the dating pool, so that horrid subjective measure of my desirability (read: worth) is gone. I’m now of the age where most men (husband excluded) fail to hold doors, or even meet my gaze; the age where male cab drivers pop the trunk but more often than not, don’t help with my suitcase. I’ve entered the “age of invisibility”: the age at which (usually around fifty) women cease to exist in the eyes of society.

Regardless of who’s to blame for this phenomenon, whether it’s evolutionary (I’m no longer a dewy-skinned baby factory, so good riddance) or societal (my economic buying power tends toward less fashionable, hence less lucrative, trends, so advertisers don’t try to woo me anymore, except with arthritis supplements and burial plans), the fact is, the world’s view of me is changing. And my view of myself (hello yellow lipstick, eye liner-less face) is changing along with it. It’s inevitable. It happens to all of us at some point (FYI men, it’s coming for you, too). And it’s uncomfortable.

A friend recently forwarded me an article from the Harvard Business Review about how to navigate life transitions. Change, the authors of the article wrote, is deeply uncomfortable for most people, but it’s necessary for growth. And they weren’t just talking about the kind of change that comes with seeing yourself anew, or being newly unseen by a particular subset of the world. They were talking about, for example, people who find themselves suddenly living in a strange country, or who’ve been demoted or fired from work, people who are newly divorced or disabled, or even newly married or a parent.

They were talking about the kind of change that karate chops one whole segment of your life from another whole segment, and leaves you dazed and heaving in the gap of the settling dust.

There was some good advice about navigating change in the article. They suggested marking the end of one era and the beginning of another symbolically, as one nun leaving her convent did by ceremoniously removing her habit and donning civilian clothes. They suggested we can create a story to tie the two, now-disparate narratives of our life together (“I was X, and now I’m Z, and I couldn’t have gotten here without going through Y”). And of course there was the ubiquitous “get help/recognize your emotions/forgive yourself” approach to accepting the changes in our life.

But honestly what helped me the most about the article was the fact that what I’ve been going through—change and growth—was addressed compassionately and reassuringly, and most of all, matter-of-factly. In a nutshell, the authors said, change—painful, difficult, scary, thrilling, hard to navigate—happens, and if we were vegetables or chickens or bugs or chairs, we wouldn’t have to, or get to, deal with it.

Change is a given, and the gift of our humanness. It ferries us from one place in our life to another.

We don’t want to be stuck in first grade forever. We don’t want to see our own slick, lemony reflection in a mirror and think to ourselves that this is the best it gets. Happily, because change is also constantly changing, it almost never is.