Maria Bello has reached peace as she navigates midlife.
Bello, 56, shared that “crisis is actually a gift” as she gets older. She admitted that she needed to take a step back to come to this revelation.
“I never meant to take a pause, but the pause took me first,” Bello told People magazine. “I started menopause at the beginning of COVID, and two years into it I felt like I was just going to die.”
She continued, “I had the opportunity to move to Paris with Dominique [Crenn, her fiancée], and I said, ‘Stop. Just pause.’ I paused my social media, traveling, some work… I realized a crisis is actually a gift to us at midlife, to take a step back, to reevaluate. So I went back on social media to talk about my findings. I feel more peace than I’ve ever had.”
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Bello returned to Instagram in December after a two-year break. She told the outlet she turned to social media to share what she learned about peace while she was away and wanted to explore questions she had about midlife.
“The only thing that I’d heard about midlife was ‘midlife crisis,’ ‘menopause’ – these phrases that denoted this horrible time in your life. I wanted to know: ‘How would I take that construct using Jung’s principles and make it into something that I could relish and grow with and grow into?’”
To Bello’s surprise, men were actually the ones who helped her the most. Her “midlife midwives,” were actually her “three old men friends that are over 80.”
“They really helped me,” Bello shared. “They all have such a sense of humor and such grace. And every time I would call my one [friend] and say like, ‘Oh my God, I feel like crap. What else is there?’ He’d say, ‘Go take a walk. If you’re feeling down, just look up.’ They told me about their own crossing over and what that looked like for them. We’re all going through it.”
The “it” she was referring to was growing older, something Bello has reprogrammed herself to view as a gift rather than a curse. Now that the actress celebrates having successfully “crossed over into the second half.”
“The sort of running to stop the aging process, to try this and the machines and the cellulite creams and the diets and the this and the that? You suddenly realize wherever you go, there you are,” she said.
Bello continued, “You take yourself with you wherever you go. Just because my skin looks a little tighter at that midlife point – when I was really down, disillusioned and depressed inside – it didn’t help a thing.”
Maria told the outlet that she keeps images of successful women such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Beatrice Wood and Simone de Beauvoir in her bathroom, because they demonstrate “freedom and strength.”
“They’re all over 60 with their wrinkles and their waddles and their confidence and their power and I find it incredibly sexy,” she explained. “My goal is to continue to grow into that.”
If Bello can share any advice to young women, she would say, “It gets infinitely better.”
Bello has a lot to look forward to in 2024. She is nominated for her first-ever Emmy Award for her role in the Netflix series “Beef” and will marry her longtime partner, Dominique Crenn, in the spring.