I’m a 41-year-old woman of average height and healthy weight. I wear a little makeup, but I don’t get my nails done. I work full-time, but I don’t wear suit jackets or button-down shirts. I have children, but I no longer carry them on my hip.

I have to search pretty damn hard to find a stock photo of a woman who looks like me. To be clear, by “stock photo,” I mean free or highly affordable stock photo. And by “look like me,” I don’t necessarily mean that the woman physically resembles me — just that she’s around my age and the lines around her eyes haven’t been airbrushed or Botoxed into oblivion.

Search for “woman” on most stock photo sites and one might get the impression that “woman” means a female between the ages of 25 and 35. If you want to see some gray hairs, you’ll have to search for “old woman,” and then you’ll see a sparse collection of beautifully coiffed retirees who are busy living their best lives on bank websites.

Search for “middle-aged woman,” and the results are downright paltry.

When I made a commitment to myself to write one story a week, I calculated that I could set aside about 45 minutes a day to write — that is, if I had no work meetings before 8:30 a.m. or I didn’t have to spend my morning scraping slime off my son’s bedsheets.

What I failed to account for are the hours I have to spend scrolling through stock photos to find anything that remotely resembles what I’m looking for.

Yes, you can find some photos of middle-aged women, assuming you include “middle-aged” in your search, but what if you want them doing something specific? Maybe you can find them doing yoga in an immaculate living room, or folding laundry in an immaculate laundry room, or drinking wine in an immaculate kitchen while staring wistfully out the window.

But what if you need a photo of a middle-aged woman jumping for joy? Summiting a mountain? Mothering an adolescent? Drinking a beer?

I once embarked on a quest to find a stock photo of middle-aged female hands. It didn’t seem like a tall order, but the hands I found were either tender and unlined or gnarled and veiny, both with unbitten fingernails that were nearly always manicured.

I couldn’t even find hands that remotely resembled mine.

I know — there’s an inherent irony in seeking out stock photos to illustrate gritty real-life stories. While some stock photo websites are undoubtedly getting better, aspiring to more authenticity and more diversity, most stock photos are still famously phony, even shamelessly so.

And yet, embedded within this phoniness are kernels of truth. The dominant images still reflect a dominant culture in which middle-aged women are deemed largely irrelevant.

In the “real world,” many of us middle-aged women are mothers, but we are no longer mommies, and our children are no longer cute. Some of us are making presentations in boardrooms, but more often, we are talked over, passed over, discounted. A handful of middle-aged women are central characters in movies and shows, but most are one-dimensional sidekicks — either frigid or overbearing.

According to the Internet, the central question for females in my generation is not how to fight climate change or how to smash the white patriarchy, but how to wage a War Against Aging.

Because according to the Internet, and society at large, the worst thing that can happen to a woman is getting older.

Maybe if we middle-aged women play our cards right, we can someday be that coiffed elderly woman at the prow of the yacht, our waist encircled by the arms of a distinguished elderly man with a coral sweater tied around his neck. That is, if we listen to our banks and get serious about saving for retirement.

But in the meantime, our faces and necks — don’t forget the neck! — require a small army of anti-aging products and maybe even Botox because it’s cheaper now and why not?

We only stay relevant by staying young.

Or so they say. Despite all the buzzing in my ear, I’m thoroughly enjoying middle age. I feel more relevant than ever, and I don’t need a stock photo or a Retinol ad to tell me otherwise.

I’m figuring out a lot during my fifth decade of life. I’m no longer in the intensive phase of parenting that nearly broke me, and I’m no longer constantly second-guessing myself as a mother. I’ve realized that as long as I’m doing some things right, which I know I am, there’s plenty of leeway to mess up along the way.

I know what I want from my career, and I know how to advocate for myself at work. I know what I want from my marriage, and I know how to advocate for myself at home. In the process, I’m questioning everything society ever taught me. I’m detoxifying, unlearning, reconstructing. I’m speaking my mind through my writing, and some people — even some men! — seem to appreciate what I have to say.

So as a middle-aged woman who is, if I may say so myself, kind of kicking ass, I find my stock photo options are few and far between.

In The Decay of Lying, Oscar Wilde famously asserted, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Imagine if we suddenly found the Internet flooded with photos of middle-aged women who look unabashedly middle-aged, engaging in activities not related to wine or self-care, living multi-dimensional lives, and just generally kicking ass?

And no, Canva, by “kicking ass,” I don’t mean kicking carbs.

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