Are Any of You Feeling Too Old? Or Too Fat? Or Too Forgotten? 

Lessons from Demi Moore and others on how to know your self-worth.

By
Published April 16, 2025

Demi Moore held up a golden trophy on Oscar night — but not the one she was expecting.

Posing post-Oscars, Demi wore a comfy white bathrobe, cuddled her constant companion — her chihuahua, Pilaf — and smiled from behind two giant vats of French fries. She hoisted one fry like a statuette.

She lost the Oscar to a 25-year-old, but she won every other acting award this year and showed us the timeless truth: real substance is more bathrobe than ballgown.

“Just know you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick,’” she said when accepting her “Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy” Golden Globe award for The Substance.

I get it, Demi. When I was her age, 62, I could still turn heads. All it took was long blond hair, tight jeans and a size-2 butt. Six years and 20 pounds later, men only pay attention to me when they see me struggling to lift my luggage into the overhead bin.

I could relate to Demi urging women to put down the measuring stick. We all seem to beat ourselves up with it — even the film’s producer Coralie Fargeat. She made The Substance after she turned 40, and terrifying thoughts started screaming in her head: “You’re not valuable anymore … no one will think you’re sexy … your life is over …”

The Substance reignites that age-old question: how far would you go to stay young and beautiful?

Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a 50-year-old actress who has faded from the A-List and now stars in a TV workout show. Her piggish boss, Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid, fires her. He wants a new star who’s young, hot and compliant — a 20-something who smiles when he says creepy things like “pretty girls should smile.”

This leads Elisabeth to seek “The Substance” — a mysterious green potion that promises to make her better than ever. She strips naked, shoots it into a vein, writhes wildly — and then her back splits open, and a nubile young beauty, Sue, played by Margaret Qualley, oozes out of the gash.

Sue is the ultimate man bait — but she can only exist every seven days. The rest of the time, Elisabeth returns. Spoiler alert! The Substance creates a monster — like Alien with lip gloss — and Elisabeth’s obsessive desire for youth destroys her.

Gross? Violent? Ugly? Absolutely.

Putting too much value on looks is a real horror show. As Fargeat said in an interview with CNN: “The two characters represent those voices in our head all the time: you’re not good enough, you’re not beautiful enough … we are constantly getting the message that we have to transform ourselves into some crazy beauty standard.”

According to Tanisha M. Ranger, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Las Vegas, women get caught up in a web of contradictory expectations. “There’s no way to win.”

“As Demi said, ‘You’re never going to be enough'," Ranger explains. “That sounds pessimistic, but it’s not pessimistic. It means you can be the arbiter of your worth.”

No Oscar? No worries. Grandma Bod and wrinkles? That’s OK, too. Our value is not determined by our hotness or someone else’s opinion.

This realization is hard, Ranger says — because girls are socialized to be cooperative and boys are socialized to be competitive.

“We are told we are selfish if we focus on ourselves in any way,” Ranger says. “The conditioning we receive from birth is to focus on whether everyone else is OK when we need to ask, ‘What is my purpose based on what I want?’”

That’s the first step in dropping the measuring stick: what do you want to determine your worth?

Here are three more tips to extricate yourself from the web of impossible expectations:

Remember: Measuring diminishes Mattering. Social media rewards measuring. “It is comparison on steroids,” Ranger said — and teaches us to value “likes” over what really matters.

“We compare how we feel internally with how others present externally on social media. Meanwhile, they could be feeling like a pile of hot garbage and just presenting like they’re perfectly fine.”

If women value outward presentation over internal peace and satisfaction, they’ve handed their power to the measuring stick.

They’ve put themselves in a “position of constant wanting,” Ranger says. “Billion-dollar industries are basically carried on our backs because of this constant wanting. The way you combat that requires you to have a good relationship with yourself and most of us don’t.”

To get to know you, be open to something new. Demi was at a low point when she got the script for The Substance. It was bonkers and bold, she said, like nothing she had ever seen. She heard the universe telling her, “You’re not done.”

So, what is the universe telling you?

Jennifer Coffey just turned 50 and recently married the man of her dreams. She also leaped to leave her dream job as a QVC host after 13 years because she felt called to pursue her next dream. She opened The Phoenix Yoga Studio in Wayne, Pennsylvania, just west of Philadelphia, because she listened to her heart.

“I find that if an idea lands in my spirit and won’t let go, it must be there for a reason,” says Coffey, who’s also launching a podcast and writing a book to build on the sisterhood she found at QVC.

Move your thoughts from your looks to your legacy. It’s never too late, and it costs nothing, Coffey says.

“You can set your intentions to find out what you are meant to do or what you really want to do … it’s a mindset shift. The key is to find quiet and calm where you can just be for a few moments and ask, ‘What is it that I really want?’”

You may need to ask it 100 times. But the right answer is never “perky boobs.”

“That whole comparison thing means nothing and it’s worth nothing,” Coffey says.

Demi Moore would second that. As her daughter, Rumer Willis, posted on Instagram on Oscar night: “Your legacy isn’t just in the awards or accolades — it’s in the way you have redefined what’s possible, for yourself and for every woman who dares to dream.”

 Do you ever feel too old or too fat or too forgotten? What do you do about it? Let us know in the comments below.

Jan Tuckwood is an Ethel and also a Janice, which happened to be the 26th most popular name for girls when she was born in 1956. She is an award-winning journalist who was associate editor and revenue content director of The Palm Beach Post for 30 years. She’s also a former fashion editor of The Denver Post, and her work has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Glamour magazine, among other publications. She is the editor of five books, including the official history book of Palm Beach County, and she is the co-author of “Too Young to Be Old, ” the 2022 memoir of Diane Gilman, HSN’s “Jean Queen."