You can do one of two things. You can bury you head in the sand and believe what everyone tells you - that you will always be that young, that thin and that fabulous. Or you can use all the things you have - talent, contacts, knowledge - and do something different.

Deeley frames a stark choice between denial and agency. The “head in the sand” option represents passively accepting flattering cultural narratives—especially those tied to youth, thinness, and glamour—that can keep a person dependent on external validation. The alternative is pragmatic self-reinvention: leveraging one’s accumulated resources (“talent, contacts, knowledge”) to build a sustainable identity and career beyond appearance-based capital. The quote’s significance lies in its critique of entertainment-industry illusions and its encouragement to treat aging and change not as loss, but as a prompt to redirect skills and networks toward new forms of work and self-definition.