Hi there
I’m writing this on a train back from Chester where we’ve been running fascinating Queenager Divorce Circles/focus groups. It is always humbling and inspiring to spend time with the women in our community – huge thanks to super-Queenager Jane Gow and her team at Clear Cut Financial Planning (predominantly female Independent Financial Advisors, which is no mean feat as women make up only 16% of the industry). They hosted us beautifully at their lovely office.
We heard many tales of the midlife clusterf*** where divorce was just one of a tsunami of midlife blows, including redundancy, ill health, a dying parent, a child in trouble and an overwhelming sense, as one Queenager put it, “of feeling done, invisible, just not knowing if it was worth going on”.
Sitting with the women, hearing their stories, reinforced my belief that this supportive network we are co-creating with all of you at NOON has never been more needed or crucial. That the optimism and sense of possibility we offer really can be lifesaving.
It breaks my heart to see wonderful women ground down by circumstance, to witness all the gendered ageism that can leave us feeling beached and over when there really is so Much More to Come….
It was great to see many leave our groups with a renewed spring in their step, a sense of being seen and understood and aware that (as our research proves) often it is those who shed the most in midlife who go on to be the happiest. Hard to believe when we are down in the doldrums – but true nonetheless. The stripping down, the pruning, the clearing out really does create space for something amazing new to grow.
We just have to hold onto the hope, let go of what is no longer working for us – and trust there is something new being born.
Let’s embrace the spirit of autumn
If holding onto hope sounds hard at the moment, try going outside and walking in autumn beauty.
All around us the trees are turning gold, letting go of their leaves, fructifying and stripping themselves for winter. And in the dark and cold of those winter days, when everything seems dead, the reality is that under the earth, roots are slowly growing, seeds are germinating, the land is lying fallow and regenerating for a new period of regrowth next spring. And just like the plants, we Queenagers too can die away and spring back.
We are a generation blessed with a whole new period of active, productive life (life spans have doubled in the last 100 years). For many Queenagers, the midlife clusterf*** means a wholesale clear-out of what has come before: Partners gone, kids (if we’ve had them, 30% of Queenagers don’t), leaving home, careers spitting us out, parents dying, change on all fronts – not least needing to take more care of ourselves physically.
A clear out leaves room for something wonderful
But in the midst of all that clearing out, in the uncertainty of change and the fear, is also a kernel of excitement. The unknown can bring something wonderful our way. In that maelstrom of newness, there’s the possibility of not just renewal but enjoying our best chapter yet.
I see it in so many of you who have escaped unfulfilling relationships and found something more satisfying, or have transferred your gifts from one career to something new and purposeful and exciting.
‘Change is difficult’
I was talking in one of the groups about sitting on a mat in a Qi Gong class weeping and snuffling while the lady next to me said she was channelling rainbows between her hands. When the instructor stopped by my mat, I snottily explained, “I am in a period of transition.” The wise teacher smiled kindly and said simply: “Change is difficult.”
How powerful those words were.
He gave me permission to find it difficult to navigate the change in my life – and also to have some self-compassion. It was the beginning of my path to a new life, career and sense of self. It really is possible to build something better and new out of the rubble…
Midlife reinvention is everywhere
I’ve been struck by how these stories of midlife reinvention are bubbling up and resonating in the culture. Our Instagram post about Patricia Routledge had over 2 million views. The incredible new book All the Way to the River from Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert charts how she left her marriage, shacked up with her hairdresser who became terminally ill and relapsed into drug addiction.
Gilbert became a pin-up for reinvention when Julia Roberts played her in the movie, escaping her failed first marriage by scoffing pasta in Italy, learning to meditate in an Ashram in India and finally heading to Bali where she found new love with a handsome Brazilian (played in the movie by Xavier Bardem).
When I met Elizabeth Gilbert
I went to interview Gilbert at her house in the countryside about two and a half hours out of New York City, for the cover of the magazine I used to edit.
We walked through covered bridges and beside the river, she took me to the antiques warehouse she’d co-founded. She had a swanky Japanese loo which cleans your undercarriage with scary water jets. Her husband made us lunch – he looked nothing like Xavier Bardem but was instead small and round, twinkly and charming.
It was strange to be inhabiting a memoirist’s reality which bore little resemblance to the fictionalised or movie version. Gilbert was forthcoming and friendly…but I had a weird sense that her world was somehow insubstantial, not what she claimed. That I wasn’t being told the whole story….
It wasn’t long afterwards that she announced she was leaving the marriage for her best female friend, a hairdresser in New York. Her latest book chronicles the craziness of her subsequent midlife adventure, a wild co-dependent love affair which ended with her terminally ill lover began bingeing on cocaine and heroin in a dank New York apartment.
How Gilbert has amplified the Queenager message
Gilbert describes a day when it got so desperate she thought she might have to kill her lover…and how she came to her senses on a bench in Central Park, realised it was over and she had to leave. Gilbert once more had to reinvent – her signature perhaps.
She’s become a pin-up for new beginnings and for that very female sense of agency and what the next chapter might look like. Ironically, the book I went to interview her about was called The Signature of All Things and was about evolution in a Pacific island and a profoundly weird love affair.
Gilbert’s inspiration to Queenagers everywhere is that we do have the agency to grip our lives in our hands, bring in something new and become someone else. She told us that our lives can have multiple acts, many chapters and many chances to become something new.
It’s not a story that has been told to women very often.
We have time to change
We are a lucky generation because we have been gifted this extra time, where we can have another spin of the wheel. I wrote last week about the courage necessary to create change in our lives, how the heron can point the way to the stalwartness, determination, toughness that helps us do that.
I’m glad that other stories of midlife change – however messy and imperfect – are joining those we’ve been telling at NOON.
Our new project launching this coming week
Next week we’re launching a very special new project. It’s a roadmap about exactly HOW we go about telling a new story about ourselves. The project is all about rebranding and how we harness the story about what we have been and who we are – and that can propel us into our next chapter.
It can be tricky to weave together all that we’ve done and learnt into a story which drives what we can be next. I’ll be sharing this project – a new digital course which distils everything I know about storytelling, change and reinvention – to help midlife women move into their own wonderful next chapter. It’s been 9 months in the making and, honestly, debuting it to all of you feels a bit like giving birth!
Look out for more this week.
One last piece of advice: Jump around!
When you read this I’ll be jumping around to some of my favourite DJs at a festival with my family outside Winchester. It’s our collective farewell to summer, a chance to be together and let off steam (Arms in the air, like you just don’t care…lots of cheesy old ravers…we call them ‘Gravers’).
I’ll be getting very hot and sweaty and throwing lots of embarrassing shapes on the dance floor to tunes spun by my old fave Norman Jay and my new fave Jaguar Skills. Remember that the surest way to future happiness is to follow the wellsprings of your joy. So do something today that reliably makes you happy: A walk, crazy dancing to some of your own favourite tunes, baking, reading a good book, yoga, digging, swimming, a long bath…whatever floats your boat!
Remember you’re not done yet… and you deserve it. Say Yes to JOY!
Much love
Eleanor
P.S. My lovely editorial director Jennifer Howze and I just got approached by 4 lovely Queenagers on our train back to London: “Are you the Queenager lady?” they asked. They call themselves “The Culture Club” and they were en route to London for a jolly weekend, living their best lives. It’s so great that our Queenager movement is growing. Let’s keep spreading the word! We’re setting up a new NOON Circle in Chester, which will meet at Inglewood Manor, another in the Cotswolds and one in Colchester. Do email us hello@noon.org.uk if you’d like to know more about how to join one (or start one!).
