Welcome to my Midlife series
What Messages Did We Receive About Midlife?
There is something I need to say plainly.
When I first heard the word “midlife” attached to me, I felt insulted. It was around the time I was working at the Mind, Body & Spirit Fayre. I was asked to help out on one of the stages — Midlife. I remember feeling slightly unready for the conversations. As I mentioned previously, I was still struggling to admit I was over 40. And now here I was being placed on a stage that represented something I had quietly resisted.
Because of past ideas about what getting older as a woman looked like, it wasn’t a stage I had been looking through. And that’s the thing about role models — there weren’t that many.
Not because I was in denial about my age. Not because I hadn’t already crossed forty and then fifty. But because of what that word carried. The imagery. The tone. The cultural undercurrent beneath it.
Midlife, as it had been presented to me growing up, was not expansive. It was not creative. It was not sovereign.
It was frumpy.
It was battleaxe.
It was bitter.
It was diminished.
And I did not recognise myself in that story.
If you grew up in the UK in the 70s and 80s, you will know what I mean. Our television screens were filled with caricatures of ageing women. Soap characters hardened by life, sharp-tongued, gossipy, emotionally stunted. Women who had endured and calcified. Women whose humour came at the expense of softness. Women whose sexuality was mocked. Women whose vitality was invisible.
There were few role models of midlife women who were expansive, creative, sensuous, evolving.
The message was subtle but clear:
Youth is interesting.
Midlife is decline.
Older women become background characters.
And those images sink in long before we consciously question them.
Media Archetypes of Ageing Women
When I look back at the cultural landscape of my youth — Manchester streets, terrace houses, working-class resilience — I see now how tightly age and identity were coded.
There were the “strong” women. But strength often meant endurance without joy. There were the “funny” women. But humour often came with bitterness. There were the “independent” women. But they were usually isolated or caricatured.
I internalised that.
Not consciously. Not in words.
But somewhere in my body I absorbed:
Don’t become that.
Don’t get old.
Don’t lose relevance.
So when I was asked to help on a midlife stage at the Mind, Body & Spirit festival in 2023, I felt that flicker of resistance. A subtle sting.
Why have you put me here?
It took me a moment to realise that the resistance wasn’t about age. It was about the narrative attached to it.
Because the women I was listening to that day were not battleaxes. They were not diminished. They were not invisible.
They were intelligent, articulate, reflective. They were doctors, authors, practitioners — women speaking about midlife not as collapse, but as recalibration.
And I realised something uncomfortable.
I had rejected midlife because I had inherited a distorted image of it.
Cultural Invisibility & The Western Beauty Contract
In Western culture especially, a woman’s perceived value has historically been tied to youth, fertility and beauty. When those begin to shift, something else is supposed to replace them — but culturally, we have not always been given a visible template for what that “something else” is.
So women either cling to youth or retreat quietly.
We are not taught to expand.
We are not shown the Sage.
We are not shown the integrated woman.
We are not shown the sensual intelligence of ageing.
Instead, we are given supermarket lighting that makes us wince, anti-ageing aisles that whisper correction, and subtle messaging that if we are no longer desirable in the conventional sense, we are less relevant.
It is no wonder so many women resist the word midlife.
Not because they are shallow.
But because they have absorbed the conditioning.
Class, Region & Identity
Growing up in Manchester, working-class but ambitious, I saw how women carried families, worked hard, managed homes, endured marriages, and rarely centred themselves.
Strength was survival.
Identity was role-based.
Rest was indulgence.
Midlife in that context was often about becoming invisible in a different way — children grown, marriages hardened, bodies tired.
So when I reached that phase and instead felt curiosity, widening freedom, creative stirrings — I did not have a cultural blueprint for it.
What I felt did not match what I had been shown.
That gap is important.
Because when lived reality does not match inherited narrative, we either shrink back into the narrative — or we question it.
Reclaiming Midlife as Expansion
The women I listened to on that stage were not in decline. They were in review.
They were asking:
What do I want now?
Who am I beyond role?
What do I no longer need to perform?
That is not crisis.
That is consciousness.
Midlife, I began to see, is not the caricature we were sold.
It is the moment when the inherited script starts to feel too tight.
It is when endurance becomes optional.
When self-awareness deepens.
When the nervous system demands honesty.
When invisibility is refused.
And perhaps that is why the word initially offended me.
Because I was still carrying someone else’s definition.
Now, I see it differently.
Midlife is not decline.
It is authorship.
And I am far more interested in writing it than resisting it.
So began my exploration of asking other women what it meant to them. Mostly it focused on the health issues it brought, the fact that we were mainly hidden, unable to mention “those things” at work, struggling to sleep at night or fit comfortably into the clothes we liked. But there were other stories too.
Some were reclaiming life. Bringing in their sassy, fun selves. Writing books. Letting other women like me know it could mean what we wanted it to mean.
And there began the unravelling of the old and outdated stereotype.
I started to notice women at the gym in their 60s. Some learning to DJ for the first time. Others setting off on their travels alone. Life started to uncover possibilities again. A sense of fun. Of expansion rather than retreat.
And I asked myself:
What do I want to try?
What do I want to reclaim?
What do I want to power up?
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