For a large part of my life, I didn’t think I was neglecting myself, I was busy.

And I was busy. There were children, work, a home, animals and all the things that come with having a full life. I am also an active and creative person. I like doing things, making things and starting things. There was always something that needed doing and, when there wasn’t, I would find something.

I smoked in those days, and smoking was my pause. I rolled myself a cigarette and sat down for a while between chores. It is funny that smoking was a reason to sit down, but wanting a rest wasn’t.

I also saved things for later. The good perfume, a dress, something I wanted to do. Later always felt like it was right around the corner, while today was full of things that needed doing.

I think many of us do this. We buy something beautiful and save it for a special occasion. Why? Isn’t an ordinary Tuesday a reason enough to use the good perfume?

I didn’t think about any of this at the time. I was living my life, and what needed doing came first. Personal pleasure could wait even though, in a way, a lot of the doing was pleasurable to me.

I grew up old school. Don’t be egoistic.

Paying attention to yourself was selfish. Anything with too much focus on the Self was considered self-indulgent. Being high maintenance was a joke and not something you wanted to be called.

For girls it was complicated. We loved clothes, make-up and hair. We experimented with how we looked and who we were. The girl who spent a lot of time beautifying herself could be envied and judged at the same time. Look good, but don’t be too interested in looking good.

Then we grow up and that wonderful experimenting with ourselves gets replaced by more serious things. We become wives, mothers, workers, carers, organisers and whatever else life demands of us. Be pleasant. Be accommodating. Don’t make too much fuss.

Do not rock the boat.

Women have depended on marriage, family, employers and social approval for security until recent history, and these patterns run deep. Fitting in mattered and belonging still matters. We adapt to the people and circumstances around us, and after a while adaptation becomes habit.

Somewhere along the way, we start looking at ourselves through other people’s eyes and this is why self-neglect can be so difficult to recognise. It doesn’t always look like neglect. We don’t walk around dirty and unkempt, having completely given up on ourselves. We can look good, have a lovely home, work, exercise, care for our families and be very capable women.

I was capable and amazing. But at the same time something was missing and it made me sad. I couldn’t describe it, how do you explain that something is missing when nothing is obviously wrong?

I had a beautiful life that I had chosen. So why wasn’t I happier?

There was shame as well. I felt I should be more grateful. I had so much, and still it wasn’t enough.

So I carried on…We are very good at carrying on.

Now I understand that in all my glorious busi-ness, I didn’t pay much attention to myself. There was always something to do and a big family to be there for.

Of course the people we love need us, but sometimes a request comes with a hook: If you don’t help me, what happens next is your fault. It creates resentment and I carried a lot of resentment. I had said yes too many times when I really wanted to say no, and somewhere inside I was waiting for someone to step us for me.

At what point does another person become more important than me, and why? Would that person do the same for me?

Somewhere along the way, putting ourselves second can become automatic.

I didn’t notice because I was busy and it took getting sick for me to stop.

Suddenly I had to focus on myself in a way I had never done before. My health, my emotions and the way I had lived became a puzzle I wanted to understand and I found that I had not been kind to myself.

That was hard to see.

I rested a lot. I read books. I did things because they were pleasurable and fun and joyeuse. For a long time I still had the urge to get up and do something useful but there wasn’t much to do, so I became calmer.

With more peace, space and fewer demands, I started looking at what I really wanted from life.

And I started to remember my dreams. I also found what I didn’t want but thought I wanted. Big surprise there. To my surprise it wasn’t easy. Sometimes it was just empty spaces waiting to be filled with something I could not put into words. Just a vague feeling.

You have to leave yourself behind to realise the true value of yourself.

For me it took a crisis. For someone else it may be menopause, divorce, children leaving home, retirement, grief, or one day we realise that the way we have been living doesn’t work for us anymore.

We need more.

This is where self-care becomes interesting to me. We talk a lot about self-care these days and much of it is about things we can do. Have a massage. Go to the gym. Eat well. Take a bath. Have a facial. Take some time for yourself.

I love all of those things. But we can have a massage on Wednesday and still cancel ourselves on Thursday. Self-care started when I decided to always check in with myself first.

Many of us grew up with some version of the idea that pleasure is self-indulgent. Something useful feels more important than something pleasurable.

So maybe we need to ask ourselves if this bring pleasure or joy.

I used to save the good perfume, the one that gave me pleasure every time I wore it. I still don’t know what I was saving it for.

Remember how we experimented as teenagers with clothes, hair, music and interests, finding out who we were and what we liked? There was excitement in discovering ourselves.

I think we need some of that again.

Wear the dress. Change your hair. Take dancing lessons. Read a book all afternoon. Try something you have wanted to try. Find out you hate it and never do it again. Find something else and love it.

Become the centre of your Universe again. It may take some getting used to.”

Always remember your dreams, use the good perfume and play the game of life.

Love, Anna

I recently sat down with a group of women who wanted to talk about post-menopause. These women are therapists, intelligent women who have spent years working with people and understanding human behaviour, so I thought they knew. They didn’t.

They knew about the physical part of menopause, of course. The hormones and everything that happens in the body. That part is important and we have to deal with it, especially when the physical symptoms are difficult, but the physical changes are only one part of what is happening. Much deeper and intenser is what we are changing into.

The women I sat with were in what I call the negative post-menopause, where much of the anger comes from the feeling that there is nothing now. They felt unbeautiful, unseen and unvalued, and that negative feeling space had made the physical experience so much worse. As one of them put it, “Not only are we ignored, but we feel like shit as well.”

This is where so much of the menopause conversation sits. The major talk is about the suffering and there is a growing amount of scare propaganda. Then there is another sphere where women talk about empowerment and all that, but I think most women are still stuck in the negative because nobody has told them what comes next. Nobody has told them what post-menopause actually means, these women certainly had never been told.

So I told these women about the Matriarch.

Women after menopause become leaders and teachers, the wise ones, and leadership in this sense has nothing to do with being the boss, that’s a patriarchal construct. Leadership is responsibility for the welfare of the tribe, and everybody is part of the tribe. The responsibility of the Matriarch is to lead the tribe towards prosperity and safety, where people are safe, everybody has access to clean food, education and healthcare, and the tribe works together towards that goal.

During our childbearing years our energy is focused on the intimate group, on babies, children, partners, family and the people immediately around us. We are available. Then that part ends. We can’t have babies anymore and that whole bit is shut down, but the creative energy that went into it doesn’t disappear. It is the same creative energy that rises after menopause, just focused differently and it is strong.

Our energy begins to move inwards, towards Self, and that opens up a leadership energy that focus on the tribe rather than the small intimate group. By this stage we have experience, knowledge and a deep understanding of what a tribe needs. This is nature, it is not a construct. The construct is the version of womanhood we have been taught to live inside.

During our childbearing, available years we become constructs of the society around us, and we have been living inside patriarchal society for thousands of years. We are taught what women should be, how women should behave, what we are responsible for and what everybody else is entitled to expect from us. Women are not taught to listen to themselves, on the contrary, and 3,000 years of force and programming have silenced that inner voice to barely a whisper.

We need to understand the depth of that history because it didn’t begin with women being expected to do too much housework. Women were absolutely dependent on men for their existence. Her body, her children, her future and her life belonged to somebody else. Women lived with the risk of being locked up, hurt, cast out or losing their children. They could be sterilised and institutionalised, sold into marriage, tortured and burnt. They had no right to ownership, money, land or the other things that create safety and independence.

The horror is unmistakable, and it sits in us.

Inherited trauma is laced with fear. Every woman carries a fear of men, not only is it an imprint, it is also taught to us from a very early age. It is instinctual, the deep knowledge that says be careful, don’t trust, don’t make him angry, know when to keep silent. Speaking up can be dangerous. Saying no can be dangerous. Fighting can be dangerous. For thousands of years women learned through very real consequences that their survival depended upon men and that belonging entirely to themselves did not exist. For thousands of years women were prey.

History doesn’t disappear because laws change and women have rights. We can see the imprint in women’s relationships with money and ownership, in speaking up, saying no and fighting for ourselves. Women have more money issues than men, and underneath that sits the deep trauma of not being allowed to own.

What is confusing in the healing journey is that the trauma isn’t personal, it’s generational, making it so much harder to access, understand and release. As a woman accesses the original memory of herself, deep issues can begin to resolve because the old trauma starts losing some of its power over her.

Because we carry so much more than trauma. We also carry the Matriarch, the original imprint, where women began their existence before patriarchy. That memory is still there. It is not gone, it is shut down and we need to find it again.

This is one of the reasons post-menopause is so powerful. All the chatter begins to go. We stop being available to everybody else’s demands as the reproductive part is finished and the physical area of ownership is finished. No more babies. Underneath the construct we begin hearing the deep instinctive knowledge again, and it tells us that we have deep meaning, that we are leaders and that we have a responsibility to lead our tribe towards prosperity and safety.

Look at nature and the way animal groups work, at the matriarchal systems and the role of the older females. Look at elephants and whales. In elephant herds the Matriarch is the most important individual of the group, carrying memories, knowledge and wisdom, while in several species of toothed whales females live for decades after they stop reproducing and older females play an important role in the survival and knowledge of the group.

Masculine and feminine have their places and both are necessary. Matriarchy doesn’t mean suppressing men. Patriarchy is a system, it is not men, and patriarchy is hurtful to everybody. It is based on violence, separation, strongest gets most and the right to use anything for gain.

Matriarchy strives for balance. Masculine energy is support, creating the stability that allows the feminine to be creative in safety.

This is what I explained to the women sitting with me, and they lit up.

The room was filled with warmth and light. There was laughter, deep conversation and much love, and the amount of gratitude they showed me was mind-blowing. They said nobody had ever told them any of this and, until that moment, I had not realised how little women know about the deeper meaning of post-menopause. These women are therapists. I thought they knew.

And when they heard it, they felt it inside. It was like turning on the light.

Something else happened that was beautiful: They found more understanding towards their husbands and wanted to find the balance instead of sitting in anger, realising that men are also victims of society.That matters because the Matriarch isn’t threatened by masculine energy. When a woman begins accessing the original memory of herself, the inherited trauma loses some of its power over her. She begins to belong to herself.

Perhaps the question we need to start asking ourselves is what this time of our lives actually means. It could be another thirty years, there must be more than learning to live with the changes, keeping ourselves healthy and finding ways to stay busy.

This is where we need to go deeper into ourselves, beyond the roles we have lived and the expectations we have carried, and begin finding our own structure and meaning. Somewhere underneath all of that is our deep instinctive role, and when we connect with it, there is no not understanding it. The deep instinctive takes over. It is the ultimate being and it makes the entire system vibrate.

How that expresses itself will be different for every woman. She may take care of children, she may be a writer or a painter, she may build houses. Leadership doesn’t have to look important from the outside. It comes from being who she truly is and bringing that into the tribe.

And to be honest, women have been useful all their lives. We know the downer of that. We know what it feels like when usefulness has become part of how we understand our value. This is something else. This comes from the deepest part of who we are.

I never feared menopause or what came after. To me it was a continuation of life, but there was a certain sense of relief, like I had come out from under a shadow. The shadow was the expectations of the world around me, the sense of failure because I lived my life so differently, and the judgements.

I had huge struggles with the physical bit, but I didn’t allow that to define me. I conquered it, because what are the options?

I grew. I stopped excusing myself and I allowed myself to be exactly who I am.

This is the Inner Queendom, the place where we belong to ourselves again, and from there comes the Matriarch.

If you are sitting in post-menopause feeling unbeautiful, unseen, unvalued and angry, wondering whether there is anything now, you have been given only part of the story. You have been told about what is ending, about the hormones, the symptoms, the ageing and the things you are supposed to have lost, while almost nobody has told you about what you are moving into.

There is a reason for this part of your life, and there is a reason for you.

The Matriarch is not gone. She has been shut down, and now it is time to find her again.

Hit reply and tell me your thoughts. Are you finding your inner Queendom?

People have started asking me if I am retired, even before they ask me what I do. My answer is usually, “What do you mean by retired?”

“You know, that you don’t have to work anymore.”

I have always known I would never retire. I understand retiring from a job. You have done it for long enough, you want to stop, so you retire. Fine. What I don’t understand is how retired became something we are because we reach a certain age.

The word itself means to withdraw. In old novels people retire to bed, retire to the drawing room or retire from a conversation. Very elegant. I rather like the idea of announcing after dinner that I shall retire to my room. You retire from something or to somewhere. You don’t retire from life.

Yet when I hear the word retired, the picture in my head is old, tired, done, obsolete. I know plenty of people are happily retired and having a wonderful time. It is the word, and what we have attached to it, that bothers me.

Apparently, at my age, retirement is expected. When I say I am not retired, people ask me why, and I tell them, “Because I love what I do.”

I work because I can’t not work. My work is part of who I am and it gives meaning to my life. I have a huge vision for what I want to accomplish, and the older I get, the more experience I have to do it. Why would I stop now?

I don’t have a pension plan, so there is a practical reality to all this as well. But if I suddenly had enough money tomorrow that I never needed to earn another euro, I still wouldn’t retire. I would step it up. Money would give me more possibilities to do what I want to do. Financial freedom would give me more freedom to work.

So when someone looks at me and assumes retired, I find it strange. Nobody assumed anything when I was forty. They asked what I did. Now my age seems to answer the question before I do.

And that got me thinking about what we actually call this time of life.

We have names for almost every stage. We are babies, toddlers, children, adolescents, young adults, adults, and eventually we reach midlife. But what comes after midlife?

Apparently nothing.

I am post-menopausal, but that describes something my body has been through, not who I am. I didn’t call myself pre-menopausal when I was thirty-five, so why would I identify myself as post-menopausal now? Then there is old, a perfectly good word that has become so negative that most of us don’t want it. Or we can call these the golden years, which sounds like something from a retirement brochure.

And this is where retired slips in. We don’t seem to have a good name for this stage of life, so we identify people by the fact that they have stopped working, whether they have or not.

I could therefore be described as a post-menopausal, old, retired woman. What an extraordinarily uninspiring description of a woman who may have another thirty years to live. That description feels like an insult.

This could be a third of our lives, and we don’t even have a proper name for it. Most of the words we do have tell us what has already happened or what we have left behind. Post-menopausal. Retired. Past middle age.

Perhaps this is why the word retired bothers me. Retirement is a perfectly good word when somebody has actually retired. Some people can’t wait to retire and thoroughly enjoy it. Good for them. But retired shouldn’t be a catch-all title for anybody over sixty. There should still be some curiosity about the individual.

Ask me what I do. Ask me what I am interested in, what I am planning, what I want to do next. You might discover that I am retired. You might discover something completely different.

Retire was once something you did. You retired from the table, from a conversation, from your occupation, or to bed at the end of the evening. Somewhere along the way, retired became something you are.

I would rather keep the verb.

And one day I may announce that I have finally retired. It will probably be to bed or my boudoir.

If you have a better name for that 3rd tridecade (last 30 years) of our lives, please hit reply and let me know. I need a word, a respectful word.

We all carry stories about who we are. Some of them have been with us for so long that they become explanations for what happens in our lives and the capabilities we might have - or not.

Usually they begin with what we are told: You are so and so, you always do this, you can’t do that… Sometimes they grow from experience, both good and bad, and the meaning we make from what happened. After enough repetition, we start living it, it becomes part of our identity.

One of mine was that I was strange.

Strange because I didn’t fit the norm which, in a way, was true. I have always chosen different and unexpected paths throughout my life, breaking societal norms, and there will always be people who think I am strange because of it. And that’s fine, the story itself wasn’t necessarily wrong. What trapped me was the constant negative repetition which over time was baked into my belief system, telling me that because of my strangeness, I didn’t belong. The worst part was that I loved my “strangeness” so it was very confusing.

When people didn’t take to me, I automatically thought it was because they found me strange, even when that might not have been true. Once I realised that, it still took time to change that conviction because the story had become part of how I saw myself in relation to other people.

This is why the stories we carry are so important to understand. They are more than thoughts.

Women in particular grow up with stories about being either not enough or too much. We are not smart enough, beautiful enough or good enough, while at the same time we can be too emotional, too demanding, too loud or too ambitious. We can never win. Women have lived with these expectations for centuries and there is a great deal of hurt and anger in that inheritance.

When anger has nowhere to go, it becomes internalised. Over the years I have seen it show itself physically and emotionally, through stress, depression, addictive behaviours and sometimes uncontrolled emotional overwhelm. Our emotional and physical systems are deeply connected. Then there is the story of the Good Girl; likeable, helpful, capable and dependable. It looks positive, which makes it harder to recognise as a story that can trap us.

Anything we put after the words “I am” deserves some attention because that has become an identity.

And this is where the brain becomes interesting.

Our basic set-up is biological, no matter how much we have evolved. One of the brain’s most important jobs is to keep us safe, and the amygdala is involved in looking for danger. That danger doesn’t have to be real. If the brain has learned to connect something with danger, the body can react as if it is.

So when a woman who has spent her life being useful starts taking time for herself, she may feel guilty or anxious. She knows she is doing nothing wrong, but the old story has been her normal for years. Knowing better or understanding the pattern isn’t always enough.

I get so frustrated with the “just do this” culture of personal development. We are far more complicated than that. Our brains carry thoughts, associations and programming that we’re barely conscious of. Our bodies are enormous interconnected systems, hormones influence us massively, emotions are experienced physically in the body and every single cell communicates with each other.

Changing a story therefore involves much more than deciding to think differently. Healing takes time.

The first thing to do is to start listening to yourself.

Pay attention to what you think and what you say, particularly the things you repeat. “I am...” “I always...” “I can’t...” “I should...” “People like me don’t...” Even statements such as “I have trauma,” “I have fear” or “I have insecurity” are worth hearing properly, because something can begin as an experience and eventually become how we define ourselves.

A story always comes from something real. Even imagination is real in the sense that we experience it as real. I don’t care where the story comes from, I care about what that story is doing to your life now and how it can be cleared.

One of the ways we can recognise a story that traps us is repetition. When a story is negative, painful or hopeless, it has nowhere to go and we keep telling ourselves the same thing over and over again. It becomes a loop, and the trick is to stop that loop. When I catch myself in a loop (and of course I have such negative stories and beliefs), I go for the complete opposite. It doesn’t matter if the opposite feels true or real at that moment. The point is to stop what has been going around in my head and think in a different way. Over time that different way becomes the new normal and I can change my life.

When you start doing this, you have to pay attention to yourself; What am I thinking? What am I saying? There is discipline involved because the old story has had years of practice and the new one is…new.

Journaling is very useful because it is a way of talking to yourself without the chatter of the brain. When I write, I can focus on what I am actually thinking and see the story with more clarity. I can see what words I use and from there I can stop the old story and start creating something new - using new words.

I call this rewriting the story. It doesn’t mean finding a positive affirmation and trying to convince yourself that it is true. Believing isn’t always the point; we believe all kinds of things that we know are not real or true. It’s about finding the story that fits with who you want to be now. You may not believe it completely in the beginning because you haven’t lived it yet. You grow into it by starting to live differently.

How do you know if the new story really belongs to you? For me, it is always about how it feels. When something comes from expectation, there is a negativity to it. I can feel it in my body and there is an underlying sadness or disappointment. When something feels right for me, my heart lightens and I feel excitement and happiness. There is almost a little high to it. We feel our emotions in the body, and I have learned to listen to that.

Then you have to start living the new story. You do things, learn things and create new habits that fit with who you want to be. You start doing things because you enjoy it and feel pleasure. This is part of the rewiring. You are doing something different and giving your brain and body a new experience, a new programming, a new story. With practice, what felt strange in the beginning becomes more natural and eventually it becomes your new normal.

Practice, practice, practice. Every day is a new day

The body has to be part of that process. I think of the body as our house, the place where we live our entire lives. Whatever happens to us will impact us there, and we need to keep that house in good repair. Proper nutrition, physical movement and relaxation is important. If anxiety is present, it needs to be dealt with. Breathing exercises can help break the cycle, movement works for many people, and once the physical intensity has settled enough, journaling can help focus the thoughts and turn them in another direction.

There is often grief involved.

There can be grief when we start seeing how much time and energy we have spent living by old stories and expectations, and I think some of the anger that comes up grows from that grief. We all deal with grief differently, but if you find yourself stuck in it, feeling like shit and nothing seems to change, ask for help.

Menopause changes us. There is a massive hormonal rearranging going on in our bodies that affects us physically and emotionally, changing our moods, energy, bodies and how we react to the world around us. At the same time, the years of societal demands are behind us, creating a freedom we didn’t have before.

We start paying more attention to ourselves, have less patience with rubbish and start questioning things we might have accepted for years. We come into this new space with a lifetime of experience. We recognise patterns because we have seen them before. There is knowledge here that only comes from living experience and now we have the opportunity to use it differently.

Becoming the Wise Elder.

She no longer needs to carry responsibility for other people’s wishes, whims and demands. Her experience can now serve through leadership. A wise elder guides. She recognises pitfalls, traps and patterns because she has seen them before, sometimes in her own life and sometimes in the lives around her. Guiding is different from telling another woman what to do. It is walking next to her through whatever may be happening and staying by her side while she finds her own way.

The Beauty of Transformation

Sometimes we can see our own stories and change them. Sometimes we are so deep and lost inside the story that we cannot see its edges anymore, and then we need the support and guidance of others to move out of it.

Changing our stories is work. There is no “just do this” answer because we are dealing with the whole woman, her thoughts, her emotions, her body, her experiences, her habits and the life she has built around who she believed herself to be.

When an old story limits us, we have the chance to create a story that fits who we are becoming, or what we always were, fulfilling our destiny. It is the sum of us: what we brought into this life, our experiences, our learning and everything we have gathered along the way. Much of that sits outside our conscious awareness until the pieces begin to fit together like a puzzle and we experience a sense of wholeness.

That moment when something inside us recognises: Aha, this is who I am.

If you recognise yourself in this and know there is an old story still running your life, this might be the time to look at it properly. Sometimes we can do this work ourselves and sometimes we need someone beside us who can see the patterns we cannot see ourselves. This is part of the work I do with women after menopause, helping you understand what is keeping you stuck and create a different way forward. If you feel ready to change your story, you can find out more about working with me below.

Work With Me

Here is one of my shared notes:

Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.

Go to Notes

How to join

Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Hera, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!

You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of Hera can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.

Why Substack Notes

Fellow writers and readers are spending time in Notes for a variety of reasons.

Ted Gioia sees Notes as a forum for dialogue.

The idea behind Notes is simple. Millions of people now participate in Substack as writers and readers—but much of this is built on long articles and essays. We now have a forum for dialoguing and sharing shorter posts.

Chris Ryan is drawn to Substack as an alternative for legacy social media.

One of my main reasons for joining Substack was to wean myself off exploitative social media platforms. I’m hoping this is going to help move us along on that journey!

Sherman Alexie wants to create a kind and creative new space in Notes.

I’m going to focus on being positive, with my own thoughts and photos and by linking to songs, stories, poems from around the web and from other Substacks.

If you encounter any issues, you can always refer to the Notes FAQ for assistance. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Go to Notes

For most of my life, being capable meant not needing help.

I loved the feeling of solving something difficult on my own, especially things that frightened me or that most people wouldn’t even attempt. There was enormous satisfaction in looking at a situation that seemed impossible and finding a way through it. I was Superwoman, entirely self-sufficient, able to deal with whatever life threw at me, and I was immensely proud of her.

There was also something underneath that pride that I understood much later: fear. Being capable made me feel safe. It made me feel that I had value, and the more difficult the challenge, the greater the proof. If I could handle it myself, nobody could touch me.

I learned that very young.

When I was around seven, my family moved from the country where I had been born to a country I had never been to before. In my birth country I had a nanny whom I trusted with my life. Then she was gone, and shortly after we arrived in this completely unfamiliar place, my parents travelled for two months and left us children with a young girl. I knew I was alone.

Somewhere in that experience I learned that I couldn’t assume somebody would stand up for me. I didn’t trust that other people would be there when I needed them, so I became the person I could depend upon. And I became very good at it.

I never asked for help or support. I took risks because there was a part of me that believed I could find a way through whatever happened. I wanted to feel proud of myself; I needed it. I wanted the evidence that I was capable and valuable, and that nobody could touch me.

It gave me freedom, and it gave me loneliness. I knew both from the beginning, and for a very long time the freedom was worth the price.

Years later I had a child on my own, and motherhood took my capability to another level. I went from capable to Superwoman galore. Nothing daunted me.

Eventually I met a man who loved us. I don’t think I ever completely learned to rely on him for myself, but I could rely on him with my child and, later, with our children. He was an amazing father. I think, in hindsight, that part of me chose him for my daughter. I wanted her to have something I had never had: someone she knew would always be there for her.

We built a life together in the forest with our children and animals. When my man developed a physical disability, I took on the physical work of running our small homestead while he worked and brought in the salary that allowed us to live. I gardened, cared for the animals, heated the house with wood and chopped that wood myself. I did repairs, renovations and whatever else needed doing, alongside my work with botanicals.

And I loved it.

This matters to me because it would be easy to look back and turn all that capability into a problem. It wasn’t. I was satisfied. I loved my life in the forest, surrounded by children, animals and plants. Being strong and capable allowed me to create and sustain a life that meant everything to me.

There were also moments when that capacity became almost extraordinary.

I remember one magnificent storm when the roof of the house collapsed. I was alone and had absolutely no idea what to do. It was an emergency in the truest sense; something had to happen now.

My nervous system has an interesting way of dealing with situations like that. Everything freezes and my mind becomes super sharp. I figured out what needed to be done and did it.

Afterwards, I felt grateful to myself.

Grateful that I had the capacity to deal with something so stressful and frightening without crashing. Experiences like that strengthened my trust in myself. Whatever happened, I knew there was a part of me that could step forward and deal with it.

For most of my life my body came along for the ride. I always had excellent health, and I asked an enormous amount of myself without really questioning whether there might eventually be a limit.

Then menopause arrived, followed by hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s, and for the first time my body could no longer keep up with the woman I had always been. I had spent a lifetime trusting my ability to push through, solve the problem and carry on. Suddenly, that certainty was gone.

Superwoman immediately went to work. I learned everything I could about what was happening to me and what I could do to help myself. That part of me was still there, researching, learning, looking for answers and refusing to give up. I was frightened and completely out of my depth, but I still had the one way of dealing with difficulty that had served me all my life: Superwoman.

But underneath her, I was stunned, scared, insecure and very lost.

For perhaps the first time, the woman who had built her identity around being able to deal with anything had to acknowledge that she was vulnerable.

This was when something began to change.

My children had always known Superwoman, and now, for the first time, I was honest with them about my weakness. I allowed them to see that I was frightened and struggling, and they were there for me. They supported me in many different ways and made it clear that they were ready to help whenever I needed them.

At my weakest, they told me I was their role model.

That affected me deeply and I began to understand strength differently. I had spent so much of my life believing that strength meant being able to stand alone. Yet here I was, allowing the people I loved to see my vulnerability, and somehow I did not become less in their eyes. My understanding of strength became more realistic and balanced.

Post-menopause has also changed the way I see my strength and what I want to use it for. For most of my life there was always something or someone that needed me; children, work, animals, a home, problems to solve and things that had to be done. I was very good at that life and much of it gave me enormous pleasure.

Now I have reached a stage where I don’t have to prove my value by constantly doing, fixing and coping. Post-menopause has stripped away my need to perform for the world around me and brought me back to myself. I decide what I want to do with all this capability, experience and strength.

Weakness is part of being human. At one time or another, every one of us will experience it. Accepting that has not diminished my strength. In some ways, my strength has become deeper and more stable because it is no longer built on fear.

I am still Superwoman. She is part of my identity and I have no desire to get rid of her. I love her. I love knowing that when something difficult happens, there is a woman inside me who can become super sharp, assess the situation and do what needs to be done. I love the freedom and possibilities my strength gives me.

The difference is that I allow myself the peace of not constantly using her.

I recognise the old Superwoman in many of the women I meet and work with. They are immensely capable. They have spent decades coping, solving, caring, organising, working and being the person everybody can rely upon. Often, underneath all that competence, I recognise the fear of vulnerability.

It may not even have a name. Mine didn’t.

What my own experience has taught me is that strength doesn’t diminish when we accept our vulnerability. It becomes something we can use rather than something we have to prove.

My strength today comes from self-knowledge and pleasure.

I feel pleasure when I experience my own strength because it gives me so many possibilities. It is beautiful and wild and strong, and sometimes it wants to curl up and rest. Both belong to me.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest changes that has come with this stage of my life. I no longer need my capability primarily to cope with whatever life throws at me, I can use it to build my life as I want it.

When I think about that seven-year-old girl who realised she was essentially on her own and began building Superwoman, I don’t want to tell her to stop. She created something extraordinary that served me for decades.

I would tell her:

You already have all you need. Focus on what you want and know that you can do anything you like.

How much of who you are is still tied to how much you can handle?

Work with me

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Post menopause is like a magical world hidden behind veils of misconception.I meet amazing women navigating this time of life with such panache. I also meet the women who suffer because of those veils of misconception.It is physical, emotional and the very depth of who you are - who you were always supposed to be.

Join me on this journey of discovery into the realm of post menopause magnificence!

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There is so much talk about menopause and what it does to our bodies. We know about hot flushes, sleepless nights, changing weight, brain fog, anxiety, aching joints and hormones that are all over the place, or not at all. But what happens afterwards, when the worst of the upheaval may have passed and we realise that we are entering uncharted territory.

We have changed.

For most of our adult lives, we have known who we are through the lives we have built. We have worked, raised families, created businesses and careers, cared for people, managed homes, relationships and responsibilities, and along the way we have become extraordinarily capable. There is pride in that capability, I know there is for me. Being able to cope, solve problems and get things done has always been an important part of who I am.

Then menopause comes along and many of the things that once defined us begin to feel different. The roles may still be there, the work may still matter and the people we love still need us, yet these things no longer seem to fit with who we are becoming.

I have spent more than thirty-five years working with women as an aromatherapist, teacher and guide, and I thought I understood women pretty well. Then I went through menopause myself.

Alongside the physical and emotional changes came unexpected questions and emotional upheavals. I began looking at my life differently; the identities I had built, the things I had believed about myself and the expectations I had carried. I started wondering which parts of my life still belonged to me, and what I wanted to take with me into the next part.

I just had one question:

And now what?

It is a question I think many of us reach after menopause. We might have another thirty or forty years ahead of us, maybe more, and suddenly the silence about those years is massive. Society doesn’t seem to care what happens once menopause is over. It is as if we drop off the face of the earth when we hit our 50s and 60s.

I believe that one of the great opportunities of post menopause is the space to see what we have accomplished over a lifetime. The space to take our health and wellbeing seriously, to understand what our changing bodies need and to care for ourselves. Space to reconsider work, relationships, creativity, sexuality, purpose and the way we want to spend our time. And there is space to hear ourselves more clearly.

This is where my idea of the Inner Queendom comes from.

The Inner Queendom is the place within us where our experience, self-knowledge and wisdom become authority. After decades of experience, we have accumulated knowledge, strength and an understanding of ourselves that can shape how we live, work, create, lead and contribute. What we do with that is ours to decide.

For me, life after menopause has become less about figuring out who I am and more about self-discovery.

This is what I explore here at HERA.

I write about health and wellbeing after menopause, aromatherapy and the practical support essential oils can offer us, as well as identity, purpose, ageing, women’s history, mythology, wisdom and the exciting experience of discovering who we are when old definitions fall away.

We have spent decades becoming experienced, capable women. We know and understand more. We have lived enough to recognise what matters to us and what doesn’t.

When a woman begins living from her own wisdom and authority, the effects extend beyond her own life.

Maybe the most interesting question about life after menopause is not about how we are going to get through it but what we are going to do now. We have experience, knowledge and wisdom that could only have been earned by living.

And now what?

If your own answer to “And now what?” isn't clear yet, this is exactly the kind of work I do privately with women after menopause.

Work with me

There is a great deal of talk about reinventing ourselves as we get older, especially after menopause. It’s interesting because women have never really been encouraged to reinvent themselves at this stage of life. If anything, we have been expected to fade silently into obscurity. The idea of reinvention has an appeal; the possibility of becoming what we believe we want to be. I have tried it myself.

Many years ago, I moved to another country where nobody really knew me. They didn’t know my history, my family, the things that had happened to me or the person I had been before I arrived. It was wonderful, I could be whoever I wanted to be, basically inventing myself. So that’s what I did. I would be cool and sophisticated, composed and together, the perfect image of the woman I wanted to be. She was a perfected version of myself.

What I didn’t understand was that this idealised version of myself was only a small part of who I am. To be her, I had to push down everything that didn’t fit the image: the wildness, the spontaneity, the loudness, the intensity, all the parts of me that had so often been rejected as too much. All the parts I had learned to control and contain to fit in.

And the thing is that I love those parts of myself. I am wild and spontaneous. I can be loud and I laugh a lot. I have a great deal of energy and enthusiasm, and I am, as I have been told more than once in my life, a lot. Yet when I can be all of that, I feel so free, happy and creative.

But I learned, from very early on, that this version of me wasn’t acceptable for the world around me. I was told to shush, calm down, behave, stop taking up so much space. There was always a sense that I needed to turn the volume down if I wanted to fit in and be accepted. So the parts of myself that made me feel most alive were also the parts I learned to diminish.

Like so many girls, I learned that there were certain expectations on how a girl should act and behave: don’t be too loud, don’t take up too much space, don’t be too much, calm down, behave yourself. We clearly understood that we had to adjust ourselves in order to be accepted.

I became good at reading the room, understanding what was expected of me and presenting the version of myself that seemed acceptable. I learned to notice what brought approval and what didn’t. After enough years, it becomes difficult to know where identity ends and adaptation begins.

Growing up, I was surrounded by mixed signals about who I was supposed, or expected, to be. The rules seemed to change depending on where I was and who I was with. There were double standards, contradictions and expectations I never quite understood. I spent so much time trying to work out how I was supposed to behave, what I was allowed to show and which parts of myself were acceptable that somewhere in all that confusion, I lost sight of myself and I started performing.

Playing a role for a while is possible, but living inside it is another matter. Life is not a theatre where we can stay on stage twenty-four hours a day, permanently prepared and performing the character we have chosen. Eventually, who we really are begins pushing its way through.

I also came to understand why those parts of me would sometimes come bursting out with such force. When something powerful has been suppressed for years, it will burst out when we finally give it room. I had to learn how to be at peace and balanced with my wild nature rather than clamping it down or allowing it to run away with me.

Years later, I moved countries again and found myself facing that same delicious possibility. Nobody here knows me. I can be whoever I want…

This time I wanted to be the maximum of myself.

That was the freedom I had been looking for all along. I had thought freedom meant having the opportunity to construct a new identity. What I wanted was to discover myself and have the freedom to be exactly who I am. Self-discovery is harder than reinvention. Because discovering ourselves means that we have to face everything we would rather leave undiscovered. The anger, shame, fear, grief and choices we pushed away because we could not deal with them at the time, and the experiences that shaped us, the ways we learned to protect ourselves, and the difficult work of understanding what belongs to us and what we took on along the way.

We cannot become fully ourselves while large parts of our lives stay hidden in the shadows. What we refuse to look at continues to influence our choices, our relationships and the way we see ourselves. The shadows keep us stuck in old patterns.

This is why I believe that there is an important difference between reinventing ourselves and discovering ourselves. Reinvention can become another performance. We decide who the new woman is, leaving the deeper aspects of ourselves behind. Self-discovery asks us to find out who we really are.

For women, I think this becomes especially important after menopause because so many of the structures that shaped our identity start falling apart. The roles we performed, the approval we sought, the responsibilities that were put on us, and the ways we learned to fit into the world no longer have the same hold over us. We have an opportunity to see who we are when we stop organising ourselves around who everyone else wants us to be.

Perhaps that is one of the great possibilities in this beautiful part of life. We finally have enough experience to recognise the roles we have been playing, enough wisdom to understand why we needed them, and time to find out who we are when we no longer have to fit ourselves into the tiny box we were given.

I am not interested in reinventing myself. I want to discover every aspect of who I am and what I came here to do. I want to live in my glorious wildness.

When You Know What Will Help, But You Cannot Make Yourself Do It

As I moved through menopause, my whole hormonal system seemed to be up in the air. There were the changes of menopause itself, then problems with my thyroid, and for a while it felt as though everything that had once kept me steady had been thrown out of order.

I had plenty of physical symptoms, but the hardest part for me was emotional.

There was depression and anxiety, but there was also something more difficult to describe, a constant sadness that wasn’t quite depression, accompanied by a sense of lack, loss, fear and loneliness. Sometimes those feelings would swamp me to the point where I could barely function. I felt stuck inside them, frozen, unable to find the movement required to get myself out.

One of the strange things about being in that state is that we may know perfectly well what would help us. We know we should go outside, move our bodies, eat something, call somebody, take a shower, do whatever it is that could help us feel better. Yet the emotional state we are trying to change can swallow us to the point where we become numb and almost paralysed, unable to act on what we know would help us.

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I was strong and fit through my fifties, hardly touched by menopause until sixty arrived and brought everything at once: the weight, the sleeplessness, the pain and the fog that stole my words.

I had never experienced anything like it. My body had always looked after me, so when it suddenly gave up, I made an appointment with my GP, convinced there had to be an explanation for what was happening. She ordered blood tests which showed hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s autoimmune disease. She started me on medication and referred me to an endocrinologist.

I took the medication faithfully and waited for my body to respond. Weeks turned into months and still I got worse. The weight climbed, sleep became elusive, my brain went AWOL and the exhaustion settled so deeply into my body that having energy again began to feel like a dream.

I waited impatiently for the appointment with the endocrinologist but it took eight months before I finally got to see him. When I finally walked into his office, I had been living with this for over a year and I was an absolute wreck. I was hopeful because I was finally going to get an explanation for what was happening inside my body and, more importantly, a plan that would help me get well again.

I explained what had been happening over the previous months, how the medication hadn’t helped and how I was continuing to get worse. He looked at me and said;

“Eat less and move more.”

I was so shocked that I couldn’t think clearly. I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there, numb. In that moment I saw myself staying in this horrible state with no hope of ever getting well again. It broke my heart and it felt like the rug was pulled out from under my feet. I was frightened.

I don’t remember the drive home, only that I was crying and feeling devastated.

I don’t think he meant to be unkind. I think he believed what he was telling me; that because I was an “older” woman, my state of health was to be expected. He made it sound so final, as if he had seen it over and over again; the deterioration of a woman once she passed the menopause threshold.

The next morning I woke up angry.

I was angry that I had waited more than a year for help only to be told that there was nothing to be done. Angry that I, who had been healthy, active and full of life, could be reduced to something so inconsequential and I made a decision:

If nobody else was going to work this out for me, I would.

I made myself a cup of coffee, sat down at my computer and typed two words into Google: hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s. Then I went down the first rabbit hole of many. I read research papers, medical journals and just about everything else I could find. I kept detailed records, tracked every blood test and approached my own health as methodically as I knew how. If I was going to understand, and heal, what was happening inside my body, I needed evidence, not guesswork.

I applied what I learned to myself and my life, and then something changed. I started sleeping. It sounds like such a small thing until you’ve spent months lying awake night after night, wondering whether you’re ever going to be okay again. That morning I knew that I was on the right track. Every improvement became another confirmation that I was moving in the right direction. I wasn’t guessing anymore. I was learning.

At my next appointment with my GP, I told her everything I had been doing. I explained how I was feeling, why I believed the medication wasn’t working as it should and why I wanted to try a different approach. I walked her through everything I had learned, the changes I had already made and the results I was beginning to see.

I told her I needed her support. There were blood tests I couldn’t order myself and medications I couldn’t access without a prescription. If I was going to continue, I needed the freedom to explore what was working while knowing I had a doctor beside me.

She listened as I showed her all my research and paperwork. After looking at it, she said, “You know more about this than I do. Tell me what you need, and I’ll support you.” I could have kissed her!

From that day on I had a partner in my healing.

Six months later I walked back into the endocrinologist’s office carrying a folder with my spreadsheets, every blood test I had taken, a dated record of the changes I had made and the results. My body was changing, my numbers were looking good and I was feeling so much better. Now he would sit up and pay attention. But nope. He looked through the spreadsheet, then searched my file for the notes from my first appointment. There weren’t any. Nothing from that first consultation had been recorded.

He turned back to my spreadsheet, shook his head and told me it was just a fluke. Nothing would change the fact that my thyroid would gradually stop functioning and eventually disappear. This was just how the disease progressed. I challenged him. I pointed to the numbers, explained the changes I had made and asked him how he could dismiss improvements that were right there in front of him. He brushed me off and I could see that he found me both silly and tiresome.

I walked out of his office knowing I was on the right track. My body was responding and my blood tests were improving. That was all the evidence I needed to continue. I decided to ask for a second opinion.

I walked out of his office knowing I was on the right track, and I asked for a second opinion.

Another eight months later I sat in front of a woman in her forties. I was sure that another specialist, and especially a woman, would see my progress. I showed her the folder. She dismissed it, and although my condition needed ongoing monitoring, she never booked a follow-up. What angered me most was the disrespect.

A few days later I logged into my online medical record. There were no notes. Again.

I was on my own.

Ain’t nobody gonna tell me that I can’t.

I knew that there was a way. I needed to heal, I wanted to heal and I was going to heal, even if I had to do it on my own. If that meant reading another hundred research papers and continuing to experiment until I found what worked, then that was exactly what I would do. I knew that I was moving in the right direction, and I trusted what I was seeing and feeling. I stopped looking for someone to tell me what was possible. I kept learning, testing, refining, and with every improvement I knew I was right.

It took me three years.

Three years of changing every aspect of my life and learning to listen to my body in a way I never had before. It cost me my savings, it cost me time and sometimes I wondered if I was going crazy.

It was a lonely road and there were days when the fear and anxiety threatened to overwhelm me. Was I ever going to get well? Sometimes I just didn’t know what to do next, but then I would look at myself in the mirror and know that giving up wasn’t an option. I hated feeling so unwell. I hated what was happening to my body, and I knew there was only one thing to do:

Get up, keep learning and keep going.

Whenever I felt like giving up, I thought back to how I had felt at my worst. I never wanted to be in that place again and that was the incentive that kept me moving forward. Every month my health improved a little more. My body was responding, my blood tests were changing and my confidence grew.

For most of my life I had taken my health for granted because it had always been there. My body carried me through every challenge I placed before it and I expected it to keep doing so without asking very much in return. Hashimoto changed that relationship forever. I learned to listen instead of override, to become curious instead of dismissive and I learned that my body wasn’t a machine but a lifelong companion that deserved my respect and care.

It also taught me something about women’s place in society. It showed me how vulnerable we are at this deeply important time of our lives, post menopause, how unprepared and dismissed. For generations we have been silenced and marginalised and along the way we stopped listening to the wisdom within us because we have been taught not to trust it.

Our inner wisdom is still there. Sometimes we just need to remember that it belongs to us.

Every woman deserves to be heard, seen and respected.

Has this happened to you?

It sounds strange to say because we have always existed, though we have often been almost invisible. Back in the day, if older women appeared in films or stories at all, they were usually cast in very limited roles: the grandmother, the old lady, the village witch, the difficult woman, the patient in the hospital. They were supporting characters, never the centre of the story. And very often they were portrayed in a negative light.

We were young, then mothers, and then we disappeared.

Already as a little girl I understood that beauty was a most important currency in a woman’s life. My mother cared deeply about beauty. She believed a woman should be naturally beautiful, slim and elegant, and she often spoke about the necessity of having the perfect figure. I grew up believing that my waist should measure no more than fifty-four centimetres - without a corset…

That idea stayed with me for years.

I was always small and I did get my waist to 54 cm, gaining the acceptance of my mother, but I still never felt beautiful enough. I loved the feeling of being empty and would often starve myself because it made me feel good. It never developed into a serious eating disorder because I did eat, apart from the bouts of starvation, but the belief underneath it never really disappeared.

No matter what I did, I felt that I fell short of the standard I believed I was supposed to reach and whenever beauty was admired, it never looked like me.

Many of us grew up absorbing the same messages. Sometimes our mothers passed them on because they had inherited them themselves, sometimes we learned them from magazines, films and advertising. We learned to shave, diet, apply makeup, dress correctly and continually improve ourselves. Beauty was presented as something we should pursue every day of our lives.

Behind the scenes, what we were taught about being a woman was ultimately geared towards attracting the male gaze.

We learned that being noticed by men was confirmation that we were attractive and therefore valuable. We were expected to feel flattered by attention that today would be recognised very differently. A man slapping a woman on the bottom was often dismissed as harmless fun or even taken as a compliment. Women were expected to smile, laugh it off and accept it as part of life. We were always measured by the attraction we held for men.

Today we have language for what many of us experienced without ever questioning it. We recognise that behaviour as sexual objectification and harassment. Looking back, it becomes clear how deeply our sense of worth had become intertwined with being desirable in the eyes of others. To the point where many of us accepted behaviour that was disrespectful because we believed it was normal.

And it didn’t stop there.

Everywhere we looked, we were being shown what the ideal woman was supposed to look like. Magazines, advertisements and television held up images that became the standard against which we measured ourselves. I was well into my forties before I realised that the women in fashion magazines had been heavily retouched. Until then I believed they genuinely looked like that, and I measured myself against an impossible standard that nobody could ever reach.

When you spend a lifetime trying to become a woman who never really existed, it changes how you see yourself.

By the time we arrive at menopause we have spent decades believing that youth and beauty are central to our worth as women; then, almost overnight, society changes the rules. The very culture that spent decades telling us to be beautiful suddenly behaves as though we no longer exist. We become invisible and less interesting as we no longer attract the male gaze.

Older women are often spoken about in dismissive or negative ways, as though our most meaningful years are already behind us. Menopause can feel as though you have been ripped apart and put together again in a way you no longer recognise. Everything you believed made you valuable is stripped away and that’s scary.

But now something is finally beginning to change.

For the first time, we are seeing films made by women, for women, starring women in their fifties, sixties and beyond. These women are detectives, adventurers, business owners, leaders, lovers and complicated human beings. They are interesting and vibrant. Yes, and beautiful!

These stories matter because we can recognise ourselves and we can recognise our innate beauty and capabilities. That sense of being at the beginning of something new and exciting.

Films aimed at much younger women can be entertaining, but they do not reflect the lives we are living now. Seeing women of our own generation on screen gives us something we have rarely had before: Visibility and recognition. It tells the world that life does not end after menopause.

For so long, the story of womanhood has followed the same predictable path. A woman grows up, becomes attractive, falls in love, has children, raises a family, and then menopause marks the end of the story. Everything beyond that has been treated as decline, as though there is nothing more to become… Even though we know that menopause is the beginning of the next chapter.

What’s fascinating is how completely this part of women’s lives has been erased. It has disappeared from literature, films, storytelling and culture. When older women do appear, they are often portrayed as people whose meaningful lives are already behind them, as though growth has stopped and there is no future beyond fertility.

That sends a fearful message to young girls and women. I myself was so afraid of growing old as a child. I saw the “old women” around me going invisible, I saw them becoming something that to me was scary. I saw an ending ahead of time.

That is changing, because today we are women in Midlife, not old, but in the middle of life. And that’s a glorious place to be!

When most of us reach menopause, we finally have the freedom to begin something entirely new. Children have grown up, careers are established. We understand ourselves better than we ever did when we were younger and we have more confidence, greater financial independence and way more experience than we had in our twenties or thirties.

We are fit, strong, knowledgeable and we have lived enough life to know what matters and what we want.

We are discovering what we are capable of and that is so exciting! It is an adventure.

This generation of women occupies positions of influence throughout society. We lead businesses, organisations, communities and families. We have wisdom, resilience and perspective that can shape the future in a positive way.

That is why we are the first generation of women to refuse accepting invisibility as we grow older. We are creating new stories, new role models and new possibilities for the women who come after us. And maybe for the first time in centuries, society is beginning to understand something women have always known: Life does not end after menopause. For many of us, it is where the most interesting chapter begins.

We are a generation to be reckoned with and there are a great many of us. Baby Boomers hello!

Reading and writing have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I learned to read very early, and from that moment books became my happy place. Language fascinated me, and writing became the place where I felt most at home. It was where I could think most clearly, express myself most honestly and make sense of the world around me. Journaling became the way I untangled my thoughts, understood my feelings and discovered what I actually thought about the world around me. Looking back, I realise that words were never simply something I used; they became part of who I was.

When I was ten years old, my mother sent me to a secretarial course to learn typing. This was long before computers and even before electric typewriters, so I learned on a manual machine, practising until I could type without looking at the keyboard. Eventually I no longer had to think about the mechanics of typing at all. The words travelled almost directly from my eyes and my mind to my hands, and that skill became an extraordinary gift because it allowed my thoughts to keep flowing without interruption.

Then came my first electric typewriter, and it felt revolutionary. Suddenly writing became easier, faster and more flexible, and I embraced every new possibility it offered. By then I was already teaching aromatherapy, so I wrote all of my course material on that machine, along with articles, research papers, essays and chapters for other people’s books. Writing was never a task to be completed. It was one of the great pleasures of my life.

When computers arrived, they opened an entirely new world. For the first time I could edit without starting over, move paragraphs, reshape ideas and refine my work until it said exactly what I wanted it to say. My writing expanded because the technology removed many of the practical limitations, allowing me to take on larger projects.

One of those projects was a book on perfumery. I wrote several chapters and eventually handed them to an editor, who came back with an enthusiastic response. The writing was strong, they said, beautifully done, and they encouraged me to continue because they wanted to see the finished manuscript.

But life took an unexpected direction…

Around the same time as I entered post menopause, with all what that entails, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s disease. Those conditions affected almost every aspect of my life, but the greatest shock was what happened to my mind. Until then I had never really understood what people meant when they spoke about brain fog. Suddenly I understood it all too well.

Words disappeared just as I reached for them; I couldn’t remember what I had done earlier that day, and names refused to appear. I remember one conversation when someone mentioned an actress. I could picture her face perfectly. I knew exactly who she was, yet I could not remember the name Julia Roberts. I spent three days trying to remember it. It circled around in my head because I am like a dog with a bone when I know I know something, and then, three days later, it suddenly appeared - in the middle of a sleepless night. That experience says more about the severity of my brain fog than almost anything else.

It was frightening because I believed there must be something seriously wrong with me. My doctor explained that this was part of living with thyroid disease and getting older, but knowing the reason did little to ease the grief. I felt as though I was losing an important part of myself, something that I always could rely on.

Over the years I worked hard to restore my health, and in many ways I succeeded. I feel stronger, healthier and more energetic than I once imagined possible, yet the brain fog has never disappeared completely. It is far better than it was, but I still lose words. My memory is less reliable than it once was, and although I have spoken four languages for much of my life, I no longer find it easy to follow the thread from one language to another until the right word appears. That effortless relationship with language has changed and my memory retention is diminished.

Not long ago I found the old perfumery manuscript again and began reading the chapters I had written all those years earlier. I found myself thinking, “This is so good. Did I really write this?” It flowed beautifully, it had depth and clarity, and I could hear my own voice in every sentence. I enjoyed meeting the younger version of myself through my own words, and only then did I realise how completely I had lost my gift of writing. The grief was profound.

The loss hit me with an intensity I had not expected because writing has always been woven into my identity. I have been reading and writing since I was five years old, and today I am sixty-five. That is sixty years of thinking through language, of finding joy in shaping ideas into words, and of trusting that whenever I needed them, those words would be there. Realising that illness had changed that felt like losing a part of myself.

Enter AI

At first I paid very little attention. Like everyone else, I heard people talking about artificial intelligence, but I wasn’t particularly interested. It sounded like another new technology that everyone was excited about. It wasn’t until I was attending a training course where AI became part of the conversation that curiosity finally persuaded me to explore it for myself.

It didn’t take long before I realised I had discovered something really useful.

If I had lost the use of my legs, I would never have hesitated to use a wheelchair. If I needed support to walk, I would gladly accept a crutch. In exactly the same way, AI became a support for my mind. I invested time teaching it how I think, how I write, the rhythm of my language, the subjects I care about and the voice that has been developing over a lifetime. Little by little I taught it how to support the places where my brain now struggles.

The greatest gift AI has given me is that I no longer have to struggle against my limitations in order to write. Speaking is easier for me than typing because my thoughts continue to flow naturally when I dictate. If I stop to write every sentence myself, I often lose the thread of what I was trying to say before I have reached the end of the paragraph. By speaking, I stay connected to my thinking, and AI helps me transform those spoken thoughts into written language.

I want to be completely transparent about how I use AI because it has become an important part of my writing process. AI does not think for me, develop my ideas or create my stories. Its role is to support the parts of writing that illness has made more difficult, allowing me to express what I already know, what I have already lived and what I genuinely believe. The wisdom comes from my own experience, the stories come from my own life, and the voice is mine. AI simply helps me bridge the gap between what is in my mind and what my brain is still able to remember long enough to place on the page.

Looking back, I realise that AI is simply the latest tool in a long line of tools that have helped me write. First there was touch typing, then the electric typewriter, then the computer, and now AI. None of those technologies created my ideas or gave me my voice. They each allowed me to communicate more freely than I could before, and each of them asked something of me in return. I had to learn how to use them before they became a natural extension of myself, and AI has been no different.

What I lost was never my imagination, my curiosity or the life I have lived. Those were always there. What illness stole was my ability to reach them as effortlessly as I once could, and AI has helped me find that path again.

I still have stories to tell. I still have experiences worth sharing. I still have things that matter deeply to me, and after believing for a long time that I had lost the ability to write them, I have found my way back.

That is why I use AI.

That said, I do use AI for images. I get what I want and I can be sure that I am not infringing on any copyright. And I don’t really care if they are blatantly AI - because they are…

Curiosity and creativity have shaped my life. There was always another idea to explore, another course to create, another direction to follow. Looking back now, my career seems wonderfully unpredictable. I have worked as a therapist, a teacher, an aromatherapist, developed fragrance systems for the automotive industry, formulated skincare, taught people about essential oils and, somewhere along the way, found myself guiding women through one of the biggest transitions of their lives. One thing led to another because I love learning and I love people.

Like many therapists, I found enormous fulfilment in helping others. There is something deeply meaningful about seeing another person leave your treatment room standing a little straighter than when they arrived. For more than three decades my hands became part of how I understood myself. Being a therapist was never simply my profession; it was woven into my identity.

Then life began asking something different of me.

The signs had been there for some time, but I ignored them. I felt flat, yet I knew how to keep going. I had clients booked, courses to teach and people depending on me. Carrying on had become second nature until one day my body refused. I was in the middle of a massage treatment when something inside me said, “Stop.”

It wasn’t a thought or a decision. It came from somewhere much deeper than my mind, and I had to listen. I finished the treatment, but I knew that a door had closed.

Looking back, I can see that my body had been trying to get my attention for a long time; through fatigue, resistance and a growing sense that something no longer felt right. I felt those signals and still I carried on because this was who I was. I was a therapist. I helped people. I couldn’t imagine my life without that role.

As I sat with all of this, another understanding emerged. My value had become inseparable from what I could do. I was useful. Reliable. Capable. I could solve problems, support people and keep going when life became difficult. Those qualities served me well and I am grateful for them because they shaped the woman I became. I was proud of what I had built, and rightly so. Most of us are. We take genuine satisfaction in being capable. We know how to organise, solve problems, care for people, build businesses, create homes, navigate crises and keep life moving forwards. There is dignity in that, and over the years those abilities become a source of confidence and purpose.

Performance becomes a way of life when our worth is tied to continually producing, achieving, helping and proving ourselves. Performance itself is not the trap. It has allowed many of us to build meaningful lives, contribute to our families and communities, and develop strengths we are rightly proud of. I have no desire to dismiss those years because they shaped the woman I am today.

The trap appears when performance becomes our identity. When we no longer know who we are without the role we perform, the work we do or the people who depend on us, our sense of self becomes fragile. As long as we can keep performing, we feel valuable. The moment life asks us to slow down, change direction or let go of a role we have carried for years, we assume something has gone wrong.

I have come to believe that nothing has gone wrong. Life is asking a different question: Who are you when there is nothing left to prove? It is an unsettling question because it asks us to look beyond everything we have built and discover the woman we have always been. She emerges as we loosen our grip on achievement, responsibility and expectation, allowing wisdom to take the lead.

That is one of the greatest invitations of post menopause.

For much of our lives we learn how to function in the world. We become skilled, responsible and dependable because those qualities are needed. We build careers, raise families, care for parents, support partners and become the women everyone can rely on. Over time those roles become so familiar that they begin to define us, and we rarely stop to ask who we are without them.

Then our bodies begin asking different questions. Circumstances change, children leave home, careers end and energy shifts. The ways we have always measured ourselves no longer fit and, because we have been taught to value performance above presence, we interpret that change as decline. We call it ageing, weakness or losing ourselves, when life may simply be asking us to loosen our grip on an identity that has completed its work.

Beyond that threshold is something I can only describe as our own inner genius. It is the place where wisdom begins leading instead of performance. It no longer seeks approval because it already knows its own value. It sees the bigger picture, trusts what it knows and contributes from experience rather than obligation. This is where our Inner Queendom begins to emerge; not as something we have to create, but as something that has been waiting for us all along.

We find ourselves standing between two identities. One was shaped by expectation, responsibility and the need to perform. The other has not yet found its voice. The space between them feels unfamiliar because we have never been taught how to value what cannot be measured.

Looking back, I no longer see that day beside the massage table as the day my career began to end. I see it as the day my body refused to let me continue living inside an identity that had fulfilled its purpose. It was the day I stepped into my Inner Queendom and the beginning of my next adventure.

For most of our lives we are rewarded for performance. We become the woman who copes, the woman who achieves, the woman who holds everything together, and because those roles serve us well we mistake them for who we are. Post menopause has a remarkable way of asking us to lay those identities down until we find ourselves standing in unfamiliar territory.

I believe post menopause creates space. Space to quiet the constant chatter about who we should be. Space to clear away the expectations, responsibilities and habits that no longer belong to this season of life. Space to honour the identities that have carried us this far and then let them go, creating room for something far more authentic to emerge. Space to expand.

Our Inner Queendom cannot emerge while our identity remains tied to performance. Wisdom needs room to breathe. It asks us to become still enough to hear our own voice again and courageous enough to trust what it has to say.

Looking back now, I am grateful my body said, “Stop.”

It was making space for the woman I was always meant to be.

There are people who choose a profession because they know exactly where they want to end up. They have a destination in mind, they work towards it with determination, and one day they arrive. Looking back over my own life, I realise I was never one of those people. I never chose aromatherapy because I wanted to become an aromatherapist. I chose it because I met an essential oil, and from that moment on I just couldn’t stop asking questions.

The only way I have ever been able to describe that first encounter is that it felt like coming home. It wasn’t excitement in the usual sense, it felt more like recognition, as though I had stumbled across something I already knew but had somehow forgotten. Even today, after thirty-five years, I don’t feel as though I have spent my life learning about essential oils. Much of the time it has felt as though I have been remembering them.

Perhaps that sounds romantic, but my response to that feeling was anything but romantic. It made me study, it pushed my hunger for knowledge.

As a child I had already been fascinated by plants. I remember trying to make a perfume from roses when I was only 9 years old. I was on the right track…how did I know?

Nature always felt alive, intelligent and generous, as if all the answers were hidden just under the surface. It is magical and fascinating. I always had an intuitive understanding of what a plant could do and I wanted to understand how plants could influence us in so many different ways. When I discovered essential oils in 1988, while pregnant with my second child, that curiosity suddenly found a direction.

Aromatherapy, at least as we know it today, barely existed in Sweden. There were very few people working professionally with essential oils. Finding genuinely pure oils was difficult, and most people regarded aromatherapy as little more than pleasant-smelling nonsense. In England pioneers such as Robert Tisserand and Shirley Price were establishing a professional foundation, while France had preserved the medical tradition of René-Maurice Gattefossé, but in Sweden there was very little to follow.

So I started where I always start; I went looking for information.

I bought books.

Robert Tisserand’s The Art of Aromatherapy became my companion because every reference led me somewhere else. Before long I was searching for the work of Gattefossé and Marguerite Maury, reading everything I could find about the plants from which the oils came, and spending more hours in libraries than I can remember. This was long before the internet put the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, so every piece of information felt like a small treasure waiting to be discovered.

When I wasn’t reading, I was experimenting.

I have always learned by doing. If I came across a new plant, I wanted to understand how it grew, how it could be extracted, what chemistry it contained, how it behaved in different concentrations, how it interacted with other oils and, perhaps most importantly, what happened when it met a human being. I filled notebooks with observations because I learned very early on that we don’t remember as much as we think. Experience becomes far more valuable when we take the time to document it.

That way of learning has never changed.

Even today, if someone handed me a plant I had never seen before, I know exactly what I would do. I would take it home, identify it, read everything I could find, examine how it could be extracted and then begin experimenting carefully, asking the same questions I have always asked. What does it do? How does it feel? What changes with dosage? Where are its strengths? Where are its limitations? Every answer would create more questions.

Somewhere along the way I realised that I wasn’t really studying aromatherapy, I was studying plants; and essential oils was a language they spoke.

After completing a professional training in Sweden based on the British model, where we studied anatomy, physiology, chemistry, massage and medicine alongside essential oils, I opened my first practice believing I had found my profession. Looking back now, I smile at that younger version of myself because I had no idea what was waiting. I thought I was opening the door to a treatment room when, in reality, I had stepped into a landscape so vast that I am still exploring it today.

The more I understood the oils, the less willing they seemed to stay inside the neat little box called aromatherapy.

One question about emotional wellbeing led naturally to chemistry. Chemistry led to medicinal applications and a much deeper respect for safety, dosage and the extraordinary complexity of these botanical extracts. That, in turn, led me into skincare because it felt so yummy to create. (I remember being fascinated by the pots and jars on my mother’s vanity.) And it is a great way to use essential oils. Skincare opened the door to formulation, formulation led me into perfumery, and back into chemistry. Before long I found myself walking through worlds that had seemed completely unrelated when I first uncapped that tiny bottle.

I have often been asked how I ended up working in hospitals, speaking at universities, collaborating with the automobile industry, developing skincare, teaching professional aromatherapy, chairing the Swedish Aromatherapy Association and working with colleagues across Europe on educational standards and labelling.

The honest answer is that I don’t know. I never set out to do any of those things. They just sort of happened. I simply kept following the plants.

For each question that arose, infinite possibilities opened. And for each knowledge I gathered, the amount of questions grew, constantly leading me forward - like Alice going down the rabbit hole.

When I became interested in medical aromatherapy, I wanted to understand the chemistry well enough that I could formulate with intention rather than hope. That curiosity eventually brought me into collaboration with doctors. One case in particular was so amazing that it has stayed with me all these years: a thirteen-year-old girl with an antibiotic-resistant infection in her cheek. Despite repeated surgery and high-dose antibiotics, the wound refused to heal and the expectation was that she would eventually require plastic surgery.

I truly believed that I could help her, I felt it in my bones. But I refused to become involved without the doctor’s knowledge because I knew that it could get me into some serious trouble. I always believed that aromatherapy should work together with mainstream medicine and when the doctor agreed to see me I was so excited! We sat down together, went through her medical records, discussed my proposed treatment and agreed to proceed. Using carefully constructed blends based on the chemistry of the oils rather than folklore or wishful thinking, I treated her over the following months. The wound healed completely, leaving only a small scar and no need for reconstructive surgery.

And that was it, nothing remarkable happened afterwards…

There were no newspaper headlines, no referrals from the hospital and no sudden acceptance of aromatherapy. In those days the profession was still regarded with considerable scepticism and, if anything, both the doctor and I had to tread carefully. I handed him my formulations and treatment notes, and life moved on.

What did happen was deeper; word spread and I was trusted.

People began arriving through recommendations, carrying stories from neighbours and friends who had experienced my work. Looking back, I realise my practice was never really built through marketing. It grew because people talked to one another.

As my world continued to expand, so did the opportunities.

I studied with people whose work I had admired for years, including Shirley Price, Dr. Daniel Pénoël and Jan Kusmirek among others. Not because I wanted another certificate to hang on the wall but because each of them saw essential oils through a different lens. Every teacher added another piece to the puzzle, and every time I returned home I experimented with what I had learned until it became my own understanding rather than someone else’s opinion.

Years later, quite unexpectedly, a conversation with an engineer at a party led to one of the most unusual chapters of my career. Aromatherapy had entered the public consciousness and people were beginning to appreciate that fragrance could influence attention, cognition and behaviour. Years earlier I had been contacted by the automotive industry, but nothing came of it. Now it was time to dust off that experience. Together, the engineer and I developed active fragrance systems for the automobile industry, work that remains protected by confidentiality agreements, but the experience reinforced something I had suspected for years.

Essential oils don’t care about the categories we place them in.

They are no more interested in being called medicine than they are skincare, perfumery or engineering. Those are human distinctions. The plants simply express their nature, and if we are willing to listen carefully enough they will continue teaching us in every environment we are prepared to explore.

People sometimes describe me as a pioneer, and perhaps that is true. I certainly helped put aromatherapy on the map in Sweden. I worked for many years as chairwoman of the Swedish Aromatherapy Association, helping establish professional standards, working alongside colleagues in other countries to discuss education, ethics and labelling, and contributing to the recognition of aromatherapy as a serious discipline rather than a passing curiosity.

But when I look back, those achievements feel less important than the thread that connects them; I was never chasing a title or trying to build an impressive career.

If anything, I probably made life unnecessarily difficult for myself because I have always been a student and a creator before I have been a businesswoman. Mine was a journey of passion and curiosity. During my work with the automobile industry, my business partner looked after everything I wasn’t naturally good at. He once said he wanted to leave me to my genius, I really loved having a manager…

And he understood something about me that I hadn’t fully recognised myself; I have always been happiest when I am learning, experimenting and creating.

Sometimes that meant walking into rooms where I wondered whether I knew enough. The doubt was certainly there, but my curiosity was always stronger. If I didn’t know something, I said so, then I went away and found the answer. I have never felt embarrassed by not knowing, I can always learn.

When people ask me what I do, I still find it difficult to answer because aromatherapy has never felt large enough to describe the landscape I have spent my life exploring.

The truth is that I followed the plants, and they took me further than I could ever have imagined.

I remember asking myself that question years ago, long before I had an answer. Why were intelligent, capable women arriving at this stage of life feeling frightened, confused and convinced that something had gone terribly wrong? After working with women for more than three decades, and after walking this path myself, I no longer believe that the shock comes from menopause. I think it comes from finally seeing the weight we have been carrying all our lives, the denial of our worth as women.

We spend our lives adapting.

As little girls we begin absorbing ideas about what it means to be a woman without ever realising that this is what we are doing. We learn by watching, by listening and by paying attention to what is rewarded and what is criticised. We notice which women are admired and which are dismissed, and before we are old enough to question any of it we have already started adjusting ourselves to fit into expectations that seem to change every time we think we have understood them.

Looking back, I don’t think most of us ever understood whether those expectations made sense. We simply assumed that if we were struggling, if we felt overwhelmed or if we could never quite become the woman we thought we were supposed to be, then the fault must lie with us.

That belief follows us into adulthood.

We become very good at carrying things. We carry children, relationships, ageing parents, work, households, responsibilities and other people’s emotions, and because women have always been remarkably capable we simply keep stretching to accommodate whatever life asks of us next. After a while we stop noticing how much we are carrying because it has become the way we live.

I know that feeling well. There were years when I thought coping simply meant becoming stronger, more organised and more resilient. I prided myself on my strength and resilience, pat on the back, never ask for help… It never occurred to me that there might be another question worth asking. What if I wasn’t failing? What if I was simply trying to live inside expectations that no human being could sustain forever?

The freedoms women fought for changed our lives beyond recognition, and I would never wish to diminish how important they were. We gained opportunities our grandmothers never had, yet we stepped into systems that had already been designed around male biology, male rhythms and male ways of working. Rather than asking how those systems might also serve women, we became experts at fitting ourselves into them.

At the same time we lost something important that women had relied upon for thousands of years.

Women once lived in communities where knowledge, childcare, work and emotional support were shared. There was always another pair of hands, another woman who understood, another generation close by. Today many of us are expected to perform the work of an entire village on our own, and when we find ourselves exhausted we often interpret that exhaustion as weakness instead of recognising that we have been trying to do the impossible.

The body, however, keeps its own account.

It remembers every year we placed ourselves at the bottom of the list because someone else needed us more. It remembers the stress we accepted as normal, the grief we postponed because life left no room for it and the dreams we promised ourselves we would return to one day.

Then menopause arrives.

For a long time I believed the emotional upheaval women described came from hormones alone. I don’t believe that anymore. Hormones certainly play their part, but they also seem to open doors that have been firmly closed for years. Behind those doors are questions we have been too busy to ask and feelings we have been too occupied to acknowledge.

This, I believe, is where the grief lives.

It is the grief of discovering how much of ourselves we have given away without even noticing. The grief of believing that being a good woman meant always adapting, always coping and always putting ourselves somewhere further down the list. The grief of looking back and realising how often we questioned ourselves instead of questioning the expectations we were trying so desperately to live up to. The grief of overriding ourselves and the lack of self-love that fostered.

Perhaps this is why menopause feels so much bigger than the list of symptoms we usually hear about. It asks us to reconsider the lives we have built and the stories we have believed about ourselves. It asks us whether the woman we became was truly our own creation or whether she was shaped, piece by piece, by expectations we never consciously chose.

At the same time we find ourselves living in a culture that still struggles to know what to do with older women. We have spent decades surrounded by images that celebrate youth while treating ageing as something to resist. By the time we reach menopause we have absorbed those messages so completely that many of us approach this stage of life with fear long before we understand what it actually holds.

What I see in post-menopausal women is not decline but possibility.

I see women who have accumulated wisdom that cannot be learned from books. I see women who understand people because they have lived. I see women who are beginning to recognise the difference between the life they have maintained and the life they genuinely want to live. I see women becoming less interested in approval and far more interested in truth. I see leaders.

That is why I no longer see menopause as the end of something.

I see it as the point where we stop asking who we are supposed to be and begin asking who we have been all along. It is not always an easy conversation because it asks us to grieve the years we spent believing there was something wrong with us, but it is an honest conversation, and I have found that honesty has a remarkable way of returning us to ourselves.

Perhaps that is the real gift hidden inside menopause. It gives us permission to stop adapting long enough to discover that the woman we have been searching for has been with us all along, waiting for us to come home.

FINDING OUR INNER QUEENDOM

At fifty I found myself standing on an archery field for the first time, surrounded by people who seemed impossibly young, athletic and confident, and although I was keenly aware that I was the oldest person there by a comfortable margin, what surprised me was not the awkwardness of being a beginner at an age when most people are expected to know exactly what they are doing, but the strange sense of excitement that accompanied it, as though some forgotten part of myself had quietly awakened and was curious to see where this unexpected path might lead.

I remember looking around that first training field and noticing that I was older than everyone else. There is a particular discomfort in becoming a beginner later in life, especially as a woman, because by then we have spent decades cultivating competence. We know how to navigate careers, relationships, households and responsibilities. We have become the reliable ones, the women who know how things are done, and there is a certain vulnerability in willingly placing oneself in a situation where one is clumsy, inexperienced and entirely unsure of what comes next.

Yet there was something about the bow that drew me in. It was not the target, nor was it any desire to compete. What captivated me was the quality of attention that archery demanded. The moment I raised the bow and drew the string, the endless background noise of life seemed to fall silent. Concerns that had occupied my mind only moments before dissolved into irrelevance, because the bow has very little interest in your stories, worries or plans. It asks only that you become fully present, and in a world where so much of our attention is scattered in a hundred different directions, that simple requirement felt almost revolutionary.

A year later I learned horseback archery, which still makes me smile when I think about it because there is something delightfully absurd about a woman in her early fifties deciding that what she really needs in her life is to learn how to shoot a bow from the back of a moving horse. Looking back, I suspect that absurdity was precisely the point. Somewhere along the way I had stopped asking whether something was age appropriate and had begun asking whether it made me feel alive, and those two questions rarely produce the same answer. My first go on a horse was basically start to end of the track without an arrow shot. I simply didn’t have time! Wearing my little white dress riding that big white horse, vaguely waving my bow around, I probably looked like a run-away fairy - albeit rather old.

As the years unfolded, competitions became part of my life, followed by demonstrations, performances and eventually a travelling show. There were seasons when I slept in my car more often than in my own bed and mornings when I woke beneath an open sky with horses grazing nearby and a full day of work already waiting. Life revolved around training, caring for ponies, setting up arenas, sewing costumes, loading equipment, driving trucks and performing, and although it was physically demanding in ways that many people would probably consider unsuitable for a woman of my age, I found myself growing stronger with every passing year.

What I remember most vividly from those years is not any particular title, competition or achievement, but the texture of the life itself. Especially the deep, honest and generous friendship of the sport; the smell of horses warming in the morning sun, coffee shared beside trailers before a competition began. Long journeys across Europe with bows, arrows, costumes and ponies packed into every available space. Even now, some of my happiest memories involve standing ankle-deep in mud wondering how exactly we were going to build an arena before the audience arrived, only to watch everything somehow come together through a mixture of determination, ingenuity and what can only be described as organised chaos.

The travelling shows developed their own rhythm. Days began early and ended late, and somewhere in between there were horses to care for, equipment to unload, costumes to repair, targets to prepare and performances to deliver. People saw the finished result; the horse galloping, the arrow flying, the illusion of effortless skill. They rarely saw the hours of preparation behind it, or the women driving trucks, hauling equipment and stitching costumes late into the evening before doing it all again the next day.

What struck me repeatedly during this period was the absence of women like myself. There were always men. Most were younger than me, and nobody seemed particularly surprised to find them pursuing difficult and adventurous things. Yet women of my age were conspicuously absent, as though somewhere along the line they had been quietly persuaded that exploration, mastery and physical challenge belonged to the first half of life rather than the second.

The irony, of course, is that the second half of life is precisely when many women are finally equipped for such adventures. We arrive carrying decades of experience, resilience and self-knowledge. We have survived enough failures to know that failure is rarely fatal. We have weathered enough storms to understand that discomfort is temporary. We have learned, often through necessity, how to adapt, persevere and begin again.

By the time I became the national archery coach for Luxembourg and later qualified as an international horseback archery judge, travelling to competitions throughout Europe and beyond, I had accumulated thousands of hours of experience that could never have been acquired from books. The knowledge lived in my body. It lived in the countless arrows shot, the horses ridden, the mistakes made and corrected, the competitions judged and the students coached.

Perhaps that is why I enjoy coaching women so much.

Most of the women who find their way to my arena today are over fifty, and although each arrives with her own story, there are certain patterns that appear often enough to be familiar. Many have spent years caring for others, managing responsibilities and carrying burdens that are largely invisible to the outside world. Some arrive exhausted. Some arrive with bodies that no longer seem to behave in quite the way they once did. Some arrive carrying the quiet disappointment of having placed their own desires at the very bottom of the list for so long that they have almost forgotten what they are.

They come to learn archery - they think…

What fascinates me is how often the real work begins long before an arrow reaches the target.

One of the first things beginners discover is that the bow has very little interest in force. A woman will stand determined to master the shot through sheer effort, recruiting every available muscle in the process, and the resulting arrow will often demonstrate quite clearly that determination and harmony are not necessarily the same thing. Years of competence, responsibility and perseverance have taught many of us how to push through obstacles, yet intuitive archery introduces an entirely different conversation, one that revolves around timing, awareness, breathing and trust in the body’s ability to organise itself when given the opportunity.

Over the years I have watched hundreds of women pass through this process, and there is a particular moment that never ceases to delight me. After a period of effort, concentration and occasional frustration, something shifts. The breathing settles. The shoulders soften. The movement becomes fluid rather than managed. The arrow leaves the bow with an ease that had seemed impossible only moments before, and my attention is on the woman standing beside me, because what appears on her face in that moment is something I have witnessed hundreds of times over the years and yet never tire of seeing; a fleeting mixture of surprise, relief and recognition, as though she has unexpectedly reconnected with a part of herself that had been waiting patiently beneath decades of responsibility, noise and habit, and has suddenly remembered something she knew all along but had somehow forgotten.

Those moments have taught me more about post-menopause than any book ever could.

The popular narrative surrounding this stage of life is so relentlessly focused on decline that it often overlooks the extraordinary opportunities hidden within it. What I have witnessed, both in myself and in the women I coach, is not a diminishing but a reorganisation. The body changes, certainly, and any woman who has travelled this road knows that. Yet alongside those changes comes an invitation to inhabit ourselves differently, to pay attention in ways we may never have done before, and to develop a relationship with our bodies that is based less on control and more on collaboration.

Intuitive archery seems uniquely suited to this stage of life because it cannot be bullied. The arrow flies well when body, breath and awareness are working together, and that quality of cooperation feels increasingly familiar to me the older I become. Somewhere between menopause, horses and bows, I gradually stopped trying to dominate life and became more interested in participating in it. The difference is subtle, yet profound.

Looking back now, I realise that I did not become an archer despite turning fifty. I became an archer because I turned fifty. The woman who arrived nervously at that first bootcamp could not possibly have imagined the roads that lay ahead of her, nor the horses, competitions, friendships, campfires, muddy fields, early mornings and extraordinary women she would meet along the way. She certainly could not have imagined that one day other women would stand in her arena and assume she had been doing this all her life.

The truth is far more interesting.

I became this woman after fifty.

And somewhere between the first arrow and the thousands that followed, I became her.

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The emotional fallout of the postmenopausal era is something we do not talk about nearly enough.

We expect the physical changes. We expect the hot flashes, the sleep disturbances, the shifts in energy and body composition. What catches many women by surprise is the emotional landscape that opens up once the intensity of midlife begins to settle.

As we move into the Post Menopause Era, something begins to shift. Time feels different; the pace of life changes and there is often more space than there has been for decades. With that space comes an increased awareness of ourselves and, for many women, an emotional landscape that can feel unfamiliar and surprisingly intense.

Feelings we pushed past for years begin to rise again. For a long time there was simply no room for them. Life was busy, people needed us, responsibilities filled our days and we kept moving forward, often without stopping long enough to understand what we were feeling or what those feelings were trying to tell us.

Now, experiences we thought were behind us begin to carry emotional weight again. Old griefs, disappointments, regrets and unanswered questions surface and ask for our attention. Emotions we assumed had been dealt with reveal themselves to be very much alive within us, quietly waiting beneath the surface of a life that demanded our focus elsewhere.

What makes this particularly confusing is that the emotional experience of post menopause rarely arrives in a way that makes sense.

For many women, this is where the real distress begins. It is one thing to revisit old emotions; it is another thing entirely to be overwhelmed by feelings that seem to come from nowhere and carry an intensity that is difficult to explain. There can be moments when a profound sense of longing washes over us and leaves us in tears, yet if someone were to ask what we are longing for, we would struggle to answer. We know something is shifting, something is calling us forward, yet we cannot clearly identify what it is. A tsunami of mixed emotions that shake our very foundation.

Alongside that longing often comes anxiety, fear and a sense of emotional instability that can feel deeply unsettling. Feelings rise and fall without warning, sometimes carrying us from hope to sadness, from gratitude to grief, within the space of a single afternoon. Many women find themselves wondering whether they are losing their emotional balance because the strategies that helped them navigate life in the past no longer seem to work. The question “Am I going crazy?” can surface more than once, simply because they have never experienced such a complex mixture of emotions moving through them all at the same time.

Part of the overwhelm comes from not knowing what to do with these feelings. We are used to solving problems, taking action and moving forward, yet emotions do not always respond to being managed. They ask to be felt, understood and integrated, and that can leave us feeling vulnerable, exhausted and out of control when we would much rather have solid ground beneath our feet. The result is often a confusing emotional landscape where nothing feels entirely wrong, yet nothing feels entirely settled either.

At the same time, we can feel deeply grateful for our lives while longing for something we cannot quite name. We can feel hopeful about the future and anxious about it in the same breath. We can experience happiness, sadness, excitement, loss and relief all within the same day and struggle to understand how all of those feelings can coexist.

Because there is so little conversation about this aspect of post menopause, many women begin questioning themselves. They wonder whether they are depressed, yet they can still experience joy. They wonder whether something is wrong, yet another part of them senses that they are moving through an important transition that reaches far beyond hormones.

The emotional terrain of post menopause is complex because it asks us to revisit ourselves. It invites us to look again at the experiences that shaped us, the losses we carried, the dreams we postponed, the roles we inhabited and the parts of ourselves that were set aside while life required our attention elsewhere.

This is the emotional confusion of post menopause. It is layered, messy, emotional and deeply personal, and it unfolds at a time when we expected life to become simpler.

Perhaps this season is inviting us into a deeper relationship with ourselves. Perhaps these emotions are not interruptions to be pushed away, but messengers carrying pieces of ourselves that are finally ready to be seen. When we stop fighting what we feel and begin listening to it instead, we may discover that beneath the confusion lies wisdom, clarity and a version of ourselves that has been waiting patiently to emerge.

And sometimes a good cry can help us get back on track…

In 1821, French physician Charles-Pierre-Louis de Gardanne coined the term menopause, and something that had belonged to women since the beginning of time was taken from us and placed into the hands of medicine. It had enormous consequences for women. A profound transition in a woman’s life, an initiation, threshold, doorway into her elder years, became defined as biological failure, deficiency and decline.

And with that change, seeping into the fabric of society, the post-menopausal woman herself was diminished. The place she had once occupied, with her experience, knowledge, authority and freedom from childbearing, disappeared beneath a medical story about what she had lost. Less fertile became less feminine, less desirable, less useful, less relevant. Medicine gave authority to a story that diminished women at precisely the age when their accumulated experience could have given them greater authority. We are still living with the consequences of that story today.

We are taught all about how to become women, but almost nothing about what happens after our fertile years end. Youth is celebrated, motherhood is sanctified and the post-menopausal woman is made increasingly invisible. We hear about ageing, decline and everything we are supposed to be losing, while the extraordinary changes taking place within us are barely acknowledged.

Yet so many of us experience something very different. We become more honest, more discerning and far less willing to accept what drains us. The need to please begins to lose its grip and the roles we have performed for decades start feeling uncomfortable. Something is changing in us, and we have almost no language for what that change might mean.

This is why I am so interested in the Goddess Hera.

I believe Hera was one of the oldest and most revered goddesses of ancient Greece. She was worshipped as a Queen in her own right, a powerful protector of women, marriage and lineage. And then look at what happened to her. The Queen became the jealous wife, raging while Zeus fucked his way through Greek mythology. Her power became anger, her authority became bitterness and eventually she was reduced to the archetype of the bitch.

I find that extraordinary because Hera’s story mirrors what happened to women. As patriarchal power grew, the stories told about powerful goddesses changed with it. Female authority became something threatening. The sovereign woman became difficult, the angry woman became irrational and the mature woman with power became dangerous.

We still live inside those stories today.

A woman who no longer organises her life around being chosen, needed or approved of becomes much harder to control, and that can make men uncomfortable. A woman who no longer needs male approval, who isn’t competing to be chosen and is becoming less willing to accommodate everyone around her, changes the balance of power.

During our reproductive years, so much of our energy is directed outwards. We nurture, adapt, smooth over conflict, maintain relationships, regulate the emotional atmosphere around us, stay desirable and carry an enormous amount of invisible labour. We learn this so early that most of us don’t even realise we are doing it. It becomes part of being a woman, a good woman, and we get very good at it.

Post-menopausal women talk about becoming clearer, fiercer and much less afraid of disappointing people. Things we have put up with for years suddenly become unbearable. We start saying no. We want more space. We become more protective of our time and energy and less willing to spend either on things that no longer matter to us. And with that can come an enormous grief, because we begin to see how much of ourselves we have given away over the years to keep the peace, maintain relationships and make everyone else comfortable.

Menopause changes our bodies, but it can also shake the foundations of who we thought we were. The good girl, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the woman who could always be relied upon; suddenly we may not want to be her anymore.

And this is why Hera’s anger is so telling.

We are taught to fear female anger, especially the anger of older women. An angry young woman might still be passionate or fiery, but an angry older woman is bitter, difficult, hormonal, a hag, a bitch. We have an entire vocabulary for putting her back in her place.

But when I look at Hera, I understand her anger. Of course she is fucking angry. Look at what happened to her. Look at what was taken from her. I see the anger that comes with betrayal and imbalance, but also the grief of being diminished, rewritten and made smaller than you are. And I think many women recognise something of themselves in that.

There is wisdom in anger. Sometimes anger is clarity. It is the moment when we finally see what we have accepted, what it has cost us and what we are no longer prepared to tolerate. And it helps us to move forward.

I think one of the realities of post-menopausal life is that women become “less manageable”. We stop apologising for needing space, become more selective about where our energy goes and increasingly unwilling to make ourselves smaller so other people can remain comfortable. We have spent decades learning how to accommodate, and suddenly we don’t want to anymore.

And that can be threatening. Our culture still expects a certain amount of compliance from women, even if we don’t like admitting it. So when an older woman stops complying, she is rarely celebrated for finally knowing her own mind. She becomes difficult. Selfish. Angry. A bitch.

Sounds a lot like Hera.

And yet, talk to women in their fifties, sixties and beyond and so many will tell you that despite all the challenges, they feel more like themselves than they ever have before. More real. There is a freedom in caring less about being approved of and more about whether your life actually feels like your own.

This is why Hera has become such an important symbol for me. She fights back. She gets angry. She says no. She refuses to disappear and she refuses to behave. I love that about her. She is strong, powerful, flawed and furious, and to me she is a beautiful symbol for the post-menopausal woman.

To a male-centric society she’s a bitch. To me, she’s a Queen.

And this is exactly why mature feminine power has been distorted in mythology and in our culture. Because a woman who truly belongs to herself changes the balance of everything around her. She knows what she knows. She decides where her energy goes and what she wants.

She cannot be used anymore.

And there are a lot of us. We are living longer than generations of women before us and may spend thirty, forty, even fifty years of our lives post-menopausal. Think about that. An entire lifetime after our reproductive years are over. Yet we are still being handed that same miserable old story about decline, as though the interesting part is behind us.

But I see something completely different: Women are building businesses at sixty, writing books at seventy, studying, travelling, falling in love, changing their minds, rediscovering their bodies, their voices and their desires. We have decades of experience behind us and the freedom to decide for ourselves what we want to do with it.

We are done being “Good Girls”.

This is what I call our Inner Queendom. We have lived, learned, fucked up, succeeded, failed, loved, lost and gathered a lifetime of experience. We know things now that we could not have known at thirty or forty, and I think it is time we trusted that.

We are tapping into a different kind of power, the power that comes from knowing who we are and belonging to ourselves.

And that is why I called this place HERA.

So tell me, where in your life are you still performing the version of you that keeps everyone else comfortable? Hit reply or drop it in the comments. I read every one.