When I was young, everything took time. If you received a letter, you opened it and read it, probably more than once. You thought about what the person had written, what was happening in their life and what they might be going through. Then you thought about what you wanted to say in return, sat down with paper and pen and composed your answer. You read through it, folded the pages, put them in an envelope, found a stamp and went to the mailbox to post it. Then you waited.

Depending on where the person lived, it could take a week for your letter to arrive. They would open it, read it and go through the same process before writing back, so one exchange could easily take two weeks or more. This was completely normal. We expected communication to take time, and the time between sending something and receiving an answer was part of the process.

There was also something very physical about it. You held the paper someone else had held, saw their handwriting and perhaps recognised their mood from the way they had written. You chose your own paper, sat somewhere to write and physically carried your reply to the mailbox. Communication involved your hands, your body, a place and a series of actions, and between those actions there were periods when there was nothing more you could do. Once the letter had disappeared into the mailbox, it was gone. You carried on with your life until an answer arrived.

Photographs worked in much the same way. You took a photograph and had no idea whether it was good. You finished the film, took it somewhere to be developed and waited, sometimes for several days. Then you went back to collect that little envelope of photographs and sat down to look through them. Some were good, some were terrible, somebody had their eyes closed or half a head was missing, and that was what you had. The photograph itself had gone through a physical process, and seeing it for the first time was something you waited for.

So many ordinary things had time built into them. You had to go somewhere, find something, write something, post something or wait for something. If you wanted information, you looked it up in a book or went to a library. If you wanted to speak to someone, you called their house and hoped they were home. Long-distance telephone calls were expensive, so you didn’t make them all the time. Some families even had little codes where you rang three times, hung up and rang again to say you had arrived safely or that everything was fine. That was enough.

We wanted things to become easier and faster, of course, and now they are. I can take a photograph and see it the second I have taken it. I can send it across the world immediately. I can write an email to someone on another continent and have an answer within an hour. I can look up almost anything I want to know without leaving my chair, speak to my children wherever they happen to be and do in minutes things that once took hours, days or weeks.

What I find so strange is that all of this should have given us enormous amounts of extra time, yet we seem to have less of it. We talk constantly about being busy, running out of time, needing things faster and trying to fit more into every day. The tools that were supposed to save us time certainly made things faster, but instead of leaving the saved time empty, we filled it with more things.

I think something happened to the spaces as well. When I put a letter in the mailbox, there was nothing more I could do about it. When I left a film to be developed, I couldn’t check the photographs. If I called somebody and they weren’t home, I tried another day. There were periods when nothing could happen, and those periods created little pockets of silence in ordinary life.

There was also a privacy in those spaces that I don’t think we thought about at the time. If I left the house, nobody knew where I was unless they were there with me. I could go for a walk, sit in a café, visit someone, go shopping or spend an afternoon somewhere, and nobody could contact me. Nobody could see where I was, whether I had read their message or whether I had been online ten minutes ago. I was unavailable, and that was completely normal.

I find that sense of being unreachable particularly interesting now because today we almost have to defend it. Someone sends a message and, because it arrives immediately, there can be an expectation that we should answer immediately. If we don’t, the questions begin. Why haven’t you answered? Didn’t you see my message? Where have you been? Somehow another person’s ability to contact us has turned into an expectation that they should have access to our attention.

And this creates emotional stress around things that really don’t need to be emotional at all. Someone sends me a message while I am doing something else. I don’t answer. They may feel ignored, I may feel guilty, they may become irritated and I may start feeling that I should explain myself. Nothing has actually happened except that one person wanted another person’s attention at a particular moment and didn’t get it.

There is a big difference between someone saying, “I tried to reach you,” and “You didn’t answer me.” I remember a time when “I tried to reach you” was simply a statement of fact. You weren’t home, so I couldn’t reach you. Today, “You didn’t answer me” can carry an accusation, as though being contactable also means being available.

We now have Do Not Disturb on our phones, we turn off notifications, leave our phones in another room and sometimes announce that we are taking a digital break. We have created ways to protect ourselves from being constantly available because the natural boundaries that used to do that for us have disappeared. Even when I decide not to answer, the message may already have interrupted me. I have heard the ping, seen the name, read the words and thought about whether I should reply. A little piece of my attention has already gone somewhere else.

There is another part of this that I have been thinking about, and that is what happened to all those empty spaces themselves. There was a beauty in them. There was time to think, to contemplate something you had read or heard, to daydream, look out of the window or sit somewhere without doing anything in particular. There were times during the day when nothing was coming at you and nothing was expected from you. You could be alone with your own thoughts, and there was peace in that.

Today even our free time can feel busy. We may have finished work, we may be sitting at home or waiting somewhere with nothing we actually have to do, yet there is still a sense of being available. The outside world is always within reach, and perhaps more importantly, we are always within its reach. There is very little sense of being completely off unless we deliberately create it.

I think we have also absorbed the speed of the technology into ourselves. Because something can happen now, we begin to feel that it should happen now. We answer the message now, check the email now, look something up now, order the thing now. There may be absolutely no reason why any of it needs to happen immediately, yet waiting has somehow become uncomfortable. We have become used to things happening at such speed that taking our time can almost feel as though we are falling behind.

Today even taking time out can create its own kind of stress because somewhere in the back of our minds there is the possibility that something is happening while we are away. When I was young, that idea didn’t really exist. If I went out for the afternoon, nobody knew where I was or what I was doing unless they happened to be with me. I wasn’t considered unavailable because the expectation of being available wasn’t there in the first place. I could spend hours entirely inside my own life, with no connection to anybody outside the people and the place I was actually with. There was an extraordinary freedom and peace in that, although I don’t think we recognised it at the time because it was completely normal.

I have started noticing how much my own relationship with empty time has changed. I have always been very comfortable inside my own head and can spend hours there without needing anything to entertain me. Yet now, when I am sitting in a waiting room, waiting for someone or find myself with one of those little empty pockets of time, I often reach for my phone.

That actually shocks me, because somewhere along the way I have developed the habit of filling time that I would once have left empty. I know what used to happen in those moments. My mind wandered. I watched people. I stared out of the window. An idea might appear because there was enough empty space for it to appear. Now I can fill that same space instantly, scroll through things I don’t particularly care about and suddenly twenty minutes have disappeared.

I can see that the more space I give my phone, the less space I give that world inside my own head. That worries me more than the amount of time I spend on the phone. I wonder what happens when we fill every empty moment before our minds have the chance to go anywhere on their own. What happens to contemplation, imagination and the ability to stay with an idea long enough to discover what we actually think about it?

I sometimes notice something similar when I am around younger people. They have grown up in a world where images are constantly supplied to them and almost anything they want to see can appear on a screen within seconds. I grew up creating much more of that imagery in my own head through reading, listening, imagining and daydreaming. I don’t know what the long-term difference will be, and I don’t want to make sweeping statements about a generation that has grown up in a completely different world from mine, but I do wonder what happens to imagination when the mind has fewer reasons to create its own pictures.

Perhaps this is one of the things we overlook when we talk about technology and time. We count the minutes it saves us, but we don’t count what used to happen inside those minutes. We waited, stared into space, wandered around, thought about things and sometimes had absolutely nothing to do. Somewhere inside all that apparent nothing, our minds were processing our lives, imagining, remembering, noticing and making connections.

There is a kind of rest in that too. Real free time, where nobody can reach you and nothing is demanding a response, feels very different from an evening on the sofa with a phone beside you and the whole world available through a screen. You may technically be doing nothing, but part of your attention is still on call.

This is where I think the speed of modern life becomes stressful in a way that is difficult to see. We have removed so many of the natural pauses that used to be built into ordinary life, and then we fill the remaining ones ourselves. We don’t even need another person to interrupt us anymore. We can interrupt ourselves.

I love what technology has made possible. I use it every day and there are many parts of my life and work that are easier because of it. I have no desire to return to a world where every letter takes a week and I have to wait three days to find out whether my photograph has somebody’s head in it. I think it is worth recognising what came with all that speed.

Time to contemplate has value. Being unreachable has value. Boredom has value. Sitting somewhere with absolutely nothing happening has value. Our minds need somewhere to go when nothing else is filling them for us.

Perhaps all the time we have saved hasn’t disappeared at all. We have become very good at filling it, and so has everybody else.

And just because something can happen now doesn’t mean it has to.

So tell me, where have your empty spaces gone, and how does that feel? Hit reply or drop it in the comments. I read every one.

Anna

P.S. On Wednesday 4 November at 18:00 CET I’m holding a free live workshop, A Perfume for What Comes Next. One hour with three oils, paper and a pen, and nothing coming at you. If you’re a subscriber, your Zoom link is in yesterday’s email. If you know a woman who needs that hour, forward this to her. She can save her free seat here:

https://claude.ai/artifact/Yaw8RtDeHEEi7mDcdxndWE

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After menopause I had just one question: And now what?

I started wondering which parts of my life still belonged to me, and what I wanted to take with me into the next part.

A woman once said to me: “Anna, you are never afraid and everything is always okay for you. Everything is so easy for you.” And I realised that people had believed this about me for a very, very long time. And I allowed them to. It was such a relief to let that go and be able to say: no, I’m also afraid. I’m also insecure. I also don’t know what is the next step, but I don’t let it stop me.

What I knew really belonged to me was my knowledge and my essential oils. So that is what I bring to you, in a free live workshop.

A Perfume for What Comes Next

Orange, geranium and ylang-ylang for the life after menopause

Wednesday 4 November, 18:00 CET

(17:00 UK, 12:00 New York, 09:00 California), live on Zoom

We work with three oils and a pen. Orange to look back, geranium to sort, ylang-ylang to choose. At the end, the three oils become one Active Fragrance: a personalised fragrance to balance you.

New here? Subscribe to Hera for free and your Zoom link arrives straight away by email.

What to bring

A fresh orange

Paper and a pen

Orange, geranium and ylang-ylang essential oils, if you have them. If you don’t, the orange peel is enough to start with.

Do you know a woman who is asking “and now what?” Forward this email to her. She can save her free seat here:

https://claude.ai/artifact/Yaw8RtDeHEEi7mDcdxndWE

So tell me, will I see you on 4 November? Hit reply or drop it in the comments. I read every one.

Anna

P.S. The replay and the Active Fragrance guide, with the three oils, dosages and the formula, are in Anna’s Atelier, the paid part of Hera. It’s €9 a month or €90 a year, and it’s where we work with this time of life through body, mind, emotions and scent. If you’re not ready, come to the live hour for free. You are welcome either way.

The first 25 women who join the Atelier for the year get a 30-minute session with me.

Subscribe now

“I’m an old bitch.”

That was the closest I could come. After all my looking for a word to describe myself, that’s where I ended up, and to be honest I was so angry by then that it felt about right.

It started very personal. How do I describe myself? With my age? Who am I now? I’m not retired. I don’t feel old. I’m not a senior. I’m a woman, and none of the words that exist for a woman at this time of life fit me. None of them.

Then I started writing essays and speaking to other women, writing for other women, and the problem got bigger. I need a word every day, in my writing and when I speak, and I still couldn’t find one. Every word I tried came with something negative attached. So I did shout-outs. I asked women what they would call this time of their lives. Nobody had a word. And I think, to be honest, nobody had ever thought about it. The women who were really retired called themselves retired. Others said old, or golden age, or one of the other names society has made up for us.

Look at the word old. Adult covers our twenties to our fifties, and that is already a lot of life. Old today covers fifty to a hundred. Think about that. Fifty years of a woman’s life, and one word for all of it, and the word is negative. We are so much more in this time of our lives than old, or golden age, or whatever else they call it.

So I started thinking, what are we really? I didn’t like any of the words, and I couldn’t wait for somebody to create a new one to fit us. I needed one now.

It came to me when I was out walking. I was going over it again, running through all of them. Senior, no. Senior and junior are words for men. Old, no. Retired, no. Golden age, no. And then elder. And I saw a picture. The elder I have always carried in my mind is a fully grown woman, and she looked like a Matriarch to me.

Then I realised that elder is a word about generations. Your elders are the generation before you, whatever age you are. When we were children we were told to listen to our elders, and there was respect in that. In a tribe or a community the elders are respected. They have knowledge and they lead. It is a word with honour in it, and it already exists. I don’t have to wait for anyone. So I chose it. All the other words are pathetic attempts to call us something.

To society I’m an old bitch. To me, I’m an Elder.

And so are you. You are an Elder. You have lived your years and the word belongs to you. You also have an Inner Queendom, the place where you belong to yourself again. The Matriarch is something else. That picture I saw on my walk, the elder who looked like a Matriarch, is a woman who has taken one more step. Nothing about that step is automatic. It is a choice, and it is yours to make, when and if it feels right for you. A Matriarch is a leader.

So tell me, what do you call yourself at this time of your life? Hit reply or drop it in the comments. I read every one.

Anna

P.S. If this spoke to you, come closer. Anna’s Atelier is the paid part of Hera, €9 a month or €90 a year. It’s where we work with this time of life through body, mind, emotions and scent, and where I ask every woman the same question: what can I do for you? If you’re not ready, read along for free and my essays will come straight to your inbox. You are welcome either way.

The first 25 women who join the Atelier for the year get a 30-minute session with me.

After one year of training five days a week, lifting heavy, with every gram of food weighed and measured, I did a body scan. It told me I had gained one kilo of muscle. Brilliant. And one kilo of pure fat. How the fuck is that even possible? If anybody had told me that story, I would have looked at her and said, sorry, you’re doing something wrong. You’re eating more than you think. And there I was, the one doing everything right, with a kilo of fat to prove it.

Let me go back. I have always been slim and fit. I could eat massive amounts of food and nothing happened. Even menopause, with all its drama, left my body alone. I stopped bleeding, I had hot flashes, and that was it.

Ten years later the thyroid came for me. Hypothyroid and Hashimoto’s autoimmune disease. The first thing I noticed was that I couldn’t sleep. I have always slept like a log, and suddenly I was lying awake night after night. And I was gaining weight. I didn’t recognise my own body and I couldn’t figure out what was happening. So I went to the doctor, and he told me what every woman has heard a thousand times. Eat less, move more.

So I did. I did what we do, I buckled down. I went through my nutrition, healed my leaky gut, and worked hard on bringing my health back. I watched my autoimmune counts go down, which was a huge win. On paper I was doing really well, and the weight kept piling on. I spent months raw vegan, then added foods back in one at a time. Nothing. Everywhere I looked it was calories in, calories out, and I was doing the maths and it didn’t add up. So I joined the gym. I got programmes, I tracked my food, I trained five days a week. A bit of cardio and a lot of lifting, and I lift heavy. I’m strong. I did everything by the book, and a year later the scan told me what it told me.

I hated how I looked and I hated how I felt. None of my clothes fitted, and I felt like a stranger in my own body. I looked six months pregnant. I’m 65. I wasn’t. Being big while doing my utmost to be healthy made me feel like shit.

So I went looking online. Every weight loss place had a questionnaire, and I answered them all. None of them asked about hormones. None of them asked about my thyroid, which I now know is a huge thing when it comes to weight. Then I found one place that talked about metabolism, the first place to do so, and I thought, yes, that’s my problem. I signed up, I got a coach, she gave me all my menus and I followed them to a T. I measured, I weighed, and even though I don’t enjoy cooking and food must be easy for me, I spent hours in the kitchen to follow the menus. I exercised. After three months I was 1 kg down, and then I was stuck. Nothing moved.

So I complained. I was assigned a new coach, and he was amazing. He was on it straight away. Thyroid, he said, is a whole different beast. Calories in and out don’t matter, exercise doesn’t matter, nothing will really fix this until your medication is balanced. He gave me training programmes and simplified menus, bless him. The training was easy. Resting was the hard part. Four days a week of training, no more.

Between training sets, two minutes rest instead of my 30 to 60 seconds. I don’t rest. I have never been the resting type. When I train, I train five, six days a week and I go hard and heavy. I remember standing there thinking, fuck me, I’m going to sit here for two whole minutes and wait to move again.

But I did what he told me, and I started losing weight. Only a little. My body started changing, it got stronger and it looked better.

Every week I checked in with him, and he asked me things nobody else had asked. What are you going through in your life right now? Emotionally? Practically? He took all of it into account, and one day he said it to me straight. You’re overloaded all the time, and you’ve been overloaded for the past 30 years. Back off. Take rest. Be kinder to yourself. Thirty years! Think about that. Thirty years of being the one who handles everything, and when my body broke down, my answer was to handle it harder. Train more, eat perfectly, weigh the food, push through.

My body had had enough.

He kept talking about inflammation, and it took me forever to understand him. I kept saying, I don’t have an inflammation, I’m perfectly healthy apart from the thyroid. Then it clicked. Inflammation is basically a state of stress in the body, with cortisol and all the other hormones coming along for the ride. And the food was a huge stress too. “Did I eat enough protein? Oh my God, I ate a cake.”

Along the way I got my medication sorted, the T3 and T4 balanced. And then came the moment that showed me what he meant. I was tired, so I took a week off. No training. I went for walks every day and I studied. And I lost a kilo. In one week. Boom, it just disappeared. After years of fighting for every gram, a week of walking and sitting with my books did what a year of heavy lifting couldn’t.

I think this goes beyond the thyroid. When hormones go haywire, and they do in menopause and in thyroid problems in very similar ways, I believe the body goes into this state of stress, and eating less and moving more only adds to it. Nobody I went to talked about this, until one coach asked about my life.

Now I train four days a week. Some mornings I wake up and think, no, I’m not feeling it today, and I don’t go. I love training, I love going in the morning, and still I will stay home if I need it. Most of all, I’m kind to myself about it. I’m not as strict with food anymore. I’m sleeping again. And I’m losing weight, at my own pace, around a kilo a month, and I’m like, wow, look at me go. The weight loss people talk about half a kilo to a kilo a week at the start. I laugh. A kilo a month is my victory.

It’s taken four years. I’m on the other side now, my hormones are optimised, autoimmune markers are declining, I am sleeping and I’m starting to feel happy in my body again.

Now I can laugh at how one year of extreme discipline gave me a kilo of fat!

So tell me, where are you still pushing harder when your body is asking you to stop? Hit reply or drop it in the comments. I read every one.

Anna

P.S. It took four years and one coach who asked about my life. In the Atelier, that question comes first. Anna’s Atelier is the paid part of Hera, €9 a month or €90 a year. It’s where we work with this time of life through body, mind, emotions and scent, and where I ask every woman the same question: what can I do for you? If you’re not ready, read along for free and my essays will come straight to your inbox. You are welcome either way.

For 35 years I have created essential oil blends for women. Specific blends to fit their specific needs. These same women still come back for their scent, or a new one to fit where they are now.

I am not talking about perfumery, I am talking about Active Fragrance - a scent you wear that is designed to impact you on a deeper level:

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Until a couple of years ago, I was not a tech person. Actually, that is an understatement. I knew how to do really basic things on a computer, but to me it was more or less a glorified typewriter.

Then I moved countries and realised that if I wanted to continue and grow my work, I had to put it online, and that was massively confusing.

I have been an aromatherapist and coach for 35 years. I know my work, I know what I want to say, I know how to work with people, and I have decades of experience behind me. I’m really good at what I do and I love my work.

The problem was that suddenly I had to understand platforms, mailing lists, CRMs, domains, websites, funnels, integrations and a whole new language full of abbreviations that everybody seemed to understand.

I didn’t and I felt like an idiot.

So I did what you are supposed to do. I took courses, joined a mastermind and learned about marketing, offers and all the things I was supposed to do to bring my work online. I learned a lot of valuable things, but there was one really important piece missing.

Nobody taught me how to actually physically DO any of it. That awful tech!

I had all this new knowledge, but every time I tried to put it into practice I got stuck because of my lack of technical knowledge. Someone could tell me what I needed to do, but then I would go to the platform to actually do it and have no idea where to start. Which button? Where is the thing they are talking about? What does that mean? What am I supposed to press?And where?

It was like somebody putting me in a car when I had never seen the inside of a car before and saying, “Right. Drive.”

Uh, no.

At one point I wanted to add the recipient’s first name to an email. That’s it. I couldn’t find the button, so for an entire week I had conversations backwards and forwards with the company trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.

Eventually, one person realised that the problem wasn’t on their platform, it was a setting on my computer that meant some of the buttons weren’t showing.

The bloody button wasn’t there.

How was I supposed to know that?

And that was the problem over and over again. When you know nothing about technology, you don’t even know what you don’t know, and you don’t necessarily know what question to ask because you don’t understand enough to know where the problem is.

I felt frustrated and lost because I had all this want and hope and excitement for my work, but I couldn’t move it forward.

Of course, I could have found someone to do it all for me, but I wanted to understand how to do it myself. I just needed someone to show me how.

And then AI came along.

There wasn’t one great Eureka moment when I suddenly understood what AI could do for me. The realisation grew as I started experimenting and asking questions.

How do I do this? How do I connect that? Where do I find this?

AI would give me the steps, but quite often even those steps were completely over my head, so I would say, “I don’t understand. Make it simpler.”

And then simpler again. If AI had been a real person, it would have slapped me already.

Eventually we would get down to what I call baby language: press this button, now look for this, click there.

THAT I can do.

And whenever I get stuck, I take a screenshot. I know how to do screenshots! I show it to AI and ask, “Is this right? Where do I press now?” and we continue from there.

This is what changed everything for me. I didn’t have to go away and learn an entire new language before I was allowed to use the technology. I could learn while I was actually doing the thing I wanted to do, and if I didn’t understand something I could keep asking until the explanation was at a level I understood.

The ultimate Eureka came when I decided to connect my own domain to my Substack.

I had owned my domain for years because it is my name, but it had just been sitting there inactive. Meanwhile I had started building Hera on Substack, and slowly it had become everything I had wanted from a website. I could write there, use audio, have different pages and organise my work the way I wanted. With the help of AI I had even developed my branding and colours, something I had never needed when I was working as a therapist in the ordinary brick-and-mortar world.

Now I wanted my own domain connected to it.

The complication (apart from the obvious tech stuff) was that my domain provider is in French, and my French is nowhere near good enough to understand technical instructions. I don’t understand them in any language!

So there I was, dealing with technology I barely understood, in a language I didn’t understand well enough, trying to connect two platforms and sort out all the little things that went with it.

And this is where AI became extraordinary for me. It can speak any language!!!

I could show it what I was seeing, ask what something meant, tell it when I couldn’t find what it was talking about and keep going step by step. If the instructions were too complicated, I asked for simpler ones. If my screen didn’t look the way it was supposed to look, I took a screenshot and showed it what I could see.

Eventually it worked.

When I typed in my own domain and my Hera site appeared, it felt amazing.

For someone who understands technology, connecting a domain might be nothing special. For me it represented how far I had come from spending an entire week looking for a button that wasn’t visible on my computer.

And this is why, when I hear all the discussions about AI, I sometimes think we are missing part of the story.

AI has saved me an enormous amount of time, frustration and probably a fair number of mistakes, but most importantly it has given me access to things I didn’t know how to do.

It hasn’t given me my professional knowledge. I already had that.

AI is like a secretary. It’s not me and it can only do what I ask of it. Admittedly, it is a very patient secretary who doesn’t seem to mind if I ask the same question seventeen times because I still don’t understand the answer.

I use it to help me understand technology, figure out platforms, connect things, correct my mistakes, work with my wording and deal with all those things everybody else seems to understand when I haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about. Sometimes it gives me exactly what I need, sometimes I have to keep questioning it, and sometimes I tell it that what it has given me is rubbish and we start again.

Because AI is a tool. A great tool, but it needs to be used with basic common sense.

You still have to think and decide what you want. You still have to question things, check things and say, “No, that’s not what I mean.” AI can help you enormously, but you are still the one driving the car.

Your knowledge and expertise is yours.

There are so many women my age with enormous amounts of knowledge and experience who built their professional lives before any of this technology existed. We weren’t taught it because there was nothing to teach. Then the world changed around us and suddenly, if we wanted to continue working, create something new or put our knowledge out into the world, we were expected to understand a completely different way of doing things and learn a new language.

If you don’t understand that world, the technology can become a wall between you and everything you know you have to offer.

For me, AI made a hole in that wall.

If I met another woman my age who had something she really wanted to put into the world but was sitting there thinking, “I can’t do all this bloody technology,” I would tell her to use AI, and then I would walk her through the first steps till she understood how to use it properly.

Because you don’t have to understand the whole digital world before you can enter it. You can learn as you go, ask the stupid questions, ask them again when you still don’t understand, take a screenshot and ask where to press next.

That is pretty much how I built Hera.

One bloody button at a time.

Love, Anna

P.S. If this spoke to you, come closer. Anna’s Atelier is the paid part of Hera, €9 a month or €90 a year. It’s where we work with this time of life through body, mind, emotions and scent, and where I ask every woman the same question: what can I do for you? If you’re not ready, read along for free and my essays will come straight to your inbox. You are welcome either way.

The first 25 women who join the Atelier for the year get a 30-minute session with me.

Subscribe now

Now close your eyes and feel yourself sinking into whatever you’re lying or sitting on. And start with…

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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?

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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!