
Midnight in Melbourne. Picture a dissolute dinner party on the eve of the Winter Solstice. One of the guests still shivers after a swim at Williamstown Beach with a bunch of other iced maniacs. She sips soup and snuggles into the jumper I thrust over her head in horror. (I keep my gloves on because even the warmest rooms are not quite hot enough for me and my Raynaud’s fingers.)
Most of the wine has been drunk and the conversation is loose and easy, slurred in the candlelight.
‘Here’s a question,’ someone pipes up. ‘What’s the thing you most want in the world? And what’s stopping you from having or doing it?’
Whoa.
Answering a question like this is akin to looking a beast full in the face, admitting your fear and impotence.
What’s the thing you most want in the world? And what’s stopping you from having or doing it?’
In fact, I resented this question. Wanted to escape back to the shallows of literary gossip from the day’s Willy Litfest, where I’d been on a panel that afternoon, speaking about sex and love and my novel, a polyamorous love story, Double Happiness.
I didn’t want to think about what comes next, or why I’d been in limbo for the last six months since I quit my job as a burnt out digital journalist, exhausted by the shit-show that is all media these days, chasing dumb clicks and trying to ride the algorithm. I didn’t even want to think about what I wanted next.
Others around the table leapt into the void. Candid, heartfelt confessions. Surprisingly, more than half talked about creative projects that they wished they had the talent, courage or temperament to undertake or complete. There were unwritten film scripts and novels, half-drafted memoir collections, and literary salons that lived only in imagination.
I realised again what I already knew: that we all want to create and contribute, and most of us are so afraid.
Of what?
Of starting or actually finishing? Of being judged and finding out we’re not as good as we hoped? Trying and missing the mark, failing to launch and dribbling back to silence and obscurity. Being laughed at, or worse, ignored or pitied by our peers. (‘She’s so lame, so cringe, too much! I used to like her but now she’s…’ These are my own imaginary harpies.)
Wearily, I recognised this territory, from my own repetitive struggles to write and publish two books that took far too long to be born and when they were out there, seemed agonisingly difficult to promote, so much so that I felt gagged and bound every time I looked at Instagram and saw other authors thriving there.
I also recognised the self-defeating patterns that I’d seen and challenged, from creating and facilitating a 13-week Artist’s Way project, based on Julia Cameron’s 1992 cult classic 12-step recovery bible for blocked creatives.
Created with ArtsHub, that project saw amateurs and award-winning professionals grappling with the fears, procrastination and limiting beliefs that make it hard to create and share the kinds of work that we intuitively know we could – work that is the highest expression of our human being. I’d used Cameron’s book twice myself to get over myself and get to the finish line. And if you’re wondering, the program really works – for a while! But in my experience, every time you start again, you really do start again. It’s terrifying. And as Helen Garner said a few years back on a panel at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival, ‘feeling like a piece of shit’ is an important part of the process, at least for her. No wonder we love her.
Real writing and making real art is always a process of stepping out on a limb or jumping off a cliff. Hoping that in the lucky spirit of Tarot’s The Fool card, angels or an upwind might catch you.
Starting something new is foolish and brave, quixotic. It might work or it mightn’t and that’s where the magic happens.

Alone: coming home to the self
The question finally came round the table to me and I couldn’t escape. What did I want most in the world? My answer had nothing to do with writing or creating. I was empty. Dried out. And if I couldn’t just wish lazily for World Peace, then I wanted to secure a promise from myself that next year I’d find a way to escape the cold, for at least part of Melbourne’s winter. Even if it meant fruit-picking in the tropics and living in a tent. I had to get away.
And in the immediate future, urgently, I wanted more than anything in the world to be fully alone. Like Greta Garbo. Or like Gina Chick in the wilds of Tasmania on the SBS show, except with my Ugg boots and more than a possum-fur cloak for a bed.
Alone.
No partners, no pets, no friends. For a minimum of three nights. Alone to face my fear of it, because for a 53-year-old woman, I’ve scarcely spent a night on my own without friends, dinners, conferences, films, children, pets or lovers.
It was pathetic really. I’d been reading that feminist classic, Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, about the myths and stories of the Wild Woman archetype. Every story shouted at me that I needed to get away, and quick, if I was going to cross over into the necessary next stage of my stalled spiritual development.
The menopausal rite of passage.
‘Do it!’ my friends at the table shouted. The one in my fluffy jumper had just come back from months of solo travel in Europe, where she discovered that her own company was delightful and not at all scary.
‘What if there’s a huntsman spider?’ I cried. ‘Or I can’t get the fire started? Or the car breaks down on the Great Ocean Road?’
They laughed. My fears were puny when I named them. I was a woman who’d recently gone on national television, talking about my adulterous past and unconventional family, and here I was worrying about a spider?
The truth was that a part of me actually wondered if I might cease to exist without the defining lines of others. Who would I even be without someone to please or to push against?
Pinkola Estes writes about how women in midlife resist the call of the wild; they postpone ‘going home to themselves’ even as they crave it and know deep down it’s the only thing that will give them peace and make their coats shiny again. Like the Seal Woman in the Inuit myth, who migrates to land to look after a man, these women stay far too long with others who love them, but claw and beg for more, and so, over time, these women’s skins and hair dry out. Returning to oneself can be delayed forever, but it costs us our vitality.
And so, I did it!
I stayed in a friend’s beach house not far from Apollo Bay. I fussed with the smoky fire, walked by the cold ocean and read to my heart’s content with a hot water bottle on my feet. I painted a picture in watercolours (badly but happily), fed a bird, saw a koala, and ate stupid meals like Cheezels and apples, at weird times of the day.
I didn’t pull out my tarot cards once, because I didn’t need them. No guidance was required. I was exactly where I needed to be and doing what had to be done. That famous drive along the cliffs in the late Monday afternoon sunshine, with my music up loud, felt like flying into heaven.
And when I came home I was fresh and glad. I’d crossed the threshold and mostly it was all about asking for it, claiming it and facing the fears. I discovered my own inner resourcefulness.
The Fool and The Queen
Menopause, quite frankly, has been a shock and an insult. I wasn’t at all ready for it. Nobody in my circle talked about it six years ago when I started experiencing symptoms, unlike now, when we’re probably over-correcting and can’t shut up about it.
Germaine Greer in her brilliant, wide-ranging and sometimes wonky book on the subject, The Change, says that none of us ever are quite ready for menopause, no matter what age it comes. We always think ‘Not yet! Too soon!’ as we do with death.
The tumult. The not knowing who you will be when it’s over. The losses of things I didn’t even know you could lose: energy, libido, cognitive speed and memory. My hair! (Oh my hair, I always imagined it wiry and thick and silver like my mother’s magnificent mane. But as I’ve always insisted, I’m not her. Joke’s on me.)
It’s disconcerting to experience this period of rapid and definitive ageing. I’m looking forward to being on the other side of the metamorphosis – while also wishing I could look ‘young’ forever.
In Getting Lost, French author Annie Ernaux writes a diary of a painful affair she had with a younger Russian man in 1989 when she was in her late 40s. She says:
‘Someday, someone should probably say how close a woman feels to adolescence between the ages of forty-eight and fifty-two. Same expectations, same desires, but you’re heading into winter instead of summer.'
That book, (not her best by all accounts, though it’s the only one I’ve read yet), is full of waiting by the phone, dreaming of sex, and also of her fear of ageing. Ernaux is terrified of losing beauty and desirability. She views her slack thighs with disgust, resolves never to get heavier than 57 kilos, and considers what she can do to hold her face in place. (Golden threads?)
Ernaux lived much longer after that Russian dude so rudely abandoned her, and she got truly old (she’s now 84), winning the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature and having expanded the scope of what serious ‘literature’ could look like. I wonder if she still thinks 52 is old and was the ‘end’ of a transition, or merely the beginning.
Traditional wisdom and pagan mythology posits that ‘woman’ (let’s stick with gender binaries for now) has three ages – three stages in the divine life cycle: Maiden, Mother, and Crone.
Looking at Klimt’s ‘The Three Ages of Woman’ it’s hard to feel joyful identification with that crone hiding behind her veil of hair, breasts drooping over distended belly.
Lately I’ve heard it said that we need another empowered archetype for the mature feminine, one between Mother and Crone, one that fully celebrates female power, competence and experience.
The Queen.
Yass Queen!

Of course! We want to be Queens.
As a passionate Tarot reader and skeptical witch, I think immediately of the four Queens in the deck’s minor arcana:
Queen of Wands with her fire, energy and creativity;
Queen of Pentacles, with her earthy generosity and good management of resources – also her rabbit!
Queen of Cups with her precious challice, emotional, empathic and truly gifted in relationships;
Queen of Swords with her fierce, piercing and uncompromising intellect, she takes no shit.
And then there are other kinds of queens in the major arcana: the Empress earth mother nature goddess; and the High Priestess, spiritual secret-holder and seeker.
Such is the power of archetypes that merely seeing these queens in my gilded cards from day to day reminds me of the values I hold that have nothing to do with youth or beauty. Gowth of the spirit as I rage and change and try to let go of what’s passing or already gone.
The thing about archetypes too, is that even the crone can access her girlish maiden, and maidens can channel crones or mothers. (Ever seen an imperious child bossing her friends around or mothering her kittens? We are always so much more than our life stage or gender.)
Not yet
Perhaps it’s just another deferral to want to be a Queen, not yet a real Crone. My partners and friends cringe when I call myself an ‘emerging crone’, but I insist on the truthful joke. I’m just at the start of my elderhood, but I like to own my real age, even as I guiltily research serums and The Substance-like interventions.
‘You look young for your age’ is a welcome compliment, but also, what if I don’t? What if I look exactly the age that I am, or older, and that age if I’m lucky gets to be 80 or 90? That has to be okay. But it’s a difficult mindset adjustment in a culture that values collagen over wisdom and keeps selling us the promise of deferral: ‘not yet’ old-looking.
Mourning
There’s no getting away from the fact that grief and mourning are part of this life stage and must be allowed time and space. As Germaine Greer writes in The Change:
The middle-aged woman will not find it easy to get her mourning done. Our culture demands a smiling face; it is bad enough to know oneself for an old trout, without having to add the epithet ‘miserable’. We have no tolerance for female images that are solemn, thoughtful or severe. The menopausal woman finds she is obliged to buck up, to pull herself together. If she wants to sit and think and cry a little or a lot, she is made to feel that these are bad wishes, and may not be indulged. Such behaviour makes other people feel bad. Yet such feelings are not only just and proper, but necessary.
Positive thinking is all very well, but not all the time.
The energy of the Queen is mature and contains multitudes. She can be joyful and triumphant, enjoying the jewels on her crown. But she’s also entitled to be ‘solemn, thoughtful or severe’ too and I love that.
Being the Fool
Starting this fortnightly Substack is a fool’s quest, no doubt. The Internet really doesn’t need more words, or more newsletters. But I do need to write, and I need a deadline to do it, even if that deadline is self-imposed.
I want to practise writing with less angst and fear; following my own particular obsessions and indulging in frivolous or solemn side quests that bring me pleasure. I want to work on letting go of the prideful perfectionism that’s kept this draft unpublished for three weeks, and thus made it far too long and complex.
Writer and entrepreneur Seth Godin talks about the importance of ‘shipping’ your work to deadline, and how we only need to serve and delight a ‘mimimum viable audience’.
While I’d love to be read and enjoyed widely, the truth here is that my minimum viable audience for this experiment is One. Me.
I give it six months and then I may stop. The experiment might be complete then. I’ll know what’s next and whether I want to keep on writing.
If you got to this point, thank you for reading! Friday week, there’ll be more.
With love and wishing you joyful creation,
Rochelle x
Reading this week
Apart from Greer, Ernaux and Pinkola Estes, I’ve enjoyed:
A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs. Subtitled ‘Nine women writers begin again’ it’s a wonderful mix of memoir and biography with Biggs tracing her own rebuilding after divorce, alongside chapters devoted to Mary Wollstonecraft, Sylvia Plath, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison, Elena Ferrante, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Patricia Lockwood’s essay reevaluating the myth and work of Sylvia Plath at the London Review of Books, Arrayed in Shining Scales. Wonderful writing and thinking and it sends you back to the poems too.
Substack The Sit Spot by Australian writer Maggie Mackellar whose gorgeously written updates on life on the land give me a window into another way of writing and being.
Also, Andie from Blue Milk whose monthly missives are treasures in my inbox; the way she insists on following her own interests and instincts. See this from her ‘about’ page: ‘… my head is full of thoughts again, much like when I first had a baby and started writing. Back then I wanted to capture something I was experiencing, but not seeing described all that honestly in writing. Once again, I am fascinated with a new stage of life I am going through and how little is really written about it - middle-age. To make sense of it for myself I am writing bits and pieces again.’ Me too Andie.
Listening
Podcast What Artists Eat by musician Zoltan Fecso and artist Claire Lefebre. The intersection of food, creativity and trying to make a living in the arts in Australia. I was lucky enough to be featured on this lush and beautifully-produced pod last year, but I’ve been listening to the latest inspiring episode on artist and teacher Brooke Holiday.
Checking out all my friends’ lists for Triple J’s Hottest 100 of Australian Songs. Voting closes soon, July 17. Cultural nationalism can be a beautiful thing, especially when our music industry is endangered.
Watching
Murderbot on AppleTV. Short, sharp and extremely bingeable episodes of this touching sci-fi comedy starring Alexander Skarsgård as the handsome cyborg with a heart. I love his addiction to trashy space opera TV, and the hippie-drippy scientists he finds himself tasked with protecting. Bonus points for their awkward experiments with non-monogamy.
Such Brave Girls Series 2 on Stan. Black, bleak and laugh-out-loud audacious British comedy about a truly terrible family of women.
Disliking
Dry July. I’m not a heavy drinker but I’m a very consistent user of alcohol as a crutch and a reward. Living without my regular G&Ts and cosy glasses of red to relieve winter blues is harder than I thought it would be. This is a necessary reset and I’m supporting a partner who’s been told to cut it out for his heart.
Mushroom obsessions. I’m so over the Beef Wellington murders. Fresh news please!
I’ve gone straight from the maiden to the crone, tho I’m still bossing kittens around. So exciting to read your first venture into Substack — almost as good as catching up with you for coffee. So well written and put together (it goes without saying).
I love this, Rochelle! So many gems here, including: ‘Who would I even be without someone to please or to push against?’ I love that you took that solo trip too. And it’s a deep comfort and company to read your musings on ageing and menopause. xo