Creativity Rising

Since I have begun teaching creative writing on Zoom I have noticed that a woman’s creativity often surges in midlife. Women who had long since given up on that novel under the bed, are reconnecting with their creative selves. Their writing voices are deep and resonant. In other words, their wisdom is hard-won. There is not a part of themselves that is not known to them and it shows in their words.

An aunt of mine, who is in her seventies, always said to me: “You don’t know anything till you are forty.” Now I am inclined to agree with her. Women are conditioned to be good girls, but around forty-something solid falls out of a different mould.

A friend puts this down to losing the male gaze. She remembers distinctly when this happened to her. She was in her early forties and pushing a buggy. She walked past a building site and no one shouted at her. She walked into a bar and no one looked up. The barman did not hold her gaze or wink at her to suggest she would get served soon. A few weeks later at the hairdressers, the young man cutting her hair said: Staying in tonight then? And growing a little pink, she said she was. “I should be more upset,” she said to me. “But I’m not. I feel liberated.”

Another friend is now madam rather than miss in shops. Again this doesn’t hurt. “I can say what I want to say now,” she told me. “Madam can have an opinion whenever madam goddamn likes.” When the first lockdown ended, a friend told me she wasn’t going to dye her hair again. “It’s like this,” she said. “I’ve finally got gravitas.” I was reminded of a moment in a Doris Lessing novel, when a married woman takes a young lover. When she returns home to her husband she insists on keeping her hair grey and plain. “Her discoveries,” writes Doris Lessing, “her self-definition, what she hoped were now strengths – were concentrated here…she was saying no: no no no NO – a statement that would be concentrated into hair.”

How unafraid these women are. “Only got one life,” one woman tells me, having abandoned PR for poetry. “I’ve lost the fear,” says another, who has set up her own business and is renovating a cottage with her bare hands.

A psychologist might put this down to a new sense of mortality: a woman in midlife knows in a way her younger self did not that time is finite. She wants to record her existence, for herself and for her daughters. She might be relieved to be spared the male gaze but she has no intention of becoming invisible.

Invisible. A few years ago, when my daughter was a toddler, I took her to the National Gallery. There was an exhibition, (In)visble, Irish Women Artists from the Archives, that I wanted to see. I wondered through its rooms unable to find it, until eventually, I realised it was in a corridor of sorts and that I had walked straight past it. Chastened, I took my daughter to a light-filled space where children can draw. She snatched a crayon off me and I did not admonish her. I love her spirit and not for the first time I knew she was going to need it.

Of course, this surge in creativity and chutzpah might have something to do with hormones. The writer Alice Taylor once wrote that this was nature’s way of redirecting female energy. Now, all that child-rearing is over or, at the very least, the intensity of the early years, many women finally have time and energy for themselves. They are giving themselves permission to move their creative pursuits up the list. Some believe motherhood has taught them how to nurture themselves. I would never talk to my children the way I talk to myself, one writer tells me, so I’ve stopped. I nod. It is a statement I have heard several times. Women are nurturing each other too. At my last workshop, two of the writers present had received tickets as a gift from another female writing friend.

According to research by Stanford University, one of the best things a man can do for his health is to be married to a woman, whereas one of the best things a woman can do for her health is to have a group of supportive female friends.

There is talk in some circles at least, that creativity can fend off a mid-life crisis. Why buy a Ferrari or have an affair when you can write a novel or take up life drawing? And midlife is a time when we naturally turn inward, processing our darker experiences. In Carl Roger’s wonderful book, Becoming a Person, the psychotherapist suggests that we do not fully integrate our lightness and darkness until our late forties.

Brené Brown believes midlife is the test, the time when we realise we can’t coast anymore: “Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders,” she writes, “pulls you close and whispers in your ear: I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go.…It’s time to show up and be seen.”

Nikki Walsh, January 2021

If you are struggling to find your purpose, creative or otherwise, or would simply like to tune into your intuition and tune out of all the noise, please join Nikki on Tuesday, February 9th at 8pm for a 90-minute writing workshop on Zoom. She’ll be using simple writing exercises to help you deepen your connection with yourself. You don’t need to be a writer, all you need is a wish to connect with yourself and others in tough times. Tickets €20, from Eventbrite: can be bought HERE.