The unfu*kwithable force that animates a midlife woman
When she's a clear channel
How is it, that as women in our forties we’re becoming softer, gentler and yet more angry and intolerant than ever?
Because it’s not a contradiction.
There’s Something Greater animating us now, an unprecedented experience of Truth.
We are softer because we’re surrendering to our innate beauty and attuning to beauty everywhere.
We’re more intolerant because the anaesthetic of our youth is wearing off. We can no longer tolerate the intolerable.1 We readily challenge what isn’t serving us personally and collectively in our birthright to thrive.
Clearing our channel
An ageing body doesn’t want to carry the density of unexpressed grief, or unexpressed love. And so we can’t help but cry more even when we don’t know why.
We can’t help but feel the tenderness and fragility of humanity and offer each other more love, even when our younger self would deem it uncool.
It’s like this body, that’s carried us for 40+ years is saying,
“It’s time to clear the channel now. It’s time to gather the wisdom from your youth and from each of these precious days, it’s time to prepare for your eldership as the fullest expression of your beauty.”
It’s no coincidence that so many of us can’t tolerate caffeine or alcohol anymore. Barely even one hit of it.
Maybe we’re more sensitive, or maybe we’re less tolerant to anything that brings interference to our channel; that numbs or overrides our beauty so we can take with us the jewels of Truth as we move into the Autumn and Winter stages of life.
A necessary intolerance
One advantage of midlife is we’ve endured sickly voices inside us for so long we’re becoming less tolerant of them because we know them as UNtruth.
We’re not just badass at setting boundaries with other people, we’re becoming badass at grabbing a sickly voice by the scruff of the neck and telling it to ‘Fuck off’, without feeling like a ‘bad’ spiritual person for not offering it compassion and giving our inner child a hug.
Self-compassion and inner child work are healing AF, but so is reinstating the art of a context-appropriate ‘You.Can.Fuck.Right.Off’.
We’re cultivating a necessary intolerance for UNtruth so we can be a clearer channel, not just as wisdom keepers but for the sake of feeling vibrant in these divine bodies we owe our lives to.
“Love is the experience of being witness to beauty” - Dr Zach Bush
How we know it’s Truth
As we become softer AND less tolerant, we become more discerning.
A midlife woman can discern what’s most needed in any given situation, because her softness is no longer overruled by trying to be cool, and her intolerance is no longer overruled by people-pleasing.
This is why midlife women are a force of Nature. We are birdsong and breeze, flood and fire. We bring whatever is needed to wake us all the hell up.
Often, men will be confused by her seeming contradiction, 'You’re lovely one moment and angry the next’.
But when a midlife woman is a clear channel she can be angry FOR something, without being angry AT someone and be so pure in her expression that a man’s conditioning to fix her, put out her fire or take it personally will eventually surrender to a force greater than him - the force of Something Greater moving through her.
We know it’s Truth when it’s evolutionary.
When it’s in service to humanity, whether it’s in her empathy or her anger, a midlife woman’s full expression is an evolutionary, loving force of Nature.
When we are devoted to being a clear channel and in our power, whatever that needs to mean for us (we each KNOW, even if we pretend we don’t), we are wild and expressive of Something Greater than all of us.
However much they try, they can’t keep us down. Nature won’t have it that way.
What have you claimed in midlife? I’d love to hear about it below.
Some writers I highly recommend as evolutionary forces of Nature in softness and in sacred anger are:
An expression I love from this Menstruality podcast
Love this! I have definitely found myself considering righteous anger and righteous rage again and again, so your description of being "angry for" really sits with me.
Right in this place too… loved this