My low-energy days have mostly come from low-grade depression, though physical illness, caregiving, and hormonal shifts in midlife have all had a hand in it too. They’ve been present for long enough that I stopped treating them as unusual and started treating them as simply how life is, sometimes.

What low-grade depression does, in my experience, isn’t primarily about mood, though mood is part of it. It’s a bone-deep sapping of physical and mental energy. It works on three fronts at once, and understanding that is what finally helped me stop treating it as a character flaw.

The first is that anticipating any reward, even the small reward of making one mark on a page, gets dampened at a chemical level, so the effort required for a task starts to look larger than the task itself before you’ve done anything at all.

The second is that the part of the brain responsible for planning and reasoning runs slower than usual, so things that once took a moment to think through now take considerably longer. A genuinely small task can feel complicated, and therefore exhausting, simply because working out how to begin takes more than it should.

The third is that every decision, however tiny, draws from the same limited resource, and depression means that resource is already running low before you’ve picked up anything. Choosing what to make can cost nearly as much effort as actually making it.

None of this is laziness, and none of it is a failure of discipline. The brain is running three depleted systems at once. Once I understood that, I stopped arguing with myself about it and started trying to design my life around it instead. Three lessons came out of that, and they’re the ones I keep coming back to: make decisions on your good days, not your bad ones. Make the smallest possible version of the task non-negotiable, and decide what that version is in advance. And treat whatever a low day produces as data about where you are now, not a reflection of your whole creative life. Oh, and a bonus lesson- BE KIND TO YOURSELF…

Three years ago, when I left my home and marriage and the life I knew and moved to Cornwall to start again, I knew I had the opportunity to put those lessons into practice properly, not just in the studio but across the whole shape of my working life. I wanted to build a business that could survive my unreliable energy. Not one that assumed I’d show up the same way every day, but one designed around the actual, unsexy truth that some weeks I have a great deal to give and other weeks I have very little, and no amount of scheduling or discipline changes which kind of week I’m about to have. I built in slack. I built in versions of things that took less thought and energy. I stopped pretending that a business run by my sensitive human body could operate like a machine with constant output.

On a good day, when I have the capacity to think clearly and plan ahead, I use some of that capacity to make decisions for a future day when I’ll have none at all. This is design work, not willpower, and it operates the same way whether the decision is about a business model or a Tuesday morning in the studio.

I run a small artist’s retreat, but I don’t book weeks back to back. I leave proper recovery time between guests rather than assuming I’ll bounce straight from one into the next, and I allow time to clean up properly in between. My coaching runs asynchronously, over email and voice note, rather than as scheduled calls, because a fixed appointment on a low day is one more thing to challenge my energy, while a voice note can simply wait for the hour I have something to give.

In the studio, the same principle gets broken down into smaller pieces, all decided well before I need them. The task itself gets shrunk in advance, and shrunk again if it still feels too large. Not make a painting, but open the sketchbook and make one mark. If even that feels like too much on the day, the rule is to shrink it again: one line, one dot in the corner of a page, until there’s genuinely nothing left to negotiate, until there’s genuinely nothing left for my frazzled brain to negotiate.

Some of my favourite pieces came from moments like these. A simple ochre smudge, brushed once on a damp page and then left as is, because that was all I had to give that day. A torn strip from an old sketch, glued at an angle to avoid making another decision. None of it looks like effort was minimised; it reflects a different style of attention.

This is precisely how I started painting, a decade and a half ago. In the midst of a brutal perimenopausal depression, I somehow knew I needed the balm of paint and colour and paper, so I found myself a few tubes of acrylic and tasked myself with one mark, minimum. If all I could manage was one brushstroke, that would be enough. Therapy and medication helped too, but this was something that pricked my dopamine enough to make me want to carry on. I painted every day for months, and have barely stopped since. No recurrence of that deep, dark depression.

Nowadays I keep a kit. A slow-day kit, tucked behind the sofa, within reach. Scissors, scraps of collage paper, a glue stick, a few pencils and crayons. Nothing fancy. Not too much choice. Whatever comes out on a day like that is allowed to be a true record of where I am. It’s not a lesser version of my usual work. The whole point is that the low-day version of me should never have to compose any of it from nothing.

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None of this works when youve hit the floor, though, and I want to be honest about that too. There are days when even one mark, minimum, is more than I have. On those days, the kit stays behind the sofa and nothing gets made, and no amount of good creative life-design changes that. What I’ve built isn’t a cure , it’s merely scaffolding for the much larger number of days that sit above the floor but below full capacity, which is most of them. That level of pain is a different problem, and it needs a different kind of help.

I’m also aware of the privilege in being able to organise my business this way. Someone answerable to an employer’s timetable, or without the runway to rebuild a working life from scratch, doesn’t have the option to design recovery weeks into a retreat calendar or swap Zoom calls for voice notes. What I’d say to that is smaller in scope but still true: the shrinking-task principle costs nothing and needs no structural change to your working life, only a decision made in advance about what your smallest version is. It won’t rebuild your business model. It might still get you to one mark.

If the low days for you are occasional, this kind of preparation is probably enough, whatever their cause. If they’re constant, that’s worth treating as a different question entirely, one a sketchbook and a blob of paint were never going to answer, and one worth taking to a person qualified to help you answer it properly.

I’d love to know, if this lands for you: whatever the reason behind your own low energy, is there a part of your creative life still running on the fantasy of constant energy, even while you’ve already learned to build everything else around the energy you actually have?

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Not gone from memory - you don’t forget the years of raising children, homeschooling a son whose brain worked differently from the one the school system was built for, watching a parent disappear slowly into dementia, keeping going through the fallout of someone else’s addiction. But behind me, in the sense of moving on, leaving me free to spend my remaining decades on my own work. That was the story I’d wanted to build this Substack on: midlife as the doorway to the next chapter, the caring finished, the self returning.

Then, this summer, Marc had a heart attack, and I found out how wrong I’d been to think a chapter like that ever really closes for good.

I want to say clearly, before anything else: I don’t resent this, and I never have. Caring for the people I love has never felt like a debt to be paid or a diversion from my real life. It has simply been part of the shape of it, and I wouldn’t undo a single year, even the hardest ones. This isn’t an essay about caring taking something from me. It’s an essay about what I learned, again, about holding onto the thread of my own creative life while doing the caring anyway.

Marc, a fit and apparently healthy 57-year-old, was dealt a genetic bad hand, and was told he required triple heart bypass surgery. The wait for the operation was three weeks, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced time the way I experienced those weeks - thick and slow and completely unusable for anything except waiting and worrying. My days folded into travel, heat, hospital visits, worry, uncertainty. There was no studio time, no stolen half hour with a notebook. There was just the next appointment, the next piece of shocking information, the next attempt to look composed in a corridor whilst feeling utterly shocked and exhausted.

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We are three weeks post-op now, and he’s recovering well. He hates being waited on. He’s frustrated that he can’t yet be the person he was in June, hiking the coast path, mountain biking and scrambling in Snowdonia. We are both learning to live in a different rhythm - his body rebuilding itself on its own timeline, one neither of us gets to negotiate - and we are both discovering that the enormity of what happened is still sinking in, weeks after the danger has technically passed.

And in the middle of all this, it was Marc, not me, who kept asking whether I’d written anything, painted anything, kept the notebook open. Even flat on his back recovering from open-heart surgery, he was the one insisting I not let it go. He made sure I understood, very early in those three weeks of waiting, that holding onto that thread was never in competition with caring for him. He understands, better than almost anyone, that the version of me who stays connected to her own attention is also the calmer, stronger version of the person looking after him.

So that has become the commitment underpinning this essay and this whole season: to hold onto the thread wherever I possibly can, not instead of the caring but alongside it, because both of us seem to agree that it makes me more useful to him, not less.

A few weeks before Marc’s heart attack, I wrote an essay titled Creativity Is Not Healing, in which I argued that art does not cure our ills, and that the true benefit of creativity is reclamation, not repair. I didn’t anticipate how soon the validity of my own argument would be tested, or how much more pressing it would feel to be the one trying to hold onto hope, rather than reflecting on it from a distance.

Here is what this period has re-taught me, more precisely than I managed the first time: reclamation was never a promise that our creativity would fix anything. It’s a smaller, more fleeting claim, always up for renewal - a commitment to keep the part of us that makes things from being crowded out entirely by whatever is asking for everything we have. We don’t need discipline. We don’t need to produce a body of work. We just need to hold on to a thread, however thin it gets.

Rebuilding that thread this summer hasn’t looked anything like a finished painting. It’s more like a handful of sentences typed into my phone in a soulless corridor. A walk, on the one evening I had energy for it, where I actually looked at the hedgerow instead of moving past it toward something more urgent. Noticing the specific blue of a hospital room at seven in the morning and letting that count as attention, even though it produced nothing you could call finished. And on plenty of other evenings, making nothing at all, and choosing to see that as an honest account of the day rather than a failure of the commitment.

The caring years and the creative years aren’t, as I somewhat naively expected, always sequential - the fuller creative life doesn’t necessarily begin once the caring is done. What this summer has shown me is that the caring years arrive on top of each other, uninvited, for as long as you’re the kind of person who loves other people. (Those of you with grandchildren will already know this!)

Creativity doesn’t heal, and it doesn’t ask to be earned back in full before it counts again. It asks only that we keep hold of the thread, whatever size it comes in - the occasional collaged page in my sketchbook, a few lines in my notes app, a careful photograph on my iPhone. Creativity matters not because it heals, but because it’s one of the truest ways I know how to stay myself while loving him through this.

If your caring years came back around when you thought they were finished - through illness, or someone else’s crisis, or any of the ordinary emergencies that rearrange a life - what is the smallest thread you managed to hold onto? Not the discipline. Not the finished thing. Just the thread. I’d love to know.

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A couple of years ago I started reading and researching around the idea that there’s something that happens at this age - I’m talking very broadly, 45- 75- a questioning, an impatience, a thinning of that veil of tolerance that we coat ourselves in as we orbit like satellites around the lives of our loved ones, employers, society. I read Sheehy, Wittenberg-Cox, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, the neuroscientists writing about the post-menopausal brain, the sociologists mapping out what they’re calling the hundred-year life. I wanted to know what the rest of the world was calling this stage, because I needed to understand if ‘midlife’ was the right term.

I found a whole vocabulary, both weird and wonderful.

There is Second Adulthood, Gail Sheehy’s term for the years from forty-five to eighty-five and beyond, which she split into the Age of Mastery and the Age of Integrity. There is The Third Chapter, from Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, treating fifty to seventy-five as a distinct creative chapter rather than a footnote to what came before. There is Avivah Wittenberg-Cox’s Becoming Years, which cheerfully uses the word ‘becoming’ about a woman of sixty and refuses to apologise for it. There is Middlescence, which names the fifties as a genuine transitional stage, a bookend to adolescence, with all of that earlier era’s awkwardness and intensity and identity-making. And there is a whole family of equally poetic terms - Late Bloomers, Second Spring, Renaissance Women, Modern Elders, Queenager - none of which sit quite right with me.

Could I write an email newsletter ‘for women in their Second Spring’? Or change my bio to ‘coach and mentor for late-blooming creatives’? Or call my tribe ‘ Queenagers’?! Um, no.

The more I tried to find an alternative to ‘midlife’, the more it appealed, for its functional simplicity . The women I talk with, whatever their age, are almost never in the middle of life itself. They are in the middle of a reckoning. They have finished one version of themselves, the one that was so busy raising, earning, tending, proving - and they haven’t yet stepped into the next. They are standing in a doorway. Behind them is a life lived fully, ahead of them, more possibility than they’ve been given permission to imagine.

I’ve met women in their seventies who are more genuinely mid-life, more actively in the middle of their own becoming, than some women half their age. I’ve met women of forty who have yet to cross that threshold at all, because the noise of their outer life has drowned out the nagging question underneath. Age is not the qualifier. What we are paying attention to is.

There’s a question we start to ask ourselves: if I’m not proving something, what do I actually want to do? We don’t start asking this on the eve of our 50^th, or when we receive our bus pass. It arrives when it arrives, with a loud bang or a more subtle ‘ahem’.

A 2025 survey of nearly two thousand Britons over sixty, commissioned by the art education company art-K and run by pollster Perspectus Global, found that the average age at which respondents felt they hit their creative peak was sixty-seven. Two-thirds said they felt more creative than they had in their thirties, and 88% agreed that a creative life helped keep loneliness at bay. It’s commissioned research, not a peer-reviewed study, and I mention it here not as proof but as confirmation of something I’ve witnessed in women for years. The work gets better when there is less to prove. There is an unsentimental reason for this. Erik Erikson called the central task of the second half of life generativity - this is the urge to make something beyond ourselves, to contribute, to hand something on. He also warned that the alternative was stagnation. A creative life is one of the best ways to meet that need. A painting, a poem, a novel begun at sixty-eight, the planting of a new garden border. All of these are small acts of generativity, and each pushes back against the cultural script that says women of a certain age are meant to step out of the frame.

The body is in on it too. Menopause, so often described as a time of crisis or meltdown, is more accurately a renovation. Oestrogen recedes, the brain rewires, and on the other side of the fog (which admittedly may seem interminable) many women report a clarity and directness they simply did not have before. Some neuroscientists are calling it a hormonal renaissance. Whatever we call it, it is a good reason to reconsider what we are spending our days doing.

So I have decided to embrace the term and the concept of midlife. The women I witness show me it’s right. The woman writing the first lines of her novel in her early 60s. The women painting large canvases for the first time in my artists’ retreat. The friend who is writing poetry with some amusement and not a little coyness. For me, learning to write more regularly and enter a new way of creating feels good.

Midlife isn’t a number. It’s a state of mind. It’s the moment you stop performing the life you were supposed to want and start listening to the one that has been waiting for you.

If you are reading this and wondering whether you qualify, whether you’re too early, too late, too old, too tired, too far in - I think you already have your answer. The question you’re asking is the doorway itself.

Come on through. The paints are out. The kettle’s on. And there is, honestly, more time than they told you there was.

Imagine spending your whole life trying to run Mac software on a Windows machine. Error messages everywhere, things freezing or crashing for no obvious reason. If you’re anything like me, you’ll immediately jump to the worst conclusion- my computer is completely f*cked! But in reality, the hardware is fine; the manual for running it is illegible, or doesn’t exist at all.

I’ve spoken with dozens of midlife women who suspect they might have ADHD, and this feels like a fitting way to describe their frustrating, even debilitating experience.

For years, the struggle has often hidden in plain sight. Our lives are dominated by school timetables, high-pressure jobs, and the daily circus of raising children or caring for other people, all of which act as scaffolding. There’s always somewhere we’re meant to be, something urgent we’re reacting to. Deadlines, calendars and other people’s needs are the bones that hold the day together. On the outside, we look capable, if a bit chaotic. On the inside, we’re holding it all together with gritted teeth.

Then midlife happens and the shape of life shifts. Children, if we have them, grow up or simply need you in a different way. Work changes, inevitably, and our parents age. Relationships wax and wane and sometimes combust. And often, for the first time, there’s the tiniest sliver of space where everyone else’s needs diminish, for a moment. And into that space comes a craving: I want to make something. I want to paint. I want to write the book. I want my life to include real creative work, not just other people’s lists.

And yet…we don’t start.

The desire is there, and there’s certainly no shortage of ideas. The time, however scrappy and imperfect, is, finally, there. But the actual beginning doesn’t happen. We sit in front of the blank page or the empty canvas and feel welded to the chair. From the outside it might look like laziness or lack of discipline. Inside, it feels like banging on the glass between you and your own life.

Here’s where so many women decide their brains are fundamentally flawed. ‘Everyone else seems to be able to just get on with it. What is wrong with me?’ or a version of this, is something I hear often. In my own experience, and from the research I’ve done, the answer is less about willpower and more about wiring.

Psychiatrists sometimes describe ADHD as an ‘interest‑based’ nervous system: a brain that doesn’t reliably respond to ‘this is important’ but lights up for interest, novelty, challenge, or urgency. If a task doesn’t trigger one of those, the ignition doesn’t quite catch- no matter how deeply you wish it were so.

Put that together with years of calling yourself flaky or lazy, and you don’t just have a creative block; you have a whole wall between you and the work you long to do, a wall built out of missed deadlines, abandoned projects, and shame.

This piece is my attempt to take some bricks out of that wall. Not by promising a perfect system or a cure, but by offering a different story: your brain is not broken, and you are not failing your creative life. You’ve just been trying to run the wrong operating system.

A locked steering wheel?

From the outside, a woman sitting in front of a blank canvas and not moving can look lazy. She has time. She has paint. Why doesn’t she just get on with it?

Inside, it feels completely different. Laziness sounds like, ‘I could do it, but honestly, I’d rather not.’ What so many of us live with is more like, ‘I want to do it. I am begging myself to do it. And yet I cannot seem to make my body move.’ The wanting is there. The ideas are there. The steering wheel is the thing that’s locked.

It took me a long while to understand this: the territory of executive function. Planning, prioritising, shifting between tasks, starting and finishing things- these are not questions of character, they’re jobs the brain has to do. In ADHD‑type and other neurodivergent brains, those systems do not reliably respond to ‘this is important’ or ‘people are expecting this.’ You cannot bully the hardware into moving just because the manual says it should.

This is the interest‑based nervous system I mentioned. A neurotypical brain can look at a boring but important task and think, ‘It matters, so I’ll do it.’ An ADHD‑leaning brain needs a different kind of fuel, and if the task doesn’t supply it, the engine just…sputters.

That’s why you can disappear into six hours of researching an idea, or happily sketch twenty versions of a painting, yet feel utterly unable to take the first mundane step of clearing a table and putting the canvas up. The research is novel and deliciously engaging. The clearing is dull, repetitive, invisible. The spark never catches.

To live with this and not know what it is-especially if you were raised on ‘try harder,’ ‘be disciplined,’ and gold stars for being the responsible one- is to spend decades quietly calling yourself names. You don’t see a locked steering wheel. You see a personal failing.

The invisible wall

Once you understand that the steering wheel is locking, not that you’re ‘just not trying hard enough,’ a second layer comes into view: the wall you’ve quietly built between yourself and your own work.

Every time you bought materials and didn’t use them, every online course you signed up for and ghosted, every draft abandoned halfway- all of it left a little residue. Add in the throwaway comments about you being ‘scatty’ or ‘away with the fairies,’ plus the years of your own internal name‑calling, and it doesn’t stay as residue, it turns into solid immovable bricks.

You are not just trying to paint. You are trying to climb over years of self‑blame, disappointment, and the sick feeling that this time will be ‘just like last time.’ Of course your body slams on the brakes. It is not resisting the canvas; it is trying to keep you safe from that familiar sting of shame.

And then - how easily desire turns itself into a demand! A project begins as a small, delicious flame-’ I’d love to try this.’ Somewhere along the way, it hardens into, ‘I must paint today, because I spent money on canvases / promised myself / told Instagram I would.’ What started as curiosity becomes an order barked in your own ear.

For many neurodivergent nervous systems, that shift from ‘want’ to ‘must’ feels like being cornered. Even if no one else is watching, the internal pressure registers as threat, not support. The moment it becomes a rule, your brain does what all good nervous systems do around threat: it shuts the door. You freeze- not because you don’t care, but because every part of you has flipped into self‑protection.

Treating your brain like a thoroughbred

Stop arguing with the wall and look at the wiring instead, and a different picture of ‘productivity’ comes into focus. A lot of ADHD‑type and otherwise divergent brains are less plough horse, more thoroughbred. They are built for bursts: intense, joyful gallops of focus followed by real, unapologetic rest. They can go fast and deep, but not in a neat, even line from 9 to 5. Hitching that kind of brain to a metaphorical plough and demanding steady, identical output every day is a pretty reliable way to make it collapse.

Meanwhile, the culture keeps handing us plough‑horse rules. Optimise every hour! Measure your worth in output! Earn your rest by ticking enough things off the list. For a midlife woman already carrying caring roles, invisible mental load, and the hormonal wildness of perimenopause, those rules aren’t just unrealistic, they’re cruel- they ask you to override your body and your brain at the precise moment both are begging you to live differently.

Writers like Cal Newport and Oliver Burkeman have sparked quiet revolutions out of the idea that more and faster is not the point- that deep work and a finite life simply don’t bend to endless optimisation. Tricia Hersey, through The Nap Ministry, goes further and names grind culture for what it is: a system that treats humans as machines and rest as a reward for good behaviour. Her counter‑offer is radical and tender: rest is a birthright. Not a treat, not something you earn by finishing enough tasks. Something you are entitled to simply because you exist.

For a brain that constantly feels ‘behind,’ that idea can feel almost illegal. It is also, awkwardly, what the neuroscience points to. Chronic stress and never‑off‑duty‑ness hammer the same dopamine systems that are already under strain in ADHD. High cortisol doesn’t just make you tired; it interferes with the chemistry that makes initiation and motivation possible. The guilt about not doing enough becomes part of what stops you from doing the things that actually matter to you.

Seen that way, rest stops being the enemy of your creative life and becomes one of its main conditions. Unapologetic naps, quiet afternoons staring out of the window, walks with no podcast in your ears- these are not proof you’re slacking. They are you tending the hardware so it can light up properly when you finally sit down in front of the canvas.

Mapping your energy, not just your time

Accept that your energy moves in waves rather than a straight line, and the obvious next question is: how do you actually build a day around that?

One gentle place to start is by mapping energy, not hours. Instead of asking, ‘What did I do between 9 and 10?’, you ask, ‘What does this thing do to my body and brain?’ Some tasks act like springs: +3, +4, +5. They wake you up, spark ideas, give you momentum. Others are pure drains: –3 to –5. They leave you jangly, flat, or weirdly exhausted for how small they looked on paper.

For many neurodivergent systems, the biggest hidden drain is context‑switching. Answering ‘just a couple of emails’ before you write, flicking through WhatsApps between brushstrokes, paying a bill in the middle of a drafting session- each switch yanks you out of one state and into another. On a spreadsheet, they’re tiny jobs. Inside your nervous system, they’re energy leaks.

When you start to notice this, you can make different choices. You can cluster the small, horrible admin tasks together so they cost you one bigger drop instead of ten tiny stabs. You can protect the things that feel like springs, instead of constantly puncturing them with ‘I’ll just quickly…’

Deep tunnels, not multitasking

Monotropism- a mouthful of a word from autism research that fits many ADHD‑ish brains too- offers a kinder way to understand this. The idea is simple: some brains are built for deep tunnels of attention, not for spreading themselves thin across five things at once.

What the world calls ‘hyperfocus,’ often with a bit of side‑eye, is in this view a gift: your capacity to drop into a tunnel, lose track of time, and be fully inside a painting, a page, a piece of music. Inside those tunnels, creativity and expertise can grow at incredible speed.

The catch is the transition. Being pulled out of a tunnel feels like a small shock. A phone ringing, someone shouting up the stairs about dinner, a notification ping- each one can feel like being yanked up from the bottom of a deep pool. Your attention doesn’t skim; it has to climb. No wonder a single interruption can turn a +5 painting session into a –5 crash.

For midlife women holding jobs, households, relationships, and a thousand tiny tabs open in their heads, this has real consequences: your creative tunnels will not survive on scraps. They have to be deliberately protected, the way you’d protect a friend’s studio time if you really respected her work.

That protection is practical, not magical. Aeroplane mode. Headphones. A door that closes. A visible ‘I’m in my tunnel for 45 minutes’ sign on the kitchen table. Not because you’re being precious, but because your brain is finally being used the way it was built.

Doors and handholds: how you actually start

Even with a beautifully protected tunnel, you still have to get through the entrance. That’s where Brendan Mahan’s language of doors and handholds is so useful.

A door is a quick state‑shift, a tiny thing that helps you slip past the first layer of resistance. You blast the song that always wakes you up. You do ten silly star jumps in the kitchen. You light a candle that tells your body, ‘We’re in studio mode now.’ The point isn’t to fix your life. It’s just to crack the door enough that you can put a foot inside.

Handholds are slower, and they’re what let you come back to the work again and again without needing heroic amounts of courage every time. Neuroscientist Anne‑Laure Le Cunff’s idea of tiny experiments is one of the kindest versions of this. Instead of ‘I must finish a painting,’ the experiment is, ‘I wonder if I can fill my water jar and put the canvas on the easel.’ Not make a masterpiece. Just touch the tools.

You can build experiments with ‘good / better / best’ goals. Good: open the notebook. Better: write one messy paragraph about how much I don’t want to do this. Best: stay with it for twenty minutes and see what happens. Framed this way, you are not barking orders at yourself; you are quietly asking your brain a question and seeing how it responds. Your autonomy comes back online.

When friction is high, another powerful handhold is working alongside other humans- what ADHD circles call body‑doubling. This can be as formal as a virtual co‑working session, or as simple as texting a friend, ‘Want to sit on Zoom for an hour while we each work on our thing?’ You’re not creating for them, which would feel like pressure; you’re creating with them, which reads as companionship. The gentle presence of another nervous system gives enough structure and urgency for your own to get moving.

Tiny experiments, body‑doubling, and small bits of environment design all do the same core job: they build an outer scaffolding that finally matches how your particular operating system runs. They don’t turn you into someone else. They let you be who you already are- with a little less friction between you and the work you came here to make.

Finding your operating manual in midlife

For a lot of us, midlife is when the old workarounds finally stop working. The external scaffolding thins out. The mask gets too heavy to wear. The body starts telling the truth more loudly. And in the gaps, that small, insistent voice about art- about writing, painting, making something that is yours- gets harder to ignore.

If you’ve spent decades calling yourself lazy, flaky, disorganised, this is the part where the story can change. A late‑in‑life ADHD realisation (or even just a strong suspicion) is not a verdict on a broken brain; it’s the first glimpse of the right operating manual. You start to see that the ‘problem’ was never your desire to create, it was the generic, one‑size‑fits‑someone‑else instructions you were trying to follow.

Our hardware was always high‑performance. It just doesn’t run on shame, hustle, and colour‑coded spreadsheets alone. It runs on interest, novelty, challenge, meaning. It needs protected tunnels of attention, not constant interruption. It needs rest that isn’t earned, and tiny experiments instead of giant ultimatums.

Once you know that, you can begin to build a creative life that fits you in midlife, instead of trying to squeeze yourself back into a younger, more obedient version of you. Maybe that looks like redesigning your studio hours around your best energy. Maybe it’s joining a co‑working group or retreat where other brains like yours are quietly building their own handholds. Maybe it’s as small as deciding that today, success is putting water in the jar and seeing what happens next.

Your brain isn’t failing you. It’s inviting you, perhaps for the first time, to make work, and a life, in a way that was actually built for you.

Good grief, I thought, I can’t even sleep right!

As if insomnia wasn’t enough, when I did sleep it was only possible on my side, arm tucked under me, wrist cocked in what’s known as ‘dinosaur hands’ (apparently a classic neurodivergent thing, but I’ll leave that pathologising for another day). It felt like a bad habit I should be able to fix.

Instead, it led to a shoulder that was at first stiff, then painful, then the source of a radiating tension that spread between my shoulder blades, up the back of my neck and into my head, the root of an almost permanent headache. Massages, acupuncture, visits to the chiropractor became regular fixtures in my diary. I kept thinking, ‘If I can just find the right pillow / stretch / sleeping position, this will go away.’

Across the pond, Internal Family Systems therapist Melissa Monahan went through something eerily similar. Weeks of doing everything ‘right’ in physical therapy, before a surgeon mentioned, almost as an aside, that her frozen shoulder was extremely common in women her age- and directly linked to perimenopause. No one had thought to say this earlier. Like me, she’d been blaming herself, filing it under ‘getting older’, ‘not doing enough yoga ’, ’ probably my own fault’. As we do.

How is it that we take each inexplicable thing that starts happening in midlife - brain fog, the disorganisation, the sudden inability to hold a thought for longer than thirty seconds, the disproportionate rage at the recycling bin / next door’s dog / the news headlines - and we put it in the drawer marked personal failing. Because that’s what we’ve been taught to do with ourselves, and no one taught us a different way.

It took me years to realise that what’s happening to our brains in this season isn’t simple decline; it’s much more exciting than that- more like a renovation! And that renovation is exactly why so many of us feel a fierce pull toward creativity.

In my late forties, life on paper looked familiar: work, children, ageing parents’ appointments wrapped around house renovations and parents’ evenings. I was competent and organised, if permanently exhausted. Being ‘the one who handles everything’ had become my whole personality.

Then the machinery started to grind. Bone‑deep tiredness. A sadness for no specific reason. A hollow, drifting feeling. Things I’d always taken pride in started to feel pointless; other things - painting, writing, making anything at all - suddenly felt urgent in a way they never had before. At the same time, my old coping strategies failed. I inexplicably missed appointments. Lost my words. Stood in the kitchen thinking, ‘I used to be good at this. What’s wrong with me?’

For a long time, I treated all of that as proof that I was coming apart. It took years - and a lot of late‑night reading - (and drugs, HRT, and therapy) to realise it wasn’t random at all.

The brain does something interesting in midlife: called compensatory scaffolding. It’s a strangely lovely phrase. To compensate for the subtle structural changes that do happen with age, the midlife brain starts recruiting multiple neural regions at once. It strengthens the connections between left and right hemispheres; it ropes in extra networks to support the ones that are tiring. It literally builds scaffolds!

In scans and experiments, this shows up as increased ‘bilateral activation ‘: both sides of the brain lighting up together when midlife and older adults tackle complex tasks. Younger brains tend to solve problems by leaning on a few specialised areas and sheer speed. Older brains call in reinforcements. They spread the load, coordinate more widely, and rely less on raw pace and more on patterns.

Some things do get slower: pulling up a name on demand, juggling a dozen shallow tasks at once, blasting through an inbox on three hours’ sleep. Those are often the bits midlife women notice and mourn, because they’re the skills we’ve been applauded for since childhood: ‘She’s so capable. She can do it all.’

But at the same time, other abilities stay strong or sharpen: integrating information from different places, spotting long‑term patterns, making solid, independent judgments instead of chasing approval. The brain leans away from glittering surface speed and toward depth - synthesis, meaning, context.

Now, put that together with perimenopause, caregiving, and the endless crisis management of the sandwich years, and you have a brain that is:

- less willing to waste energy on superficial nonsense

- better at spotting what actually matters in a crowded, noisy life

- wired for joining the dots, telling the story, seeing the whole picture

And you put that brain inside a body that is:

- carrying the physical load of chronic stress

- losing the hormonal ‘buffer’ that once helped you keep masking and people‑pleasing

- increasingly unable to tolerate living entirely for everyone else

Of course, it starts whispering (or shouting): Make something.

Of course you get the urge to paint, to write, to start the business, to change the work you do.

When you sit down with a brush or a notebook, you’re doing more than ‘taking up a hobby’. You’re using the full, renovated architecture of your midlife brain: the pattern‑spotting, the meaning‑making, the ability to hold contradictions and complexity. You’re giving that upgraded system a task it’s actually designed for.

And - because the physiology matters too - those creative sessions also give your stressed nervous system a chance to stand down. Short bursts of art‑making and other forms of play have been shown to reduce cortisol and help our bodies recover from stress. The midlife brain, with all its scaffolding, is brutally realistic about what you can no longer sustain. It sinks the old coping strategies and then hands you a rope in the form of creative work.

So when we ask ‘Why do so many women turn to creativity in midlife?’, the answer isn’t ‘because they’re bored now the kids are older’ or ‘because they finally have time for a nice hobby’. It’s because:

- the old operating system of endless self‑sacrifice is breaking down

- the brain has rewired itself to excel at synthesis and story

- and creativity is the one place those changes actually make sense

The frozen shoulder, the brain fog, the insomnia, the tiredness: they’re real, and they’re horrible. The science doesn’t magically fix anything, but it does offer a different story to file them under. Not ‘I am falling apart,’ but ‘my brain is rearranging itself for a new phase of my life.’

And that, for me, changes how I move through my life.

I know from my own experience that creativity does restore something. I have seen it with my own eyes and felt it in my own body. Picking up a paintbrush in the midst of a perimenopausal storm of anxiety and depression a decade ago gave me a tiny nudge towards recovery. But so did therapy, prescription drugs and a few grudging barefoot steps on the grass. I am not here to dismiss anyone’s experience. But I want to gently challenge the story, because I think we deserve a more honest one. The word we reach for too quickly is healing . And I think the word we actually need is reclamation.

The wellness story and what it leaves out.

The ‘creativity heals’ narrative has become so ubiquitous that it has started to feel unarguable, like death and taxes . Art therapy, journaling as self-care, the creative retreat as prescription. Underneath all of it there’s a troubling implication: that the problem is inside you, and the solution is too. Make more art. Feel better. Crack on.

Kristie De Garis has written sharply about a parallel phenomenon she calls the ‘nature cure’- the cultural habit of offering women long walks and cold swims as a response to structural conditions that have ground them down. Her observation cuts right to the bone: ‘If walking were sufficient, ramblers would have dismantled the patriarchy by now.’ The same logic applies here. If making art were a cure, we (mid-life women!) would be running the world. But the conditions that have silenced us - domestic overwhelm, the cultural dismissal of women’s inner lives, the way ambition in a woman was for so long read as selfishness - those conditions are not a mood. They are not treatable with watercolours.

Dr Simon Willems, whose work explores the intersection of art and wellbeing, puts it plainly: wellness programmes, however well-intentioned, tend to ask us to ‘meditate our way through impossible workloads’ rather than examine the structures that created those workloads in the first place. We are asked to manage ourselves. The system is left entirely unchanged.

This is the sleight of hand at the heart of the healing narrative. It takes something political - the long, accumulated silencing of women’s creative and intellectual lives - and turns it into something personal. A problem with our nervous system. A deficit in our self-care practice. It asks us to heal, when what actually happened was that something was taken.

What bell hooks understood about reclamation.

In 1995, bell hooks published ‘Art on My Mind: Visual Politics’ - a book so direct in its argument that I still find myself feeling a little whiplashed. She was writing about art and oppressed communities, but the logic arguably reaches into the lives of midlife women with an accuracy that startles. Art, she argued, is how silenced people reclaim subjectivity - their sense of themselves as full human beings with an interior life worth attending to. And then this, which I think is one of the most important sentences written about creativity in the last century:

“If one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonisation, is complete. Such work can be undone only by acts of concrete reclamation.”

Phew. Read that again slowly. Losing touch with your creative capacity is not a personal failing or a consequence of being busy. It is, hooks is telling us, what subjugation looks like when it has done its work properly. And the undoing of it - picking up the pen, returning to the canvas, letting yourself make something - is not therapy. It is reclamation. It is an act with political potential.

The word reclamation does something that healing cannot. It implies something was taken. It names a prior wrong. It puts the agency entirely with you, not as someone recovering from illness, but as someone retrieving what is rightfully theirs.

The care in making, not the cure.

Maggie Nelson, in ‘On Freedom’, approaches this territory from a different, challenging angle. She is suspicious of the impulse to turn art into a vehicle for personal healing, a prescription that, if followed correctly, will deliver the desired outcome. What she asks us to focus on instead is ‘the care in art-making’ -the quality of attention, the commitment to the practice itself, not what the practice is supposed to do for us afterwards.

This distinction is subtle but important. A prescription has a desired outcome. A practice is its own justification. When we talk about art as healing, we are secretly still in the language of productivity - the creative act is legitimised by what it produces (a better, calmer, more functional you). When we talk about the care in making, we are saying something different: that the act of attending seriously to our own inner life is inherently valuable, regardless of what it fixes or fails to fix.

Your silence will not protect you.

Audre Lorde wrote her most famous words about self-care - that it is ‘an act of political warfare’- while she was dying of cancer, as well as fighting racism and sexism. The wellness industry later ‘borrowed’ that line and placed it alongside bath products and breathwork, stripping away the context: she was not talking about rest as reward. She was talking about survival as resistance, the refusal to disappear.

She also wrote, with equal force: ‘Your silence will not protect you.’ It did not protect any of us. And yet so many of us went quiet anyway, in our thirties, our forties, not because we chose silence but because the effort required to keep speaking became too costly, and society did not value what we were saying enough to make the cost bearable.

Picking up a paintbrush does not undo any of that, but it refuses to let it be the final word.

What I want for you, and me.

I am not asking you to give up the comfort that creativity has brought you, or to reframe your studio practice as political activism when it does not feel that way. (Mine certainly doesn’t.) I am asking something smaller and perhaps more difficult: that you let yourself believe how significant it actually is.

When we return to our creative practice after years away, we are not just being kind to ourselves, though we are doing that too. We are insisting , maybe against a long cultural habit of insisting otherwise, that our inner life still matters. That our vision of our world deserves to exist in material form. That what we have to say has not been overwhelmed by everything that blocked or interrupted us.

That is not healing. Healing suggests we were broken. We were not broken. We were overwhelmed, maybe somewhat suppressed, and we were busy, and the world made it very easy not to speak.

Reclamation starts, as hooks said, with concrete acts - not grand gestures, but the real and particular work of returning to yourself. This week. In whatever form that takes.

If this essay resonated with you, I would love to hear what word - healing, reclamation, or something else entirely- best describes your own return to creative practice. You can reply directly to me, or leave a comment below.