There’s something nobody really prepares you for about growth in midlife: we spend so much of our earlier years adding. Adding skills, achievements, capabilities, and armour. Building a version of ourselves that can handle things. And then midlife arrives and, quietly, asks you to put some of it down.
The growth I’ve experienced in this season hasn’t felt like addition; it’s felt like subtraction. Like shedding. Like sitting with the discomfort of not yet knowing who you’re becoming, and trusting her anyway.
Every time my life has asked something new of me, the version of me who got me to that point couldn’t get me through it. The woman who rebuilt after heartbreak was fierce and capable. She needed to be, but she couldn’t build something soft and sustainable, because she didn’t yet know how to put the armour down. The woman who hustled and proved got me somewhere real, but she couldn’t rest, or receive, or trust. She’d never been allowed to stop.
Every next level asked me to let go of the very thing that felt like my greatest strength.
That’s the part nobody warns you about.
Midlife has asked me to become someone quieter than I expected; more discerning, less interested in being impressive, more interested in being honest. That woman is different from who I was at 35, at 40, even at 45. And she’s still arriving.
If you’re in the middle of becoming someone you don’t quite recognise yet, you’re not lost, you’re just at the next level.
And while we’re talking about showing up, can we also talk about what that actually looks like?
Not the version we imagine, where we arrive full and focused and running at a hundred per cent every day. The real version. The one where some days you manage everything you planned, and some days you manage a quarter of it, and some days the whole achievement is that you opened your laptop and wrote one sentence.
For a long time, I told myself that it didn’t count. The self-criticism cost me more energy than it would have for the rest.
What midlife has slowly been teaching me is this: consistency doesn’t mean identical; it means returning. The half-days count. The day you just lit a candle, read one page, went for a slow walk and called it done, that counts too. You are not a machine. You are a woman moving through seasons of the year, of your hormones, of your grief, of your healing. Some weeks you’ll have everything, and some weeks? You’ll have very little.
Showing up anyway, even partially, is not failure dressed up as effort; it is the effort.
This week’s #85WeeksToFifty is with Femi Oke
Some women answer these questions with deep reflection. Others do it with a sharp truth, a wink, and just enough humour to make you laugh before the wisdom lands.
That was Femi Oke.
She describes her life at this stage as a TV show coming to the end of season five, beloved characters, dramatic moments, and only she knowing who’ll be back for season six. Playful, yes. But also quietly profound, because that really is part of the work by now, isn’t it? Deciding what comes with you. What doesn’t? What kind of next season do you actually want to make?
What stayed with me most was her honesty about the urgency that can arrive in your fifties. Not panic, not regret, but more like an acute awareness that time is no longer abstract. It becomes personal. Tangible. And with that comes a deeper desire to focus, to stop waiting for the perfect moment that’s never quite coming.
I also loved her candour about the responsibilities of this season: menopause, ageing parents, the emotional weight of holding life at both ends. These are real midlife experiences. And her refusal to navigate them in silence felt important. Necessary, even.
And yes, there was a perfectly timed moment about lubricant that made me smile. Because midlife needs more of that kind of honesty, too.
#85WeeksToFifty with Femi Oke
Some women answer these questions in a way that feels deeply reflective, others answer them with a wink, a sharp truth, and just enough humour to make you laugh before the wisdom lands.
On the website this week, a conversation about your gut
We talk about hormones constantly in midlife. We talk far less about the gut, even though, for so many women, that’s where the shift is felt first. The bloating that appears from nowhere. The new food sensitivities. The sluggish digestion that no one warned you about.
This week I sat down with Cynthia Thurlow, NP, nurse practitioner, host of the Everyday Wellness podcast, and author of The Menopause Gut, and it’s one of those conversations I think many of you will find genuinely useful. She connects the dots between oestrogen decline, gut permeability, insulin resistance, and the inflammation that drives so much of what we’re told to simply accept as ageing. Her approach is practical, grounded, and refreshingly free of overwhelm, because it always comes back to foundations. Diverse food. Quality sleep. A nervous system that isn’t constantly running on cortisol.
Common, she reminds us, is not the same as inevitable.
Read the full interview here.
A little milestone coming next week
Next week marks something I’ve been quietly looking forward to for a while.
Episode 100 of the Midlife by Design Podcast.
One hundred conversations about the season we’re in. About identity, reinvention, health, relationships, purpose, and what it actually means to design a life that feels like yours. I started this podcast because I believed these conversations needed to exist, and the response over the years has consistently shown me that they do.
If the podcast has ever given you something, a moment of recognition, a shift in perspective, a morning that felt a little less lonely, I would love it if you’d mark this milestone by leaving a review on Spotify. It takes two minutes, and it means more than you know. It’s how more women find their way here.
Thank you for being part of this. On to the next hundred.
The Sattva Collective CIC turned one this week
I’m still sitting with that, honestly. A year ago, The Sattva Collective CIC was an idea I believed in deeply but couldn’t yet fully see. What it would become, who it would reach, and whether the women who needed it would find it. A year on, they have. And the community that’s grown around it, the conversations, the honesty, the sense of recognition that happens when South Asian women are finally given a space to speak about midlife without apology, that has been one of the most meaningful things I’ve built.
We are just getting started.
On Substack this week, Substack LIVE
If you caught the Substack Live this week, you’ll know it went somewhere real.
We talked about growing on Substack when you’re over 40, not interested in chasing trends, and building something that actually means something. About what it looks like to show up consistently without burning yourself out. About the difference between writing for an algorithm and writing for the woman who genuinely needs to read it.
What I loved most was the honesty in the room. Women at different stages, some just starting out, some a year or two in, all navigating the same quiet tension between wanting to be seen and wanting to stay true to why they started.
If you missed it, the replay is here (or watch below). Worth a listen, especially if you’ve been second-guessing yourself lately. Which, if you’re building something meaningful, you probably have been.
Also, this week, a conversation I loved
I was part of something rather beautiful this week. Csilla 🌹 Feminine in midlife 💃, over at Feminine Energy for Midlife Women, brought together twelve women from across the midlife Substack community to answer two simple questions: “What makes you feel like a woman, and what do you love about who you’ve become after 40?”
A nosering and slow mornings. Wild, curly hair as an expression of the soul. Wearing perfume to bed. A husband who still looks at you like it's a first date.
What struck me wasn’t the variety of answers; it was the common thread. Women who have stopped performing femininity and started inhabiting it. Women who, somewhere between 40 and 60, found their way back to themselves.
Read the full piece here, and give Csilla a follow while you’re there.
If something in this week's edit landed for you, I'd love to hear it. Drop a comment, reply to this email, or simply share it with a woman who needs to read it this week. The right words have a way of finding the right people, and you probably know exactly who that is.
Until next week, keep becoming. Even on the quarter days. Especially on those.
Kiran x
Kiransinghuk.com | The Sattva Collective
Kiran, this resonated so deeply. What you write here about midlife feeling like a season of subtraction feels profoundly true to me too.
So much of this midlife journey has involved letting go. Relationships and roles that no longer fit. Earlier versions of myself rooted more in expectation than desire. The armour I once thought I needed in order to move through the world.
And maybe the hardest part is exactly what you describe — learning to trust the not-yet-fully-formed version of ourselves as she begins to surface. To believe that even in the shedding, something truer is emerging. Thank you for putting all of this into words. XO
Growth has felt like subtraction, not addition' is such a precise reversal of how we're taught to think about becoming more. The armor that got you through one season is so often the exact thing you have to put down to get through the next one, and nobody warns you in advance. And 'showing up anyway, even partially, is not failure dressed up as effort, it is the effort' might be the truest sentence in here. Some weeks the whole win is opening the laptop