Sharon Blackie is a psychotherapist and academic. Her books – including her latest Wise Women – brings together lost myths, fairy tales and stories for women at midlife and beyond. In this episode, we ask what the second half of women's lives could look like if we rerouted ourselves in positive myths of wise older women. "I'd always had a deep rooted belief that fairy tales really work on us – the imagery in them, the archetypal characters – and help us to see how it might be possible to reimagine ourselves.

How to become different than what we were. Even if it seems impossible, you've got Possibly do that. Yes, she can. That's the message of fairy tales.

are in our prime, so keep listening for how you can get your first bottle of And Begins Multitasking Nightly Serum in a cream at a special Queenager price. The author Sharon Blackie is a heroine of mine. She's a psychotherapist, academic, and she's dug out some incredible stories about older women in our culture.

What the second half of women's lives could look like if we rerouted ourselves in positive myths of wise older women. Something that Sharon has been harnessing in her work for a very long time.

And the stories that everybody is familiar with are stories of young women, you know, leaving home, getting married, kind of beginning their lives. And I wanted to know whether there were stories that could help us navigate midlife and certainly the eldering years, which I was, which I was reaching into.

So really, Hagitude and Wise Women sprang out of a fascination that I'd always had with fairy tales and a deep rooted belief that they really, really work on us. The imagery in them, the archetypal characters, and help us to see how it might be possible to reimagine ourselves. So I just wanted to apply it to the time of life that I was at.

The stories that there are of older women often are the witch in Hansel and Gretel or the wicked stepmother in Snow White or they're often not terribly Aspirational archetypes one could say. And why do you think that is? Because I know that in wise women, you've, you've refound lots of incredible, much more positive stories of transformation in midlife.

Why is it that as a culture we've ended up only with the ones which denigrate older women or mostly do?

But clearly there are some patriarchal kind of dissing of older women. I mean, I think you can see that over the centuries. The ways in which older women, when they were powerful, were more and more sidelined. Nobody wanted to know, you know, it was all just a little bit too, too frightening. Um, and so they were put to one side and, you know, you can see that in the witch trials.

I mean, a lot of, a lot of the, the, the women who, you know, who were caught up in the witch trials were older women who were a little bit eccentric, you know, kind of on the fringes of their village and what have you. So I think there was a, a deep suspicion that older women weren't going to conform any more to the values that people wanted.

And there was just this sense that, oh, we don't really want to tell these stories very much. But it is strange that the stories, um, that we keep on telling with older women in them are, as you rightly point out, wicked stepmothers and witches. But I knew that it was different, um, when you started to really delve into them.

And yeah, they were.

And I completely agree with you that they have a transformational power. The first story in this collection, um, tells the story of a woman who, um, puts on a, she kind of puts on a fox's, a kind of fox's fur. It's all about kind of transformation of what she can become and how she has to shed her old life in order to move into a new one.

And that has so, I've actually dreamt about it since I read it, Sharon, it's kind of really kind of got itself inside of me. And I feel that reading this collection gives us a new basis to think about what we might do at this point. Do you want to talk about just briefly about some of the, um, some of the women that you've discovered here and what they've meant for you.

And so I really, having found all of these stories, I was still looking after Hagitude was published. I really wanted to find a way of collecting them together in their fullness and, and in all of their glory. I mean, I'm still finding them today, actually. I've got another five since I handed the manuscript in from.

The Wise Women. And what I loved about the older women that I found is that they were so very diverse. You know, so there was not just one way to be a kind of funny, feisty, powerful older woman. There wasn't just one way of embodying the wise woman archetype. There were grannies in there. There were kind of solitary witches.

There were, again, old women, not just in Scotland, but in England and in Wales as well who, again, create and shape the landscape, giantesses and so on. So there were just such a wonderful variety that I thought, well, some, everybody is going to find themselves in at least one of these stories. And also, it was interesting that, yeah, you could say that some of them, a lot of them were old, you know, kind of old women.

But there were some like the story that you mentioned that I thought really drew attention to some of the challenges of midlife and that kind of what I called in Hagerty that time between stories when the first half of our life is kind of coming to a close, you know, all of that outward looking, driven, focused, building, building a family, building a career, whatever, when that kind of story is settling a little bit.

And we know that there's a different one ahead of us, but we're not quite sure what it is. So there were a couple of stories that I uncovered, including that first one, which I absolutely adore as well. Which kind of throw that strange, unsettling period of our life into some relief.

Metamorphosis, what Chip Condley, the American guru on midlife calls, the midlife not being a crisis, but a chrysalis, that kind of real sense of a, of a shift, a deep shift in us from what we were to what we might become. Tell us a bit about kind of how you see that and from a psychological point of view, what, what are we, what are we shedding?

What are we gaining there?

You know, what am I doing here? What's the purpose? So I see the second half of life very much about that. It's not that we can't still be outwardly focused and, you know, worry about our family and friends and what have you. But I do see it in pretty much all of the women that I've ever spoken to and known.

It's being burnt away. It's just like, everything is dropping like flies. And it's just, and the question then that as a psychologist, I want to ask is, okay, when that starts to happen and it will, you can hold it off for a while, but at some point it will, what's left when the essence of everything that wants to find you is burned away?

It's why I call my platform NOON. You know, we're only at the middle of the day. But I think what's really interesting, and why I think your, your fairy tales are so important, is there just isn't a narrative around that in the culture. I mean, those of us who've, who've read Jung or start being, becoming interested in this, begin to see, yes, of course, there's this sense of everything falling away.

I mean, we see that in the research that we did at NOON as well, that by 50, over half of women have been through five massive life events, divorce, bereavement, redundancy, elderly parents. teens, their own health issues, menopause, you know, all of those things which often come together in this kind of time of shedding.

But what I'm interested in is why we're not really told that story in our culture. There's this sense that women kind of disappeared, they become kind of irrelevant, but not this what I've seen as an incredibly rich moment of transformation. into something new, the sense of us going into a kind of crucible where we come out the other side really much more kind of concentrated, I think, and defined as who we really are.

And that, that story isn't so much in the culture. And I mean, I know that that's something that you're really interested in. Um, Why do you think, why have we not been told that story of the possibility of that kind of trans migration, that metamorphosis, um, as women hit their fifties?

I do think at some level, it always comes down to that. I mean, if you look at the Jungian world and the world of other cultures, related depth psychologists. You know, there have been some studies of women, clearly, but nobody, I couldn't find a study of the kind that I was doing on older women. I couldn't find anyone from a Jungian depth psychologist or depth, other depth psychologists perspective, who had gone and looked for stories.

Nobody had done the work of actually going through the books and saying, okay, what does this tell us about the kind of psychological archetypes of elderhood? Nobody literally had done that before. So it wasn't that it was being suppressed or whatever. It's just like, so every time I go and I'm invited to lecture at a Jungian organization or other psychology, kind of academic institution about all of this, it's just like, oh my goodness, this is amazing.

And I'm thinking to myself, why, why is it amazing? Why hasn't it been done before? And I can only, As I say, come back to the idea that it just wasn't seen to be very interesting that the assumption was that something ends at midlife and menopause and nothing begins again. Yes. You know, it's just like that's the end of your useful life.

That's the end of your fertile life. Older women aren't useful. They're a bit of a nuisance. You know, they take up lots of money on the NHS and all of the rest of it. So let's just put them in a corner and hope they go away. And as you rightly say, that's just so foolish because we all Well, we are older women who are out there doing, I think, things that are useful and transformative and so are our friends and our colleagues and the people that we meet.

So for me, it was a kind of frustration that I saw so many really wonderful, powerful elder women with such gifts to give, but they didn't know how to place themselves in the culture. They didn't know how to place themselves in a kind of, you know, archetypal construct of the world. So that's what I wanted to do.

I wanted to give people some way of saying here are the kinds of gifts that old women, older women can give to the world. Our ancestors recognize them. Yeah. There are truth tellers, there are creatresses, you know, there are mentors. There are all kinds of different older women. Find one and be inspired by the stories.

You know, we're so taught to see ourselves through a kind of male point of view. And that, and there hasn't really been an interest. I mean, patriarchy basically values women for being fecund, um, you know, being able to have children and being kind of, you know, hot, uh, i. e. men want to kind of marry them or have sex with So at the point where we become not interesting to patriarchy.

I think that all the studies of women kind of stopped. Um, I mean, that for me is the kind of, um, underlying thing behind this. And why I think this is changing now is because women now, you know, in their fifties, in their sixties, in the seventies, we are a pioneering generation of women, you know, we're a pioneering cohort.

There haven't been women like us with the kind of agency or power in the world from the fact that we've done jobs and we've, we maybe, you know, feel like we should have a voice in a way that I think women before us didn't. Um, and therefore, this is the moment when these stories begin to come back to life.

We've seen a big, bigger conversation around menopause, which had been a taboo. And for me, what I'm trying to talk about with Queen Ages, or you've been defining as kind of haggardude, is trying to reclaim midlife as a moment of transformation for women, with all these possibilities. What do you, what do you think in terms of your, um, your wise woman archetypes?

What can we, what can we learn from those? What kind of personas can we take at this point?

There are like, I think, 32 or 33 stories, I can't remember which, in, in, Wise Women. All of these very, very different, unique, kind of, older women at different stages of their development. And so, yeah. Well, you know, there are. I mean, the obvious one is the grandmother. You know, there are lots of stories of very wonderful grandmothers.

I mean, for example, in Wise Women, I found a version of the Red Riding Hood story, Little Red Riding Hood story, where the grandmother is not eaten up by the wolf. Um, it's the grandmother who is a wonderful witch and actually a herbalist witch who arrives just in the nick of time and saves Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf, captures the wolf in a sack and tosses him down a well, you know?

Hooray! That's a granny with agency. So there are wonderful grandmothers, there are wonderful witches, there are actually some good witches, not just wicked witches, um, so the witch archetype I think can be a really very important one for us as we're going through this kind of. spiritual transformation, which it is.

I mean, you know, some people don't like that word, that kind of language and think it's all a bit woo woo. But I mean, a search for meaning and purpose is ultimately a spiritual, not religious, but a spiritual search. So we need to own it, I think. There are women who literally weave the world into being like the three fates in Greek mythology who, you know, who spin and weave and then cut the thread at the appropriate time, who keep the world in balance.

This is men, this is old women. Um, there are older women who are, uh, mentors without being grandmothers, a classic fairy godmother. You know, they weren't all twee and tweakly, um, they, they, they had a lot of really gritty stuff going on. I mean, they created coaches out of pumpkins and rats, mice and things, you know, it's not, not, not kind of fluffy stuff, but proper earthy things.

There are truth tellers who hold the, the culture to account. Who, you know, when necessary, ride out of the woods and tell all the fine young men how ridiculous they look sitting around there when there's work to be done, you know, off we go. So there's just so many wonderful ways of being an old woman and I think, you know, not all of us are made to be truth tellers, not all of us are made to be grandmothers.

But we will all find some way of using our gifts, and that's what, precisely what these stories do for us.

So I already had like a collection of books, but it's just a question of saying, okay, um, what do French fairy tales tell us about older women? Are there any older women in French fairy tales? So there are lots of internet archives, so you don't always have to buy books, but sometimes you just have to track down a collection of French fairy tales in English on a books or something, buy it and literally read through it.

So, you know, I am with my academic background, I'm kind of used to doing that research. And a lot of people aren't, you know, they'll pick up one, one or two books or, you know, just Grimm's and Hans Christian Andersen and think that's the wide body of fairy tales, but there's so much more. out there that's really interesting.

So it was a question of delving into them and also, you know, kind of keeping it fairly broad within Europe. So I absolutely commandeered Siberia into Europe for the purposes, but hey, you know, there's a lot of commandeering going on into, going on the other way right now. So, but it is, in a sense, they are Eastern European, um, stories and very wild and wonderful and That one, um, the story of the woman who becomes a fox is a Siberian story, they're just really kind of, um, no holds barred, just full on strange, very beautiful imagery, so yeah.

Just, just, that sense of possibility or of extending the runway for all women that kind of women's lives didn't stop when they married the handsome prince, which is basically what we're told in most of the kind of fairy tales that that we've been served up by our culture. I mean, I love this idea of kind of extending the possibilities of our lives beyond midlife through reading the stories of what was possible for women.

Um, is that what you're trying to do?

And they changed them so that the girls weren't quite so feisty and well behaved and did what they wanted to. And they seem often in that process to have taken out. These old women, and even when the older women in the stories that I have collected and talked about are not, um, the protagonists, you know, they're not the main character, nevertheless, they're the ones who hold this story, who, who shape it, who know exactly what the younger heroine must do in order to, to follow her path.

They have this big picture vision of how the world works, and of course that's what older women do, because. We've been about a bit and we are more community, I think often more community focused and more family focused and so we see what happens. when you do this and it all goes wrong. And I think that that's why we see so many older women in these stories who are weaving and spinning, making the patterns, you know, spinning the threads of life.

Um, it's absolutely fascinating stories.

And that's another reason why I really, really like, um, the, the older women in these fairy tales. They're not holding the heroines back with their warnings, they're kind of empowering them.

It reminded me, I mean, I, I, my degree was in English literature and it reminded me actually of some of the kind of women in Chaucer or those kind of earlier medieval kind of women who were allowed to be rather kind of earthy and bossy and.

You don't find fairy godmothers in the oral tradition, but you find the hen wife and she's the character who always lives at the heart of the community. You know, she's not one of those old witches who lives on the fringes of the village. [00:26:00] She's at the heart of the community and she sells eggs. She keeps hens and she sells eggs.

And so the heroine goes to her ostensibly to look for eggs, but she always comes away with more than she bargained, which is often a husband. Husbands in fairy tales, you know, we have to see this symbolically at some level. It's not always about, um, it's not always about getting married. It's about, it's about leaving home and becoming adults and kind of setting off on the next stage of your life.

And the hen wife is one of these characters that knows exactly the husband that a particular girl needs. And she kind of navigates. them through the marriage, tells them what to wear, all of these kinds of things. Absolutely gorgeous character. I love her to bits. So, is she a bit of a midwife? No, she's not a midwife.

Well, she's a midwife of the soul. Yes, that's what I meant. Yeah. A midwife of the

You know, when you look at these characters, the hen wife, I mean, and the fairy godmother in the stories that she appears in, Without them, the heroine would never leave home, you know, would never, would never be able to successfully step out on the next stage of their journey. So these older women are really, really critical, I think.

So there isn't a thing such as menopausal or even midlife skin type. However, In midlife, there are certain common needs that we all face. So, um, we may find that we have more fine lines and wrinkles, or hyperpigmentation, or that our skin becomes duller, or that we notice, um, sort of cumulative sun damage.

And that's how And Begin was born. So we formulate, um, Personalized skincare to specifically address those needs. So you can have your best and healthiest skin yet.

Do you want to tell us a little bit about kind of your life and how you came to be? to do this?

Like that was a really good decision. And all of the time that I was in corporate life, um, I knew that it wasn't me. I knew that it was, I knew that this wasn't my path. I just had this very strong sense that this wasn't what my life was for. And, I wrote about this in the Long Delirious Bening Blue, that bit was very autobiographical.

When I, in my first midlife crisis, I think I counted three of them, I was in America in my late thirties and trying to break free of corporate life, just trying once and for all to have the courage, um, you know, to take the risk. I'd grown up in a very insecure environment. And so. putting myself back, you know, potentially out on the streets again was complicated.

And I learned, I decided, I had a fear of flying. I had a fear of pretty much everything living. And I decided to learn to fly to overcome that fear of flying. And it sounds mad, and it was a bit, but I did it. And at that point, I thought, if I can do this, you know, if a little girl from, um, from the, um, the council estates of Hartlepool, um, can, can be in America and learn to fly, then I can do anything.

And so I left. Finally, I finally managed to leave and I came back to the UK. And I took up, I re did some retraining and I practiced as a, as a psychotherapist for, for quite some time. So while I was finding my feet, and ultimately it was the writing, but that was, that, that was all about, um, and that I think is very much my purpose and, and my meaning in life.

And, and really I started, of course as, as, as we all would to. You know, as I said, I've worked with fairy tales because I do believe that at the heart of every single fairy tale is transformation. That's what they show us, how to become different than, than what we were. Even if it seems impossible, you can't possibly do that.

Yes, you can. That's the message of fairy tales. But again, I wasn't seeing myself in them. I was working with, with fairy tales, um, with, with much younger protagonists. And I was attracting women of my age, midlife women who wanted. to, who wanted to break free themselves. You know, that was a lot of my clients.

It was middle, middle, midlife women and some men who were desperate to make a change and didn't quite have the courage or didn't quite know how or what to do. And I started to be very frustrated that I couldn't find any stories which told them that this, this feeling that they had was normal. Yeah. Um, And, and that it, not that it was going to be alright, although, you know, at some level that is what you're doing as a therapist, but, but also that there were.

That other women had forged paths like that ahead of them, even if it was, quote, only in a fairy tale.

tended to resonate with other people. Um, which is why I wrote the book that I wrote, which is again, trying to create a map or some signposts for what this kind of time in life can be. But I think it's incredibly important that, you know, amazing writers like you are creating new signposts for midlife.

And I was just so shocked by the kind of paucity of material out there. Research, my, my great friend, Dr. Lucy Ryan, who's just written another brilliant book about midlife called Revolting Women, which is about why women are leaving their careers. When she tried to get, that, that began as a PhD, she couldn't find a single professor who would take that on.

Um, in the end, Dorothy Byrne did, but she said that everybody was saying, Oh, nobody's interested in kind of older women or what's happening to them. So I think that really what all of us are trying to do is to open up a kind of new seam, a whole kind of new way of looking at this as an age of opportunity and of transformation, not as, you know, somebody said to me, um, you know, older women.

Men are seen like silver foxes kind of getting better with age and, you know, like fine wine, whereas women are seen like peach is one wrinkle and we're done, you know, so it's trying to, I think it's really trying to get beyond that narrative into something more optimistic and fit for purpose.

No! Yeah, yeah. Stay beautiful, keep wearing the clothes. I mean, you might want to and that's absolutely fine, but there is no obligation because our bodies are changing. And if you insist on hanging on to what's past, then you're living in the past, you're not living in the present and you certainly can't conceive of a future.

That has you in it, rather than some kind of, you know, slightly fake version of what you once were. So I find that, that sense of, we must hold on, uh, you know, we must hold on to everything is absolutely not the way to go. What we have to do. It's learned to change, not to become old, you know, kind of in our heads before our time, but to accept what's happening to our body and what's happening to our psychology, which is turning us inwards for a little bit to look for, to look for meaning because there are a lot of gifts in that.

There are gifts in an aging body, even though sometimes it does break and it's really irritating. And I think, I think we're not allowing ourselves to really feel and to be in our bodies as they age if we're going to keep on trying to hold ourselves back to stay young and beautiful at all costs.

And really. we have to value ourselves in a different way, not hanging on to seeing ourselves through the male lens of how can we go on looking as young and luscious as possible, but how do we actually move into a new version of ourselves, into wisdom, power, being mentors to the next generation, or going into the kind of spiritual transformation of which you speak.

Um, you know, because I think if, if, if women who are approaching menopause see older women who've gone through it and come out the other side strong and, you know, and with a vision, not necessarily with lots of lipstick, but there's nothing wrong with, with the lipstick, but, but with a vision. Um, and a new way of being and enthusiasm, then I think that's really, really important because the truth is that, that all of the women that are, certainly for me, um, 50 onwards has been the best time, certainly my 50s were the best decade of my life.

And if you, and if women see each other doing that. And I think it, it really, it really shows how, how that can transform the way that you look at the world. And I know so many women who say that after midlife has been, has been the best time of their lives, precisely because we're freed. of a lot of the constraints and, um, and we're freed to be who we should always, you know, have been, who we were always going to become.

It's just like, okay, shape up or something bad is going to happen to you. And of course, in a fairy tale, the bad thing that happens is the old woman kills them because it's a fairy tale and she's allowed. But the whole point there is that you get to a stage and I think so many of us feel it, although we don't all admit to it.

Uh, sometimes it's important to show people the consequences of what will, you know, what's going to happen if they, if they carry on down this path. And I think a lot of women find that very, very liberating. And most of the women that I know use that power of truth telling. Very, very responsibly, you know, because there's no point telling the truth just for the sake of telling the truth.

You tell the truth when it's going to change something and shift something.

That for me has felt very liberating after years of writing in a particular voice which suited the kind of, you know, the very kind of male lens newspaper industry to actually be able to write truly what I think and from the heart has been a real liberation for me. I think that comes with quite a lot of fear and quite a lot of pain, but I think it also feels feels very powerful when you do it and it connects in a way that I think nothing else does because I think there's a real hunger, um, in women to see something else to not to be written off kind of at this point.

And that's why, you know, your work and I hope what I'm trying to do too is important.

Sense of obligation really. I'm very, very much more interesting and very much more arty. You know, for example, because, because everything that you have held back during the first part of your life when you thought it was important to conform in order to keep the jobs and in order to keep everybody happy.

Um, all of that is gone and what comes through then is something very unique and very individual and it's very much more interesting and that's why I love the second half of life.

Um, tell us a bit about what, what are your ambitions now? My ambitions for writing. Yeah. Or for, you know, for the rest, for the, for the next bit of your life.

I've got two books now that are very, very focused on the second half of life. And I'm kind of interested to sit and think what I, what I understand now about the first half of life that I didn't understand or so. Kind of lots of, lots of different ways of, of, um, exploring that, but always, always with another book in mind.

That's just about it for this time, but why not head straight to this week's bonus debrief episode, What We Learn From Sharon. Women's Centred Coach Wendy Lloyd and I will be selecting three takeaways from my chat with Sharon Blackie to help you reframe your midlife journey with confidence and clarity and become the woman you always wanted to be.

Next time, I'll be talking to longevity leadership expert Avivah Wittenberg Cox.

Just use the code QueenAgerPod at andbegin. com to get your heavily discounted serum. The Queenager podcast was hosted by me, Eleanor Mills, produced by Wendy Lloyd and engineered by Santi Arribas. At rear window studios with original music by Hamish Clark. Thanks for listening and being a part of the Queenager revolution.