I spent my late adolescence absorbing the aesthetics of a decade that gave us heroin chic and super-waif as aspirational categories. I watched Victoria Beckham get weighed on live television two months after giving birth. I saw Kate Moss get widely celebrated for saying "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels."

The version of meditation most of us were handed is: sit still, empty your mind, and arrive at some smooth, untroubled state where nothing gets to you. It's a lovely idea, but for a lot of midlife women it's also a trap.

Maybe you’re drawn to the idea of a ceremony to mark the threshold of menopause, but you don’t have a clear picture of what it involves. Here’s an opportunity to embrace the experience in a way that feels meaningful.

There's a word running through every piece of advice aimed at midlife women right now: reinvention. The whole conversation assumes the woman you are now needs repackaging. I'm more interested in something else.

The conversation we're finally having about menopause is almost entirely medical. What you cannot find, almost anywhere, is someone acknowledging that you're also becoming a different woman.

I've sat in rooms where I could feel myself sliding sideways out of my own opinion. There was a dominant view and mine was different, and somewhere between the thought arriving and my mouth opening, I let it go.

Unsurprisingly, we may well have arrived in midlife not knowing exactly who our authentic self is. Buried under the rubble of Having It All, Doing It All, Attracting It All, Showcasing It All and now Shunning It All is a woman who's simply tired and uncertain.

In tribute to the women who paved the way, the ones who laid the foundations, the ones who fought and forged a path forward. In gratitude and reverence.

At 35, I moved back to my parents' house, divorced and in debt. People thought I was falling apart, but I was finally building the life I wanted on my terms.