The cold water lesson

There is a memory from my 20s that has been coming back to me lately, and I think it is because I have been using the lesson from it for years without fully realising it.

When I first learned how to dive, we started in the Virgin Islands. I mean, honestly, what a place to begin. The water was warm, the colours were ridiculous, and I remember that feeling of slipping beneath the surface and realising there was this whole other world underneath the one I thought I knew. It felt vast and quiet and alive, and for a moment all the noise of ordinary life became very small.

I loved it immediately. It was one of those experiences that changes your sense of scale. You think you know the world, and then suddenly the world shows you another floor.

The moment the water changed

The next place we went diving was the Pacific, and that was not the dreamy warm-water version at all. The water was basically the temperature of my fridge. The shock of it hit my body so fast that my whole system went into reaction before my mind could catch up.

I was not panicking in a dramatic film-scene kind of way, but I could feel my breathing change. It became fast and shallow. And once that happened, everything else felt more intense. The cold felt colder, the water felt bigger, and my body felt less safe.

Before long, we had to stop the dive early because I had used up my air too quickly.

That moment stayed with me, not because anything terrible happened, but because I understood something very clearly. The ocean had not changed. The cold had not changed. The only thing that could have changed my experience was me coming back to my breath before my body ran away with the fear.

It was such a simple lesson, and also deeply inconvenient, because of course I would have preferred the lesson to be that the Pacific should have been warmer.

The cold water moments of midlife

I think by the time we are around 50, most of us have had quite a few cold water moments. Not necessarily dramatic from the outside, but deeply provoking on the inside.

The body changes. Relationships shift. Children grow up and need us differently, or perhaps motherhood never looked the way we thought it would. Parents become fragile. Work that used to make sense suddenly feels tight around the ribs. Money teaches us things we did not particularly want to learn. The dreams we once had start to ask whether they still belong to us, and sometimes the answer is not as comfortable as we hoped.

And then perimenopause or menopause arrives with its own inner weather, and suddenly everything can feel closer to the surface. The irritation, the rage, the urgency, the tenderness, the exhaustion, the strange longing for more space and more truth. Something that would once have rolled off us can suddenly land like a personal attack.

I have had moments in this season where I reacted before I even knew what had happened. Only afterwards could I see that my system had gone into cold water. My breathing had changed, my nervous system had taken over, and I had used up far too much energy before I had even understood what was really being touched.

And I want to say this very clearly: I do not think women’s anger in midlife is wrong. Often, I think it is incredibly intelligent. It can arrive after years of being reasonable, holding the peace, making things work, carrying everyone else’s emotions, and trying to be the woman who can cope.

Sometimes anger is the first honest thing that has come out of us in years.

But it still asks us a question. What do we want to do with that energy?

Do we want to spend it all in the first few minutes, reacting to the shock of the cold, or do we want to slow down enough to understand what the provocation is showing us?

Our unfair advantage around 50

This is where I think our age becomes our unfair advantage.

Not because we suddenly become calm, serene wise women who float through life in linen and never shout at anyone. That would be lovely, but I have not found it to be entirely accurate.

Our advantage is lived experience. It is the fact that we have been provoked by life enough times to recognise that the thing in front of us is rarely only about the thing in front of us. We have learned, often the hard way, what it feels like to stay too long, say yes too quickly, swallow the truth, perform being fine, and wait for permission from people who were never going to hand it to us.

At some point, we realise we cannot keep looking in the mirror and expecting the reflection to smile first.

If we want something to soften or change, we usually have to take the first breath. We have to stop waiting until we feel completely ready. We have to get our arse into gear, not in the old pushing-through way, but in the much braver way of coming back to ourselves and choosing the next step from there.

This is not about controlling the ocean. Life will still be cold sometimes. Hormones may still create havoc. People will still say things that poke old places. Businesses will still outgrow their old shape. Some days will still ask more from us than we thought we had.

But the breath gives us a moment. And in that moment, we can ask a better question.

What is this showing me?

Maybe it is showing us where an old role has become too tight. Maybe it is showing us where our business no longer fits our energy. Maybe it is showing us where the good girl is still running the meeting. Maybe it is showing us that we have been waiting for approval when what we actually need is movement.

This is why I do not believe women around 50 are becoming less relevant. I think we are becoming far more dangerous to the old stories, because we have seen too much to keep pretending. We know too much to keep making ourselves smaller. We have lived enough to understand that a provocation can crack us open, and the crack is often where something new enters.

The whole map rarely appears at once. Most of the time, we only get the next step, and even that step may only become visible once we stop thrashing about in the water.

So start there.

With the breath.

Then take the next step.

With so much love & respect, Sharonah x