Following Strange Threads

Hello Everyone,

I hope this letter finds you well.

We’ve been talking a lot lately about The Creatrix, creativity and feeding our artists as part of my 12-month series “A year of Becoming.” Today I’m sharing how I’ve been feeding my artist with the women in The Liminal Studio, and I have to tell you, the process has not been at all what I expected.

I shared with you last week about consulting the cards and what they had to say about feeding my artist. Their message was simple: trust yourself. Trust Spirit. So, in an effort to trust myself, I’ve given myself permission to let my mind wander wherever it wanted to go. Which, now that I think about it, is something I haven’t allowed it to do for a very long time.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I fall somewhere in the neurodivergent camp. Growing up, I spent a lot of time masking in order to fit in. The trouble with masking is that it’s exhausting, and if you do it for long enough, you eventually forget where the mask ends and you begin.

Somewhere in my early twenties, I decided that the person I naturally was wasn’t going to get me very far. I believed I had to become more disciplined, more organised, more “normal.” So I squeezed myself into increasingly smaller boxes, lived by rigid rules, and tried to sand off every rough, strange and unconventional edge. There was a lot of sanding to do, believe me!

It worked, to a point. But no matter how hard I tried, I could never seem to thrive in a conventional job.

Instead, in my early thirties, I became a personal trainer.

Looking back, I can see why it suited me so perfectly. Every hour brought a different conversation with a different person. I was constantly moving, no chance to be pinned down. My day was structured, but no two hours were ever the same. Best of all, I was in charge of every interaction. I knew who I would be with, what we would be doing, how long we’d be together, and when the conversation would end. And for that entire hour, I was the boss. If I wasn’t in the mood for conversation and chit-chat, I could simply work my client so hard they couldn’t talk (strangely, they always loved those sessions the most). For a mind that finds predictability draining and endless social interaction overwhelming, it was almost the perfect occupation.

At the time, I thought I had found a career I enjoyed. Now I wonder whether I’d actually stumbled across a way of working that honoured the way my mind had always been wired.

Fast forward to the descent into perimenopause and beyond. Suddenly, it’s so much harder to mask. In fact, it becomes almost impossible. All the weird, squiggly bits start to ooze out of the boxes I’d packed them into, and I’m too exhausted to shove them back in or sand down any more edges.

Slowly, almost without noticing, I begin returning to myself.

And now here I am, at the other side of menopause, wanting to build a life that honours the woman who remained underneath it all. And the first thing Spirit asks of me is to unmask a little more. To loosen the ties that have kept me walking the straight and narrow, and let my mind wander where it wants to go.

So here are the threads I’ve been following as I take off my mask and feed my artist