Now, to find myself ...

In 2015, I was rebuilding my life after caring for my father, who had lived with dementia for several years. I remember saying to one of my cousins that I felt I’d left myself at a bus stop somewhere and now I had to go back and find myself again.

I was floundering.

I was also in a relationship that had gone as far as it could without some big changes – and those changes were never going to happen. I had no financial back-up and was terrified of stepping out on my own as a woman in my late 50s.

At the heart of my situation was the realisation that I had very little sense of who I was. I felt completely at sea. There was no anchor point, no point of reference from which I could begin rebuilding my life.

I understand now that this experience is something many women know all too well. We can lose ourselves in the significant relationships in our lives. We become so accustomed to knowing what someone else wants that we find it difficult to articulate what we believe, what we want, or even what we don’t want. And the world around us often reinforces the idea that this is how things ought to be – that putting others first is simply what being a good woman is all about.

But I have come to wonder how much of this is about individual circumstances, and how much is shaped by the expectations society places on women.

We live in a world whose institutions, values and histories have largely been shaped within a male framework. I am still surprised by how often the values and beliefs within a household are influenced by the male of the house. I sometimes wonder whether this is a reflection of my generation and the way I was raised. Yet when I look at the challenges facing women today, I am not convinced that these expectations belong only to the past.

I raise the question of identity because it lies at the heart of my work now as an emerging writer and historian. It is the motivation behind the work I will be sharing with you here on Indigo Women.

Over time, I have become increasingly interested in the connection between who we understand ourselves to be and the women who came before us. What can we learn from their lives? What were the choices available to them? How were their lives shaped by the times in which they lived? And what might their experiences help us understand about our own?

I have come to believe that knowing our female ancestry can offer us another point of reference from which to understand ourselves. The lives of women who came before us can help us see our own experiences differently – not as isolated experiences, but as part of a much longer story of women’s lives.

Perhaps finding ourselves again begins, in part, with discovering the women whose stories have too often been left untold.

This is one of the questions that brings me to Indigo Women. I look forward to exploring it with you.