How I Found My Muse on a Greek Island
I ran away to a Greek island. Because who wouldn’t, given half the chance?
But I arrived on the shores of the Aegean lugging a fair amount of baggage… and none of it Vuitton.
It wasn’t just about floating in crystal clear water, reclining beneath a beach umbrella, and downing more than my fair share of Aperol Spritzes. Though, I’ve got to admit, it was a bit of that.
The reason I washed up on the tiny Greek island of Symi was to find words to express whatever the fuck it was that I was going through.
Most of all, I was searching for my muse, who had gone MIA without leaving a forwarding address. Menopause meant my well of creativity had run dry… so to speak.
Symi was the final leg of what was meant to be the trip of a lifetime.
With the youngest of our kids out of school, my husband and I took off for a three-month vacation in the Mediterranean. A month each in the tiny hilltop town of Gaucín in Andalucia, Sicily’s Ortigia, and an idyllic Greek island just off the Turkish coast.
My plan was to write a novel about a woman of a certain age. I imagined it to be a gently amusing, life-affirming and contemplative piece.
Think Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love for the menopausal generation.
But you know what they say about the best laid plans? Yeah.
It sure wasn’t where I ended up.
When I sat down to write, I couldn’t find the words.
Voices in your head may be a mark of madness. But for a writer like me, they’re where my stories begin.
My mind paints pictures of the people who become my characters.
They whisper to me. I learn their voices, share their secrets. We become friends. They’re my constant companions.
I don’t set out to make them a certain way. I just open my mind, and they appear. That probably makes me sound completely bonkers.
But it’s true.
It’s the well of creativity that’s kept me going.
A multi-dimensional universe is created in my head that my imaginary friends move through. I can see, feel, smell, and taste everything they do.
What ends up on the page is a tiny fragment of that alternate reality.
Pick a paragraph in anything I write, and I can recount the smell of suntan lotion on someone’s skin; the sound of a jet ski out on the bay; and the sharp pain from a pebble trod underfoot, which has tumbled from a garden bed onto a terracotta-tiled walkway warmed by the afternoon sun.
Yeah, I know. It gets silly.
But it really is that vivid… when it’s working.
As I spread my towel on the sun lounge that first day in Greece and took out my notebook, those voices were mute. They had been for a while. And that terrified me.
Confusion about what was happening to me, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was occupying my every waking moment.
The aches… the pains… the sweats… the 3am wakeups… the incandescent raging against nothing and everything… the sense of complete uselessness… well, that was bad enough.
But the thing that distressed me the most was that menopause seemed to have scared off the most special part of me… the part of me that creates worlds.
What was needed to shake me out of a terminal case of navel-gazing was a muse.
She did eventually appear. But in the most surprising of forms.
As I sat there and tried to clear my mind, I watched a woman with whispery silver hair stagger, bow-legged, towards the water’s edge.
A tall man, considerably younger than her, walked beside her, one arm around her waist and the other extended to hold her hand.
Her fierce, arthritic-knuckled grip turned his fingers white.
The pair waded out until the water was waist deep. And then, she set herself free.
She lay on her back and floated—eyes closed, arms outstretched—to where the aquamarine turned inky blue.
There, she began to swim.
It was no miraculous transformation. Bent arms windmilled into the water as pale legs stained with purple veins kicked at the sea.
She moved slowly. Painfully. But, moved, she did.
The young man lowered himself into the shallows and waited.
When she was done, the woman returned, and the process reversed. Only this time, she paused at the edge of the sea while he retrieved a towel for her. She dried herself, took his arm, and they resumed their painful progress towards the line of sun lounges at the top of the beach.
At first, I thought he was her son. The gentle familiarity and affection between the two hinted at that.
Perhaps that was just me indulging in wishful thinking. Because I was half a world away from my own children.
And I was adrift.
Maybe that’s what we hope for when we give birth. That, one day when we need them, our children will care for us as the tall, young man was helping the woman I assumed was his mother.
But, of course, it’s never that simple.
Motherhood is a remarkable, and very beautiful, thing. But… you knew there was going to be a ‘but,’ didn’t you?… a peculiar psychological shift happens for many of us who have carried children to term.
It certainly did for me.
I no longer felt connected to my body. It wasn’t a terrible thing. I actually enjoyed pregnancy. But it did feel like I was the driver behind the wheel of a bus carrying one, very precious, passenger.
My job was to make sure the vehicle was serviced, topped up with the best fuel, and that it stayed on the road until we reached the destination.
But that wasn’t the end of the journey, of course.
Because once I reached the depot and the passenger disembarked, the bus was expected to transform into an all-night diner, with me doubling down as short-order chef, waitress, and dish-pig.
OK, that’s as far as I’m going to push that metaphor. But you get what I mean.
Pregnancy and motherhood teaches you that you no longer control your body.
It belongs to another.
It doesn’t help that society tells women the same thing.
Our bodies are vessels we just happen to inhabit.
To the world, we’re incubators. Ornaments. Sex dolls.
Our purpose is to have things put into us, and things taken out of us.
Is it any wonder that one of the most fraught relationships many of us will ever have, is with our bodies?
The next day, the elderly woman was back with her companion.
I watched her pick her way across the stones again and applauded her complete lack of vanity.
And it struck me that if the sexes had been reversed—if it had been a desiccated Rupert Murdoch clone reclining beside a svelte young woman in an Aegean beach club—my assumption would have been that they were a couple.
That’s because we have no trouble imagining that an older man has sexual needs.
Not so, older women.
The menopausal woman is the sportscar that was all the rage back in the day when it was first released, only now you can’t get parts for it, and it only takes leaded fuel, so it’s sitting up on blocks under a tarp in the garage.
Not the male vehicle, though.
He’s registered with the vintage car club and stored in a climate-controlled garage to be trotted out for race days and coastal drives in summer.
I’ll park that metaphor there.
(… sorry—awful pun).
But things are different for men.
A big part of that is fertility.
While menopause means our ovaries are fit only for producing dust bunnies, testes manage to keep pumping out baby batter until their owners are six-feet-under.
As far as men are concerned, it gives them potency.
Sure, the package is a bit worse for wear, what with the erectile dysfunction, the hair loss, the dad-gut, and moobs that give Dolly Parton a run for her money.
But nature’s all, like, “yeah, dude… don’t worry… we’ll leave you with your sperm… so, book in for a weekly spray-tan, whack on some veneers and hair plugs, and here are some blue pills to get the old noodle al dente again. Chuck in a Ferrari, and you’ll land yourself a second family before you can say ‘child support’.”
Not so, women.
We’re taught that beauty is currency. No matter how much we have deposited in the bank, we’re expected to earn interest on our savings, whatever the cost.
We sculpt, reshape, paint, poke, prod, starve, plump, squeeze and stretch ourselves into shape.
Even when the midlife cloak of invisibility descends, we’ve invested too much to let things slide.
I’m as bad as anyone. I spend way too much on pots of cream that promise to keep my skin dewy and youthful.
And if the bathroom scales start moving in the wrong direction, I’ll up the gym visits and leave the rosé on the shelf for a week or two.
I tell myself that it’s all about keeping healthy. That’s true, in part. But it’s also patented bullshit.
Just because I’m invisible, doesn’t mean I want to be unsightly as well.
Yet the woman I watched floating out in the Aegean had discovered a way to silence self-doubt.
The act of fulfilling a desire—in this case, a dip in the Aegean—was far more important to her than concern about the way she looked doing it.
I envied her.
It’s insidious.
Growing up, I learned that appearances are everything.
Strength wasn’t measured by how well I weathered the storm. It was gauged by how good I looked while I was riding the waves.
Flawless skin, clear eyes, lippy, and a well-coiffed head of hair were pieces of armour I strapped on each day to go into battle.
Hell, when I first arrived in my Greek paradise, I even (don’t judge) wore makeup to the beach. Not a heap of it, mind you. Mascara, a bit of concealer, and some lippy. But makeup, just the same.
In my defence, I was coming off the back of a month spent in Sicily’s Ortigia, where the five-star lido I spent my afternoons was populated by women who looked like Monica Bellucci and changed into at least three bathing suits a day. It was a high-end meat market.
But this was Greece.
I was on a tiny island, living in a village with a permanent population of around twelve and a donkey named Spiro. Humans were outnumbered by cats.
The picture at the top is the view from our balcony. It was metres from the front door to the sunlounge.
Effie at the little market downstairs certainly didn’t care whether my lashes were mascara-fabulous or not. Nor did Constantinos, who set me up on the beach each day.
So why couldn’t I find the same peace with myself as the magnificent woman now snoozing beneath an umbrella a little further along the beach?
Women are conditioned to be eternally dissatisfied with our physical appearance, all the better to train us to be good little consumers.
Because you can bet that whatever it is that you don’t like about yourself, there will be a balm, a contouring trick, or a surgical procedure that will help fix it.
Even the things that are supposed to be our most appealing bits and pieces aren’t enough.
Take me, for example.
Long legs… sure. But my non-existent waist means anything with a belt makes me look like a racehorse wearing a tutu, even when I was at my youngest and twiggiest.
Then there are my decent-sized and perky boobs. Great. Only flounces and pleats are out, or I might as well be a Bavarian beer wench on tankard duty.
My broad shoulders are also a win, particularly in summer when I can go sleeveless. But force me into a high-necked, sleeved top and combine it with the Bavarian-beer-wench chest situation, and I wouldn’t look out of place on the starting bench for the Dallas Cowboys.
Not that any of that deterred unwanted male interest.
Because that’s the other thing about being valued only for the skin-sack of blood, bones, and muscle we walk around in. We may as well be a rump steak displayed under lights in a butcher’s front window.
We’re there for the taking.
What woman doesn’t have a story or fifty?
Tell me as you read this that you’re not nodding along and recalling your own horror stories.
There was the family friend twenty years my senior who offered me a lift home when I was a painfully shy and skinny 11-year-old, and tried to woo me with a hand on my leg and the Bellamy Brothers’ classic, ‘If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?’
Then there was the maths teacher who insisted on fiddling around with the computer cords beneath the desk under my legs and then giving me shoulder massages when he was well into his ‘40s and I was around 13.
Or the boss who rarely let a management meeting go by without making a comment on my breasts or the length of my skirt.
And then there was the man who decided he wanted to be more than just a friend and slipped me a tab of LSD without my knowledge. I lost most of the night and ended up in a stranger’s bed, wondering why the ceiling rose had grown arms that were trying to strangle me. I lost my bag, my keys, my shoes, and my dignity, and was trying to smash my way into my home with a bare fist on the laundry window. A neighbour heard and helped me.
It’s just part and parcel of being a woman.
A catcall from a man driving past? He’s just letting you know you’re appreciated.
Pat on the bum on the train? Just paying you a compliment, love.
A man crosses the road to strike up a conversation while you’re waiting at the tram-stop? Just being friendly.
Ignore it, and you’re a bitch.
Play nice, and you’re leading him on.
Push back, and you’re asking for trouble.
By the time we’re in our twenties, we’ve learnt that we’re prey.
No prizes for guessing who the predators are.
What menopause does to a writer’s brain
When we realise our body is a battlefield, we retreat to our safe place.
Our minds.
Senses work overtime. Cortisol keeps us in a constant state of fight or flight, or fawn.
We learn what we think are the rules of the game. Most of the time, it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t.
Then, midlife hits.
And the body decides it’s not going to cooperate any longer. Add to that the loss of purpose that lands for so many of us. I couldn’t count the number of extraordinarily accomplished and brilliant women my age I see struggling with careers in free-fall.
Then there’s the shifting landscape that is later-life motherhood.
We spend decades as chauffeur, chef, nurse, logistics consultant, therapist, strategist, mediator, systems analyst, cheerleader, careers counsellor.
Speaking for myself, I became so accustomed to being the everything to everyone in my household, that when my services were no longer required, it came as a shock.
Without so much as a signed card and a farewell cake in the staff room, much less a gold watch and commemorative plaque, I was sent on my way.
I thought my voices had fallen silent because they no longer had anything to say… that they belonged to a part of me that had disappeared.
Then, I met the woman I had been watching on the beach every day.
She had struck up a conversation with my husband while they were both waiting for coffee in the taverna.
She was, it turned out, an Italian art history professor.
Her companion was neither her son, nor her lover. He was a friend and a colleague who travelled with her to help her cope with the things her octogenarian body could not.
We dined together that evening, and two more after that.
I had been expecting Buddha with double-X chromosomes.
Instead, I found a prize fighter.
Her mind was ferocious. But her body had fallen behind. And she hated it.
When I told her about how I was feeling, she laughed until she cried.
“Don’t be a fool!” she said. “You’re young. You’re clever. You’re beautiful. Enjoy every moment. Because it will never be easier for you than it is now. You will look back on these days with fondness.”
That was the day my voices returned.
I had been searching for characters who were gentle and wise. But they had long departed, if ever they existed.
The people who arrived on my doorstep were unhinged, unwired, and deeply human.
Forget Eat, Pray, Love.
The world that burst into life in my head was ridiculous, real, funny, and furious… all the things I was living.
And ten months later, Sunday Reilly is All Out of F*cks to Give was finished.
I’d been in Greece for a week when I walked bareface to the beach for the first time.
It sounds ridiculous, but it was quite a moment for me. Admittedly, I had built up a rather lovely Mediterranean tan by then, so I had that in my favour.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m still buying ridiculously expensive face cream, styling my hair, and wearing red lippy.
But I’m starting to do it for me.
Not for an audience.
