Being the Change: Shaping Your Creative Postmenopause

What if our ‘menopausal anger’ is because, by the time we get to menopause, we’ve been dealt with decades of misogyny and we’ve simply had enough?

What if our ‘menopause anxiety’ is at least partly because menopause reminds us that we are ageing and will die and we live in a culture that despises ageing and is terrified of death?

What if we don’t have to DO menopause brilliantly?

What if we could BE however we are and in that being, find out who we are becoming in postmenopause?

What if menopause isn’t the end, but the wake-up call to our vital third act?

Being the Change asks us to consider menopause as a time of crisis and opportunity. Like puberty, menopause is a gateway to a new time of life. A time where many of us realise that, whatever other caring responsibilities we have, we need to start caring about ourselves, before it’s too late. In that caring is the possibility of genuine creativity – an opportunity to create a third act based on all that we have learned in growing to this point – a third act we are hungry to live.

Postmenopausal herself for decades since cancer treatment in her 30s, in Being the Change Dr Stella Duffy draws on her work as a writer and theatremaker, her doctoral research into the embodied experience of postmenopause, and her psychotherapy practice, combining creative exercises, therapeutic ideas, and deeply personal life experience to offer a timely welcome to postmenopause as a life stage of energy and possibility.

Virago, who also publish Stella’s fiction, will publish Being the Change in the spring of 2027.