Robyn Malcolm

The minute you see a friend going, oh, I'm not coping, everybody else goes, neither am I, let's have a huddle.

Group hug.

The one thing I got all through my childhood was imagine what you could have done if you'd done some work, you know?

And I had to go back and rewrite all of it.

You're not having sex anymore to make babies, which means you're a certain age in your life, which means your lack of fertility is a source of shame, which means that your body is a source of shame, which means that your dry vagina is a source of shame, which means that everything ageing in you is a source of shame.

So why on earth would you want to rip your clothes off and throw yourself at anybody?

Because you're really fighting so much shame.

I would never have said this.

20 years ago, the idea of 60 seemed horrific to me.

And I look back at that and I'm like, oh, you fool.

But also, why was no one telling me?

Why was no one saying to me at the time, probably because I didn't have 60-year-old friends probably, but you go through this awful bit

which these days you don't have to go through in such an awful way as women used to.

And then you get out the other side and as long as you own it, you know, as long as you own it, it's better, I think, better than before, you know.

like I can inhabit who I am not in a way in a way that just it's I don't know how to describe it it's not that I'm taking up somebody else's space I'm just sitting in my space and I'm here there's a I feel like there's a little bit more courage because there's less anxiety about about what other people might think yeah and there's also less anxiety about failure you know because if you reach if you get to if you get to 60 or if you

whether you like to acknowledge it to yourself or not, you've had a lot of failure.

Yeah, you've already failed.

Yeah, it's like that Dr Seuss book, you know, that either places you'll go, you know, you'll be up here and then sometimes you won't and bang-ups and smash-ups happen to you and you get... So there's, you know, gratitude's an overused word, but I do feel that.

I'm like, ah, lucky to be here, actually, and I've fallen on my face so many times that...

I'm not scared of it anymore.