The Her Edit

There is a long list of things women have been expected to go through quietly. Ageing is near the top of it.

And menopause — for generations — sat somewhere just beneath, unspoken, a door closing softly that nobody was permitted to mention.

Then Davina McCall started talking. And a whole country found it could no longer look away.

For decades a familiar, warm presence on British television, Davina did something in midlife that reshaped her legacy entirely: she made a documentary about menopause, and then another, and she refused to be embarrassed by any of it. The brain fog. The sleepless nights. The anxiety that arrives without warning, and the sense — for so many women — that they are quietly losing themselves with no one explaining why. She named all of it, on camera, with a candour that gave hundreds of thousands of women the language they had been missing. Her book, Menopausing, became a companion for women who had spent years being told their symptoms were simply their lot.

What moves me about Davina is not only the campaigning. It is the willingness to be visible in the middle of something hard — to let herself be seen not polished and resolved, but in process. When she faced a frightening health scare of her own, a brain tumour discovered and removed, she spoke about that too. The fear. The recovery. The strange grace of a body that carries you through more than you ever asked it to.

There is a particular bravery in a woman speaking honestly about her own body, especially as she ages, in a culture that would much rather she disappear gracefully.

This is where our month of coming home to the body arrives — not at an ending, but at a continuation. Because the body keeps changing. It will move through seasons we haven’t reached yet, and the temptation will always be to meet those changes the way women were taught to: silently, apologetically, alone. Davina’s life is an argument for the opposite. That ageing is not a decline to be hidden but another stretch of the becoming. That honesty about the body is not oversharing — it is a service to every woman coming behind you.

Over these past weeks we have sat with five women: one who refused to let her pain be normalised, one who made room for the mind to be cared for, one who taught us to listen to our own rhythms, one who gave us permission to rest, and now one who reminds us that there is no season of this body we have to face in silence.

The body is not a problem to be managed or a secret to be kept. It is the home you live in.

And you are allowed to know it, tend it, and speak of it without shame, for the whole length of your life.

Which conversation about your own body have you been whispering — and who might it set free if you said it out loud?

Softly,
Fiona x