Evie’s Story: Age: 48
I used to read two books a week.
I know that sounds like I’m showing off, and maybe I am, a little. But it was my thing. It had been my thing since I was twelve and discovered my nan’s Agatha Christies in a cardboard box in her spare room. I read on the bus, in the bath, in bed with a torch long after my husband had turned the light off. I had opinions about bookshops. I had a spreadsheet, an actual spreadsheet where I logged everything I’d read since 2011. I was a person who read. It was a fact about me in the same way that my eyes are brown and I take my tea with one sugar.
Then, sometime last autumn, I picked up a novel I’d been looking forward to for months. One of those you pre-order in hardback because you love the author and you want to hold it in your hands the day it comes out. I remember opening it on a Sunday evening, settling into the sofa, reading the first chapter, and feeling absolutely nothing.
I read it again, the same chapter, from the beginning. The words went in, but they didn’t land anywhere like dropping a stone into a well and never hearing it hit the bottom.
I put the book on the side table and told myself I was just tired. I’d read it tomorrow. But tomorrow came, and I didn’t pick it up. Or the next day. Or the day after that. The bookmark is still on page fourteen. That was nine months ago.
It wasn’t just reading. It was cooking. I used to spend Saturday afternoons trying new recipes, proper ones from cookbooks I’d collected over years, the kind with splattered pages and notes in the margins. Now I stood in the kitchen most evenings at half five staring into the fridge like it might tell me what to make for dinner. My daughter, who is sixteen and notices everything, said to me one night, “Mum, are you all right? You’ve been standing there for ages.” I closed the fridge and said I was fine. I made pasta with jar sauce and felt quietly ashamed of myself, which is a ridiculous thing to feel about a jar of sauce, but there it was.
It was the small forgetting that unsettled me most. Not dramatic ones. Not leaving the front door unlocked or forgetting to collect the children from school. Just a constant soft erosion of things that should have been automatic. I’d walk into the utility room and stand there, genuinely blank, unable to remember what I’d come in for. I’d start a sentence at work and lose the word I needed not an unusual word, not a complicated one, but a word like “schedule,” “budget,” or “Wednesday.” It would hover just out of reach, like a name on the tip of your tongue, and I’d have to talk around it while my cheeks went hot.
“What’s you know, the thing, the meeting planner thing,” I said to my colleague once, waving my hand in the air as if I could catch the word physically. She said, “The calendar?” and I laughed it off. But in the toilets afterwards, I gripped the sink’s edge, stared at my reflection, and thought: who are you becoming?
That was the question underneath everything. Not what is wrong with me, though I asked that too, but who am I if I’m not the person, I’ve always been? If I don’t read. Suppose I don’t cook with love if I stand in rooms and can’t remember why I’m there. If I cry at the John Lewis advert, a song on the radio, and a text from my sister that just said, “thinking of you” and wasn’t even sad.
I was crying more than I’d ever cried in my life, and I’ve never been someone who cries easily. Not at films, not at funerals, not when the children were born — though I told everyone I did because it seemed like the right thing to say. But suddenly there I was, tearing up in the car, at my desk, in the queue at Boots, for reasons I couldn’t name and couldn’t stop.
My husband asked me one evening, gently, if I thought I might be depressed. It was a fair question. I’d thought it myself. But it didn’t quite fit. Depression, in my limited understanding of it, felt like a darkness falling. This felt more like a blurring. Like someone had taken the photograph of who I was and smudged it with their thumb. I was still there, but the edges had gone soft. The things that used to define me my sharpness, my memory, my appetite for life were fading, and I didn’t know how to get them back.
I told my friend Sarah all of this one afternoon over coffee in her kitchen. I hadn’t planned to. I’d gone over to drop off a birthday present for her son and somehow ended up sitting at her table for two hours, talking about things I hadn’t said out loud before. She listened the way she has, without interrupting and without rushing to reassure you. And when I’d finished, she said something I keep coming back to.
“Maybe you’re not losing yourself. Maybe you’re just between phases.”
I didn’t know what to do with that at first. It sounded too kind, too tidy. But it stayed with me in the days that followed, turning itself over quietly in the back of my mind, the way certain sentences do when they’ve landed somewhere true.
Looking Back
What I see now, looking back over that year, is a woman who was measuring herself against a fixed idea of who she was supposed to be. I had an unwritten, rigid list of the things that made me. The reading. The cooking. The sharp memory. The emotional steadiness. And when those things started shifting, I didn’t just feel confused. I felt erased.
But people aren’t lists. I know that now, or at least I’m starting to. The things I loved haven’t disappeared; they’ve just gone quiet for a while. And the things I’m discovering in their place are smaller, stranger, and harder to name. A new patience I didn’t have before. A tenderness towards myself that would have embarrassed me even two years ago. A willingness to sit with not knowing, which is something I have never been comfortable with in my life.
I spent so long being frightened of the woman I was becoming that I never stopped to consider she might not be worse. Just different. Just new.
What Helped Me
Saying it out loud. Before I told Sarah, everything was just a private weather system inside my head shifting, threatening, impossible to predict. Once I’d spoken the words, they became smaller. Not solved. Just lighter.
Writing things down. Not a journal; I’ve never managed to keep one for more than a week. But notes on my phone. Tiny dispatches from inside the fog. “Forgot the word ‘invoice’ today. Found it eventually. Felt ridiculous.” “Cried at a cereal advert. The one with the little girl and the granddad. Not sure why.” Reading them back now, they’re almost funny. At the time they felt like evidence of something falling apart. Now they read more like weather reports from a past season.
Lowering the bar. I stopped expecting myself to be the woman who reads two books a week and cooks from scratch every night. I let myself be the woman who listens to podcasts in the bath instead, who makes beans on toast on a Tuesday and doesn’t feel guilty about it, who sometimes can’t find the word and says, “the thing” and moves on. She’s not less. She’s just operating on different terms.
Seeing my doctor. I went in expecting to feel silly and came out feeling heard. She didn’t dismiss anything I said. She asked questions I hadn’t thought to ask myself. She talked about hormonal changes, about what the body goes through at this stage, about the fact that so many women sit where I was sitting and say the same thing: I just don’t feel like myself. Hearing that it wasn’t just me was worth the appointment on its own.
What I Wish I’d Known
I wish I’d known that your identity isn’t a fixed thing carved in stone at twenty-five. That who you are is allowed to shift, stretch, and rearrange itself, and that this doesn’t mean anything is being taken away from you.
I wish I’d known that forgetting a word doesn’t mean you’re losing your mind. That crying more easily doesn’t mean you’re falling apart. That losing interest in something you’ve always loved doesn’t mean the love is gone; it might just mean you need to hold it differently for a while.
I wish someone had told me, plainly, that a lot of women go through this. That it’s common and real and documented, and not something you need to carry in silence while pretending you’re fine at the school gates, the office, the supermarket, and everywhere else women are expected to hold themselves together without complaint.
And I wish I’d known that the space between who you were and who you’re becoming isn’t emptiness. It’s transition. And transitions, even the disorienting ones, are still movement.
Reflection
I haven’t finished the novel. The bookmark is still on page fourteen, and at this point it’s become almost a talisman, a little paper flag marking the spot where something in me shifted.
But last week I picked up a different book. A short one, nothing ambitious, just a memoir someone had mentioned on a podcast. I read thirty pages on a Sunday afternoon while the house was quiet and the dog was asleep at my feet, and when I looked up, an hour had passed, and I hadn’t noticed. It wasn’t like before. It was quieter, less hungry. But it was something. A flicker of the reader I used to be, or maybe the beginning of the reader I’m becoming. I’m not sure yet.
I cried a little afterwards. Not the bewildering, unsupported crying of the past year. This was something else. A recognition. Like bumping into someone you haven’t seen in a long time and realising they haven’t changed as much as you’d feared.
I’m not who I was at forty. I’m not who I was at thirty-five. I don’t think I’m supposed to be. And the woman I’m becoming this softer, slower, more forgetful, more tender version of me I’m starting to think she might be someone worth knowing.
I’m still in here. I’ve just moved rooms.
