Somewhere on the way to holding everything together, a great many women quietly set a version of themselves down. This is a piece about going back for her.
She is capable, respected, relied upon. She is the one who remembers, who arranges, who absorbs. She has built a career or a family or both, and she has done it well. And if you ask her, in an honest moment, whether she is somewhere in all of it, she will go quiet, because the truthful answer is that she is not sure.
This is not a complaint about a good life. It is a description of a particular kind of disappearance, one that happens so gradually, and is so rewarded, that the woman it happens to is often the last to notice.
The self that gets deferred
Women are trained, subtly and relentlessly, to put themselves last. To be accommodating. To keep the peace, carry the emotional weather, make themselves smaller so that everyone else has room. Much of it is invisible even to the woman doing it, because it is called being good, being reliable, being a mother or a partner or a leader who never drops the ball. The self does not vanish in a single act. It is deferred, one reasonable sacrifice at a time, until midlife arrives and asks, quietly at first and then insistently, a question that will not be put off any longer.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver, The Summer Day
For many women the question arrives alongside a convergence of changes, children leaving or needing less, ageing parents, shifting bodies, the menopause, a career at a crossroads. It can feel like everything loosening at once. It is also, though it rarely feels like it in the moment, an opening. The structures that organised the first half of life are giving way, and in the gap there is room, at last, to ask who you are when you are not being useful to someone else.
Why we called it The Clearing
There is a moment on Kilimanjaro when the dense mountain forest, tangled, close, disorienting, gives way. The canopy breaks, the ground opens, and for the first time you can see exactly where you are and how far you have come. It is one of the most quietly moving experiences on the mountain, and it is the truest image we know for the work this expedition does.
The forest is the life a woman can no longer quite see herself inside. The clearing is what becomes possible when she steps far enough out of it, with nothing left to manage and no one to hold together but herself. That is not an escape from her life. It is the vantage point from which she can choose it again, differently, on her own terms.
Done among women
This work is done in the company of other women, and that is not incidental. There is a particular honesty that becomes available when the room is entirely female, when the roles are set down and the performing stops, when a woman can say the unsayable thing and watch it be met with recognition rather than alarm. Led by women who have walked it, held closely and never rushed, The Clearing is not therapy and does not pretend to be. It is challenge, fellowship and honest reckoning, on a mountain that has a way of giving a woman back to herself.
She was never gone. She was deferred. And she is, it turns out, still entirely reachable, if you are willing to go far enough to meet her.
References.
Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day," from New and Selected Poems (1992).