These lovely little chapters I indulge in writing and hope you enjoy too. Stylized. Conversational. Slightly sarcastic. Random thoughts stitched together like the inside of my brain on a good day. Like when I write in my journal, but this, this is for all eyes to read.
Lately, as I’ve been diving deeper into writing my first fiction novel, my mind keeps wandering backwards. Way backwards. I find myself imagining what it must have been like to be a woman writer in the 1800s. No Google Docs. No Substack. No group chats hyping you up. Just you, your thoughts, and probably some aggressive corsetry cutting off circulation to your frontal lobe.
There’s something I’m deeply drawn to about the Victorian era, especially the outlier women.
The Women Who Didn’t Fit the Mold
These were the women who pushed boundaries and questioned the status quo, often quietly and at great personal cost. They wanted more than what they were supposed to want, which alone made them suspicious. Ambition on a woman was considered inconvenient at best and dangerous at worst.
Let’s be clear though, we had brains back then. And feelings. And creative fire. We were not just baby makers and housemaids with a side of embroidery. History just prefers a simpler narrative.
Midlife Without a Manual
And can we take a moment for the women who made it to midlife back then without hormone replacement therapy, supplements, or even the language to describe what was happening inside their bodies?
Many of them genuinely thought they were going mad. Doctors probably agreed. What they were actually experiencing was perimenopause, a slow hormonal plot twist with zero warning and absolutely no grace period.
It makes you wonder how many brilliant women were dismissed, silenced, or institutionalized simply because their bodies were shifting and nobody had a clue what to call it.
Emily Dickinson Would’ve Been a Gen Xer
Somewhere along this historical spiral, I started rewatching Dickinson, the Apple TV series about Emily Dickinson. During her life, she was largely dismissed as an eccentric recluse who never married. Translation: she opted out of the expected script and made people uncomfortable.
Only after her death did the world decide she was actually a poetic treasure.
Emily would have made a phenomenal Gen Xer. We are radical, independent, creative, scrappy, introspective humans who don’t tolerate nonsense just to keep the peace. We question authority. We rewrite rules. We quietly burn things down and rebuild them better, preferably in designer shoes.
This Is Not the Epilogue
As I went down the rabbit hole of reading everything I could find about Dickinson, something clicked. I started wondering how I could inject some of her essence into my own writing. Into my voice. Into my work. Even into my social media content.
Not as cosplay, but as permission.
If we merged together, we’d be this midlife creative comfort persona. Someone who gives you space to be deep and sarcastic. Soft and sharp. Reflective and wildly self aware. Someone who doesn’t need to be loud to be powerful and doesn’t need permission to take up space.
Maybe that’s the real takeaway of this chapter.
Midlife is not a fading act. It’s not the epilogue. It’s the chapter where you finally stop editing yourself for an audience that was never really listening anyway. It’s where you let your inner outlier have the mic.
So maybe the question isn’t who you’re becoming next.
Maybe it’s who you’re finally allowing yourself to be, once you stop trying to be palatable.
Just something to ponder.
xx, Maria
