This article is late

But don't come at me about my failings during International Women's Day week/month.

I’ve had a cracker of an International Women’s Day week/festival/depressing acknowledgment of how horrific the lives of many women remain.

I enjoyed this week mostly because I could speak openly about the impacts of Peri menopause AND ADHD when I:

1. Went to the wrong hospital to give a speech

2. Booked the wrong flight

3. Lost my phone

4. Late to events

5. Found my phone

6. Lost my phone again

7. Lost my glasses

8. Did not finish this Substack in time

9. Did not finish anything on time

10. (I could also add that I turned up to my radio show with 30 secs before it went to air - which is technically on time - but I am aware that my workplace is quite public and my bosses might find out how hard my producers had to sweat).

    And also, how good are the chicken sandwiches at these events? I have been through many obsessions – dim sims, pies with the lid cracked open, tzatziki – and now, I dream about that chicken mix that wizards make with the mayonnaise et al. How can a bird taste so good? This week also works so well for domestic labour quotient, as said chicken sandwiches are easy to pocket and then feed to the kid that night for dinner. He’s never eaten so well.

I was asked at one of the events that I spoke at about why I was feeling so cranky about the state of play for women in 2026. And beyond the pesky details of homelessness, poverty, femicide, domestic violence, unequal pay etc, I answered in the most peculiar way - I said, ‘It’s because I really love women.’ And when I said it, I realised just how strange it must have sounded. How can someone love a whole gender of people indiscriminately? It’s a hyperbolic overreach at the very least and an empty nothingness at worst. And yes, it’s a generalisation (but shut up, I’ve got ADHD mixed with a potent hormonal human body that has all but forgotten that she is on planet earth and it’s not the time to be pedantic with me)

But since then, I can’t think of any other way to say it. There is just something about women, due to the very nature of the being of the woman, that makes us so darn loveable. I tells ya, I haven’t met a bad one yet! But as absurd as the claim might be, this week was yet another one in my life where I was surrounded by women known and unknown to me that make me feel like the world is not entirely going to hell in a handbasket.

I have travelled the country speaking about wisdom and women and ageing for the last couple of years. It always shocks me, although it really shouldn’t, that these rooms where we gather are made up of 95% women. I genuinely can’t understand what must be inherently unappealing for men about discussing women and wisdom and ageing. It’s almost as if the issues that are faced by women, are exclusively women’s business. The one time a man did come to one of these talks/gatherings/coven meetings – he wrote notes during my presentation and at the conclusion of my speech, raised his hand and told a room full of women that he had a comment –not a question. I’m not sure what he said after that – it all went black – but it was a saliant reminder that these meet-ups are done in such a different way. Women lean in and are curious. They ask questions, share details of their lives, and listen deeply to each other in an authentic attempt to push ideas or understand something more deeply. Women have an interest not only in their lives – but in the lives of the people in their family, community and for the generations that have yet to arrive.

Of all the decisions in my life, concocting a plan to write a book that required me to travel the country uncovering the wisdom from women, has been the most genius. As a result, I now exist in a life of fancy lunches with my elder babes and a constant connection to older women whom I love and who share with me their lives and their perspectives and advice on how it is to find a way to throw your legs out of bed each morning. We don’t ever speak of anti-ageing creams or how to move that bloody hormone belly – no, it never comes up. Rather, it is often about matters of the heart – and the world, and poetry and art and listening to the birds. The other day I told Liz, 95, that I didn’t think I had the communication chops to do justice to a relationship that I was in – she just looked at me, furrowed her brow and said, ‘bullshit.’ Noted.

One of the most stunning experiences of this week was the All About Women Festival, held at the Sydney Opera House on the IWD, day itself. Featuring incredible women, Jacinda Ardern, Zadie Smith, Gina Chick - you get the drift. It also featured a discussion on my book A Wisdom of Age. But this time, rather than giving a speech or doing an interview on this book, they asked if they might also invite three women whose stories I share in it, to join me on stage for a panel. This, for me, was a sign of something shifting – as was the fact it sold out quickly. We want to see and hear from our elder women. Not just talk about them. We want to put them on a stage and ask them about the nature of being, centre their voices and witness their lives.

For me, this was deeply moving. I love these women for what they have shared with us all in the stories I gathered. Brenda Appleton, heroine and trans advocate who has led a life of quiet, persistent, resistance and activism. Guosheng Chen, academic and poet, a woman tempered from iron to steel in the years she lived through the Chinese cultural revolution and a woman who teaches us how to love without fear, and Liz Hicklin – the 95 year old woman that I manage who claims to be the oldest sit down, stand-up comedian in the world who has lived with enormous personal trauma - to sit before us, her eyes ablaze with mischief, to show us that we can.

But what is crucially transformative about the opportunity to put these women up the front of the room and attach Madonna mics to their heads, is that we realise we have been starving from the lack of access to the insights from women who have travelled for long distances in their bodies. We have been starved of hearing the way a woman might interpret the world and her place in it. Starved of the love that is inherent inside a women when they speak of themselves as an offering.

This panel wasn’t a discussion about the ten ways we might beat ageing, but rather one that took the entire sold-out audience into the deep heart of how it is to live on this earth as a woman, over years and years. The muck, the pain, the loss, the isolation – but mostly, the profound experience of a life full of giving and receiving love. It is not unusual to feel a woman before you hear her, to know that you are connected through something ancient and sacred – but it is something to do that as a community of women (and one man) and connect through the stories of their lives, so different from our own, but so, so, so fundamentally the same.

As bombs fall on lands and people around this world, and lives are so painfully disregarded, this was not just a lovely morning listening to some old birds chat about ageing, but it was about being there together as a prescription to bring us back to health.

At the foot of the matriarch is where I want to sit, aware that she might give me a kick to get me back on track, but at the feet of the woman who deserves my honour for all that she is and all that she has been, and mostly for everything that is still yet to come. And for what she has to offer, that profound understanding of what time can do to a human life in its quest to understand itself.

Thank you to the women who teach me how to love without fear and to stay fierce and curious about the world around me. Let us raise your voice, to be heard above the din.