On Tuesday morning, I was standing in my kitchen waiting for the kettle to finish its familiar rattle when I noticed a peach on the counter. It was just sitting there, a little softer than it had been the day before. I hadn’t planned to stop. My plan was to make tea and move along with my day. But the peach held my attention in a way I couldn’t explain.
Almost immediately a line from a poem slipped into my mind. Do I dare to eat a peach. I hadn’t thought about that poem for years. Yet there it was, fully intact, like something that had been waiting.
Suddenly I was back in my early twenties in an English literature seminar where our professor was working her way through The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. She spoke about ageing and hesitation and the quiet bravery of doing something as small as eating a peach when you are afraid of looking foolish. She talked about the trousers rolled at the ankle and the peach juice dribbling down a chin and the feeling of letting yourself be a person rather than an idea.
At twenty-one, none of this belonged to me yet. I understood the poem in the way a student understands a text. I didn’t understand the life inside it. It felt remote, almost theatrical. Even so, certain lines stayed with me. I didn’t memorise them. They simply settled in my mind the way old songs do. Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets. In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo. The phrases return now with a kind of softness that only time can create.
Standing there in my kitchen, I realised something that surprised me. I finally understood what my professor had been trying to tell us. Not in an academic way but in a lived one. Ageing isn’t a tragedy or a punchline. It is the slow work of returning to yourself.
This is something many of us learn only in midlife. We spend years moving quickly. We say yes because we can. We build competence the way other people collect souvenirs. We keep going because that is what is expected and because slowing down feels inconvenient. At first the pace feels normal. Then it becomes a habit. Eventually it becomes a story we tell ourselves about who we are.
But the body always keeps the real score. At some point it begins to ask questions. A tension that won’t leave. A fatigue that doesn’t respond to sleep. A sense of misalignment that arrives quietly and then refuses to go away. These signals are easy to ignore. Most women are good at ignoring them. We are trained from a young age to keep moving and keep accommodating and keep proving that everything is fine.
Midlife interrupts that pattern. Not dramatically. Usually it happens through small moments that catch us off guard. A line from a poem. An ache that keeps returning. A morning when you realise you are tired in a way that sleep cannot repair. These moments are not crises. They are reminders. They ask a simple question. Have you made room for yourself lately.
When I was younger I thought daring meant something large or bold. Now it feels much quieter. It feels like resting when I need to. It feels like telling the truth about what I want. It feels like turning toward my own life rather than sprinting through it. The older I get, the more I understand that daring often looks like small, ordinary choices that make life feel more like a home and less like an assignment.
Thinking about that peach line now, I realise the question isn’t truly about the peach. It is about whether you allow yourself to choose anything honest, even if it is messy or imperfect. Whether you let yourself be seen as you are. Whether you show up for your own life instead of performing a version of it.
The return to yourself often begins in these tiny, accidental pauses. The world tells us to optimise and improve and stay ahead. We track our steps and our sleep and our moods. We try to stay updated and productive and relevant. Yet the most important shifts rarely come from systems or strategies. They come from noticing what is already happening inside you.
Returning to yourself is not a reinvention. It is a remembering. It is the slow rebuilding of the connection between who you are and how you live. Sometimes it begins with something as ordinary as a peach softening on the counter. Sometimes it begins with a poem you studied long before you had the life experience to understand it.
In that literature classroom all those years ago, I listened to my professor speak about the courage of ageing. I remember thinking she was overly sentimental. Now I see she was describing a kind of freedom you only earn over time. The freedom to take yourself less seriously. The freedom to stop performing competence. The freedom to let the peach juice run down your wrist and not care who notices.
So on that Tuesday morning I picked up the peach. I ate it standing at the counter. It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t symbolic. It was just a moment that felt honest. And in that small act, I felt something loosen. A sense that I was, in some way, returning to myself.