When she was 45, Chrissie Swan’s life looked pretty fantastic from the outside. She was one of the most successful women in Australian media with lucrative TV and radio contracts, national fame, a lovely bloke, and three great kids. She was respected by her peers, admired by strangers, and adored by fans.
This would seem an unlikely time to be anything other than stoked. But Chrissie wasn’t so stoked. She was mostly just lost.
At what seemed like a high point in her life, all Chrissie Swan wanted was some time by herself. To think. To remember who she was. To figure out what she wanted from the second half of her life and whether she really wanted it to continue in the same direction.
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Slowly, she realised things needed to change. She didn’t yet know what things exactly, or maybe she did but it took a while for them to make themselves known to her because of the noise. She certainly knew what everyone around her needed but her own needs had been drowned out for so long she wasn’t even sure how to access them.
The noise is familiar to women in their thirties and forties or whenever you first become dislodged from being number one on the call sheet. Partners, children, caring responsibilities, aging parents, work commitments, troubled siblings, friends who are struggling... it’s an imperceptible slide that accelerates until you are so far down your own list of priorities that you forget what you even want from your own life.
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