Two years ago, still married to my ex-husband and feeling exhausted and disheartened, I attended the wedding of two dear friends. Recently, I came across photos from that day and scarcely recognize myself.

My hair was salt-and-pepper grey, straightened but lacking any style, and in the floaty, floral dress I wore for the event, I appeared frumpy, dumpy, and aged.

Older, in fact, than I’ve ever looked before – or since. Worse, though, I look . . . sad. 

There was no spark in my eyes, and I remember the heaviness during that period, how my vitality had vanished. It highlights how the ending throes of a long marriage—18 years in my experience—can affect one’s spirit.

I put on a brave face at my friends’ wedding, but inside I felt I was gradually fading away. I had lost my identity entirely, withdrawn from life, allowed my hair to turn grey, as I sank into invisibility, depression, and middle age.

In bed every night by 9pm, I was doing the opposite of what Dylan Thomas suggests – raging against the dying of the light. 

Instead, my life was slowly slipping away as I sat, having long forgotten what it is to live.

There is nothing lonelier than feeling lonely within a marriage. I look at those photos and see a woman who believed her life was over, merely trying to get through each day without joy or a sense of purpose.

Yet here I am at 57 feeling more like 37. Set free, I have finally come back to myself. Not the woman I was when I was married, but to the essence of who I was when I was young; I like to say I have rewilded myself, dropping the constructs of who I thought I had to be in order to be accepted by the world as a wife, a mother, a novelist.

Now, I feel more authentically myself than ever before, and a happy side-effect has seemed to be dropping years from my appearance.

I have dyed my hair back to its original brunette, and lost the extra weight I was carrying . . . but it’s more than that.

When you live a life that is true to yourself, it changes you from the inside out. And I made seismic shifts, kicked conventionality to the kerb and started to rediscover the things that brought me joy.

Of course, age is still taking its toll. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I see the crepey skin on my neck and legs. I notice how creaky I sometimes feel when I stand up after sitting. Sometimes I am so tired I have to take a power nap.

But I mostly feel younger than I have in years. Yes, really, as much as 20 years younger.

Though, in reality, life was pretty heavy when I was actually 37. I was recently divorced from my first marriage with four children under the age of six. I then fell in love with the landlord of the tiny cottage I rented by the beach. We married, built a house and had a beautiful blended family of six children.

Our lives were wonderful for many years and I felt so very lucky. But I was racked by insecurity. Terrified of not fitting in, never really feeling good enough, I ‘armoured up’ with the right clothes, the right labels, the right jewellery – hoping that if I looked good enough on the outside, I would be accepted.

Everything started to change when I turned 50. On the morning of that birthday, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: who would you be if you stopped caring what anyone thought about you?

I think perhaps, that was the turning point in my quest to find peace.

My marriage changed during Covid. Life felt frightening, I wasn’t earning what I had been, and it was clear to me that we couldn’t afford our life in a rambling old house on Long Island Sound, with vegetable gardens I tended to every day and a huge kitchen where I gathered the people I loved and cooked on a daily basis.

My husband, who hadn’t worked for years, had helped out with the children while I earned the money, but they no longer needed him, so he went back to school to do a master’s in psychotherapy.

This left me continuing to carry the financial burden on my own, which had not only killed my creativity and left me struggling to write the novels I have written for most of my adult life, but had shut me down in every other way as well.

Financial stress – and feeling so alone in carrying that burden – filled me with resentment. We drifted further and further apart, him carrying his own resentment at having a withdrawn and cold wife who refused to help him take care of his ailing mother, who lived five minutes away.

He was so angry with me. And in the face of that anger, I made myself smaller and quieter, hoping that it would change.

Ultimately, once the last of the children left home for university, he left the house early every morning to have breakfast with his mother, did all her errands during the day, and spent most evenings sitting with her while he had dinner. I waited for him at home alone.

We both drowned our sorrows in ways that weren’t good for us. He chose vodka. I chose medical marijuana, prescribed to me to help my migraines but which I also used to numb my sadness.

By the time he came home, I was usually high. He didn’t complain, instead pouring himself a large vodka, as I counted the hours until I could go to bed. Always alone. He would fall asleep downstairs, stumbling up to bed at some point in the early hours.

We had become ships that pass in the night, barely speaking to each other, both of us angry at our unmet needs. Writing had always been my saviour, but my depression and loneliness made it impossible, which I suspect caused further resentment. My husband didn’t understand why I wasn’t able to write.

In 2021, we sold our family home and moved into a tiny cottage that felt dark and oppressive. 

I had found other houses in cheaper towns, beautiful old farmhouses with enough room for our children to come home, a big enough kitchen for me to keep cooking, gathering family and friends and showing my love for them in food.

My husband refused, insisting we move into a rental investment cottage I had bought during the first year we were together.

I had never planned to live in this house, not then and not now, but he insisted this was the right choice.

I walked down the stairs every morning, and thought, this is not a life I recognise. I spent two years there in the garden, come rain or shine, the only place where I felt I could breathe.

My friends’ wedding was in May 2023, a few short months before I finally left. No wonder I looked like a tired, middle-aged woman who had no joy in her life.

On New Year’s Eve in 2023, my husband and I had the same argument we always had, about money, his mother, our marriage, but this time, instead of coming together a few hours later to repair, we ruptured. 

As much as I loved him and wanted to believe things would change, I knew in that moment that this was it.

He was blindsided. We were both devastated. This was never how I wanted to end up.

Days later, I flew out to Marrakesh for a short holiday. I had fallen in love with the place a few years before when I’d visited to research a novel. It had made me feel alive and free. I didn’t come home. I spent the next year and a half there, learning to stand on my own two feet again.

It’s easy to label women who choose to leave at this age as having a midlife crisis, which is lazy and reductive. No middle-aged woman leaves stability and security for life on her own unless she feels she has absolutely no other choice.

My journey of rewilding started with my hair. While I had loved the time and money I’d saved by going grey, I hated how invisible I had become. 

As soon as I went back to brunette, with a wash-in temporary colour mask I applied myself in the bathroom, I felt younger. That’s the woman I remember, I thought; I recognise you again.

Next came clothes, my sense of style. As a woman who never felt right – too big, too tall, too curvy, not conventionally pretty, simply too much – I had shoe-horned myself into being acceptable. 

Into looking like everyone else. If ballet slippers were in vogue, I would wear them. I tried to fit in, to look like the rest of the women in my town.

But I am not, it turns out, someone who likes to wear what everyone else wears. My own style, it seems, has nothing to do with what’s fashionable, and everything to do with the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I am happiest in bell-bottom jeans, furry Afghan coats, rings on every finger, bracelets up both arms. I no longer dress for other people’s approval, but for myself. And in doing so, I feel vibrant in a way I’m not sure I have ever felt before.

Those first eight months were a roller coaster. There were days when I felt overwhelmed and scared, and days when I was filled with optimism and hope.

After the summer, I started to feel clearer, and calmer. I had far more energy than during my marriage, and today I am aware that I have more energy than I have had in 20 years. Certainly, that energy had gone AWOL in my marriage.

My friends say they can see it in my face. I haven’t done anything different, still do Botox a couple of times a year, but I am of the firm belief that I look better now not because of any significant changes to my beauty routine, but because I am happy, because I have finally learned to trust myself, and more, to like myself.

Intensive therapy has led me to being completely comfortable with who I am today. The introvert who shut herself away from the world is long gone.

I have had to forge an entirely new circle of friends in Marrakesh, which is a city that does not see age. I accepted every invitation that came my way, spoke to everyone I met, built a circle of friends. I frequently find myself at dinners, where I might be sitting next to an 80-year-old on one side, a 19-year-old on the other. Age is nothing more than a number.

Except perhaps in the dating world, which is a unique challenge but also somewhat liberating. I have had some time on the dating apps, which can be both fun and demoralising. It requires a tremendous sense of self-esteem, and the need to keep expectations low.

I have met some wonderful people, and a couple of terrible ones, but I am less interested in dating these days, more interested perhaps in forging friendships, rebuilding a career and dating myself. 

The apps are filled with scores of younger men who seem to want to meet women my age. I have not dated them, but have spoken to some of them, who say the allure of the older woman is their confidence, that they know what they want, that they have shed the insecurities of youth. 

Relationships with older women, they say, are often easier than with women their own age.

Certainly, I have no shame about my age, although I won’t pretend not to be delighted when people tell me I look younger. But I wouldn’t change it – the comfort in my own skin, the acceptance of my flaws, the wisdom I have acquired, has helped me move through the world in a very different way.

I have learned that there is a huge difference between loneliness, and aloneness.

I am more alone today than I have been in years, but I am no longer lonely.

Loneliness is a hollow ache, the sense that you are not being seen, a need for someone else to fill something that’s missing.

Aloneness is a quiet fullness, an appreciation of your own company. The aloneness can be overwhelming at times, but I have learned to embrace it; I would rather be alone than be surrounded by the wrong people.

I don’t know that I will marry again, but I am reaching a place where I think it might be lovely to meet someone, particularly now that I am finally comfortable in my skin.

When we are not bringing a suitcase of insecurities with us everywhere we go, people feel it. When we are truly content with ourselves as we are, people feel it. Strangers talk to me everywhere I go, and I am once again embracing all that life has to offer, unafraid, knowing that if people don’t want to be with me or dislike me, it no longer means that I am somehow not enough.

I am convinced that I am ageing backwards, at least emotionally. We have one life, and every opportunity is there to be seized. I may be 57 but in finding my truest self, in refusing to go gentle into that good night, I am slowly working my way back to 17.