Herstorically Speaking

a shout out to my middlescence friends

My husband used to call me the Tasmanian Devil.

When I was really upset—truly at the end of my rope — I’d spin into a furious wave of colorful emotions and salty adjectives.

Cartoonish but NOT funny.

Maybe you have been there too. Maybe you have felt both the power and personal shame of outrage.

But here’s something I have learned. There is a word people have used throughout history to describe women like us. Passionate women who speak their minds, who rage at injustice, who refuse to be quiet. That word is hysterical. And do you know where it comes from? The Greek word for uterus, “Hystera.” Meaning womb.

For centuries, women who raised their voices were diagnosed as hysterical — their passion pathologized, their pain or upset dismissed, their stories eviscerated.

The cure? Sometimes institutionalization. Sometimes anti-depressants, Sometimes worse.

So if being Hysterical means I have a womb, a voice, and something to say —

then I am proudly…. Powerfully….and Unapologetically….Hysterical.

My story.

Picture me at eight years old.

Wispy hair in a whale spout. Arms akimbo. Wide-eyed grin. I revel in perfecting my handstands in the front yard, clearing footpaths through the woods, sketching in every notebook I can find — convinced I was going to be the next Norman Rockwell. I was impetuous. Spontaneous. Fully, completely myself.

Then high school. AP Art history. Our teacher projects a 17th Century Italian painting on the screen — a commanding portrait of a woman wearing a red velvet cloak — and asks us to identify the artist. We scour the textbook. We are stumped.

Our teacher smiles and points to the canvas. The tiny signature reads: Artemisia Gentileschi. A self portrait of the artist dressed as Saint Catherine of Alexandria.

The artist wasn’t in the textbook. She wasn’t in the index (this was pre-Internet.) In the premier art history book of the time, Janson’s, only a few women were listed. Out of thousands of artists.

I was gobsmacked.

I felt something shift in me that day — this visceral, electric mismatch between the world I believed in, and the world I was living in. I couldn’t yet name it. But I felt it.

So I did what any stubborn, curious girl would do. I followed her. I studied art history, spent a year in Paris sketching nudes and exploring galleries, and eventually landed at the Smithsonian Institution — where I discovered something that would send me in a completely new direction.

I found my mission. I found my rage. And for the first time, I found my direction.

What I found at the Smithsonian lit a fire under me. If money and power were the gatekeepers, I needed to understand them. So I went to business school. Then I built a startup — riding the early Internet wave, raising venture capital, scaling fast.

And then I crashed. Completely.

I was thirty-eight, with a 3-year-old and another baby on the way, and I left it all. My husband and I built a new home and a new life and I tried — really tried — to be content.

But even leading the PTA and volunteering at church left me intellectually itchy. I hated being financially dependent and craved adult conversation. I became impatient, grumpy, and prone to outbursts.

The Tasmanian Devil showed up again.

I’m 52 years old. I’m sitting in a parking lot, gripping the steering wheel of my minivan. Sobbing. Full-on. Mascara-down-the-face, ugly crying.

I had joined a new startup — because I wasn’t “done yet” — and sitting in that driver’s seat I finally admitted the truth: the Executive team was completely undervaluing me and I was miserable. The only thing left to do was the most terrifying thing I could imagine.

I had to build my own table. Again.

Weeks later, InANutshell Consulting was born — built to help female founders turn their brilliant ideas into businesses that actually get funded, actually scale, and actually last.

And here’s what I learned that you may not know: women start businesses at the same rate as men. But only two percent of female founders get VC-funded. Two percent. And that number hasn’t moved in twenty-five years.

So yes — I take that personally.

And then came what I can only call my “midcentury season of losses”.

My family dog. My father. My mother.

One after another. And in the midst of all that grief and caretaking, my husband and I became “Open Nesters” as the last of our three daughters headed to college. On a solo retreat to Boulder, I realized I no longer recognized myself. After twenty five years of taking care of everyone else, I’d lost sight of what truly blew my hair back. I wanted to return to being the person I was designed to be.

I call this “middlescence” — that strange, uncharted territory in your late 50s where the world assumes you’re winding down, and your whole body and soul are insisting the reverse.

I spent five years recalibrating. Deeply.

Re-membering what I love.

I said no — firmly, unapologetically — to everything that no longer jazzed me. Hockey games. Violent movies. Uncoachable clients.

I began investing my time and money in what I want to see in the world. I started taking big risks. Speaking out. And I began the practice of deliberately, repeatedly, incorporating joy into each day.

And I discovered something about being a sixty-year-old woman in this culture: we are largely invisible. At first, that stings. And then? You realize it’s our titanium. Nobody expects anything from us. Which is our secret advantage.

My ancestral grandmother was tried and executed in Salem. Her crime? Being “salty of tongue.” A widow and grandmother was silenced for speaking her truth. For refusing to lie or be quiet about the injustice she witnessed.

So maybe I am here by design. For a such a time as this.

I am done shrinking. I am no longer seduced by suffering nor ashamed of my desires for a better world. I am tapped in, tuned in, and turned on. I have nothing to prove anymore and everything to offer.

Here’s what I know about this moment in history:

There has never been a time — in all of recorded history — when there were more women our age who are educated, experienced, healthy, financially independent, and wise.

Never.

And the world is just beginning to understand what that means.

So now is NOT the time for us to make everyone feel more comfortable.

Now is NOT the time to shrink.

Now is NOT the time to go quiet.

Now IS the time to invoke the strength of the brave women who came before us.

Now is the time to invent the world we want to see.

Now is the time to invest in each other.

Because when we women who are salty of tongue, grounded in our joy, and refuse to be invisible stand together

:

We are not hysterical.

We are herstorical.