Purpose Chose Me

I want to open September with something I am not especially proud of.

I did not want Silver Sirens.

Not at first. When the idea arrived, I was a psychotherapist with a full practice, relationships that needed me, and precisely no appetite for building a national community out of thin air. I had plans for that year. Sensible ones. Silver Sirens was not on the list, and if you had asked me then to name my purpose, I would have given you a tidy, professional answer that had nothing to do with it.

The idea came anyway. And then—this is the part I want you to hear- it would not leave.

We talk about purpose as though it were a set of keys. Something mislaid, findable, waiting patiently under a cushion until we get organised enough to look. A whole industry is built on that idea: the vision boards, the journals, the weekend retreats, the earnest question, What is your why? asked by someone half your age. I have sat opposite women in their fifties and sixties who arrived in my consulting room quietly convinced they had failed a test everyone else passed. They had done the exercises. They had made the lists. And still nothing had announced itself.

Nothing was wrong with them. The premise was wrong.

Because in my experience, and I say this as a woman who has now built two things she did not plan to build, purpose is not found. Purpose selects. It looks around, works out who has been quietly prepared for a particular piece of work, and lands on her whether or not she is free that Tuesday.

Here is how it landed on me.

I kept meeting the same woman. Not the same person — the same woman, over and over, in different bodies, with different accents and different postcodes. She was in her fifties or sixties. She was competent, often magnificent, and she had begun to notice that rooms closed over her as she walked through them. Waiters looked past her. Recruiters stopped replying. Her doctor spoke to her in terms of symptoms. She used the word invisible so often that I stopped hearing it as a metaphor and started hearing it as a diagnosis. And she almost always apologised for mentioning it, as though ageing were a personal failure of manners.

I noticed something else too. I was furious about it. Not professionally concerned, furious. That should have told me sooner what was coming.

Because I know what it is to be left. Regular readers know the story: a baby left behind in Nigeria at one year old, and a nervous system that drew its conclusion early — you are the one who gets left. I spent most of my life managing that wound without ever knowing its name. And here it was, walking into my practice in its fifties, wearing sensible shoes, calling itself something else.

Purpose does not knock. It moves in, puts the kettle on, and starts rearranging your furniture.

I resisted for a while, and I want to be honest about why, because I think the resistance is where most purposes go to die.

I could tell you it was the cost, and that would be true as far as it goes. Being chosen is expensive. It asks for your evenings, your savings, your professional reputation, and the version of you who had earned the right to rest. It asks you to be publicly bad at something in your fifties, in front of people who knew you when you were competent. Anyone who tells you that following your purpose feels like relief has never actually been handed one.

But that is the respectable answer. And I have never much liked respectable answers, so here is the real one — which I have carried for years and never once said out loud, and which I am typing now with my stomach somewhere near my knees.

I am a Black woman who was proposing to build a community for women ageing in a very white country.

Every time I imagined standing at the front of a room full of Australian women in their fifties and sixties, the same questions arrived in the same order, like a panel of examiners who had booked the room in advance.

Will they relate to me?

Will I be an outsider in the very thing I built?

And then the one that shames me most, because it is the one I used hardest against myself: what would I know about it anyway? I did not look my age. I still don't. For years people had said it to me as a compliment, that lovely, careless thing people say, and I had quietly filed it as a disqualification. What business does a woman who is regularly assumed to be a decade younger have standing up and talking about the indignities of getting older? Who was I to speak for a struggle that had, in that one visible way, gone easier on me?

Underneath those sat the quietest fear of all, and the one I have never written down until this morning. That I would not be given the ordinary margin for error. That if I got it wrong — mispriced something, said the clumsy thing, ran the badly organised event that every founder runs, I would not be a woman who had made a mistake. I would be filed, permanently, under something else. Anyone who has spent a working life as the only one in the room knows exactly what I mean, and knows that it is not paranoia, it is arithmetic. Less forgiven. Judged harder. Remembered longer.

So I made the calculation any sensible woman makes. If I could not be flawless, and I certainly could not, then the safe thing was not to begin. Stay in the consulting room, where I was good. Stay one-to-one. Stay useful and stay small.

I wanted to build a community against invisibility, and my own first instinct was to hide.

That is the sentence I have been walking around for the better part of a decade. The women arriving in my practice were grieving a world that had stopped seeing them. I was quietly arranging not to be seen in it. Different griefs, same address.

What broke the resistance was not a moment of clarity. It was my mother.

My mother came out to Australia in 2018, and something about having her here, an elder in my house, in my city, being exactly who she was without apology — finished an argument I had been having with myself for months. I stopped negotiating. That year Silver Sirens began, as a single conference in Sydney, and it was not a business plan. It was a refusal. A refusal to keep sitting opposite women who had been made to feel unnecessary and offer them nothing but an hour a week and a tissue.

I would love to tell you that starting answered the questions. It did not. In seven years, a few women have asked me for my credentials in ageing; that particular examiner turned out to be sitting mainly inside my own head. But the other fear was not imaginary, and I will not tidy it up for you here — I have made mistakes in public, and some were forgiven quickly, and some were not, and I have my own private ledger about which was which. The questions did not get answered. They got outlived. I stopped waiting for a verdict and got on with the work, which is, I have come to think, the only thing anyone ever actually does with a fear like that.

Years later I can see what I could not see then. I did not choose that work. That work chose the one woman in the room who could not look away from it, because she had been in training for it since she was one year old and did not know.

This is the thing I most want to say to you this month, and it is not comfortable. Purpose recruits on the basis of what you have survived, not what you are good at. Your competence is how you deliver it. Your wound is how it finds you. The place where life took something from you is, with terrible frequency, exactly the place where the work is waiting — not because suffering is noble, but because you are one of the few people who knows the terrain, speaks the language, and cannot be lied to about it.

Which means the question isn't, "What is my purpose?" That question is far too big, and it makes us all go quiet. The better questions are smaller and much ruder.

What do you keep doing anyway, unpaid, without being asked? What are you still angry about, years after it would have been reasonable to let it go? What did you need at forty that nobody gave you? Who do you keep noticing — the ones other people walk past? Answer those honestly, and you will not have found your purpose. But you will have found the door it has been standing outside of, waiting for you to stop pretending you cannot hear the knocking.

And if you are reading this at sixty-five and thinking it is all a bit late, I promise you it is not, and that is a letter for later this month. Purpose does not check your age. It checks whether you are still standing where it needs someone to stand.

I have spent eight years now doing work I never applied for. It has cost me more than I expected and given me more than I deserved. It has also taught me the only thing I am really qualified to tell you about purpose:

We do not go out and find our purpose. We get chosen by it — usually by the very thing we would have paid good money to avoid.

So this month, let us stop looking under the cushions. Let us talk instead about what has been trying to reach you. Next Sunday I want to show you what the science says about women who have a reason to get up in the morning, because it turns out this is not a soft subject at all. It is written into how long we live.

What have you kept doing anyway — without being asked, without being paid, without ever calling it a purpose? And what are you still angry about, all these years later? I would love to hear in the comments.

I'm Faith, a therapist and founder of Silver Sirens (link silversirens.org), a community for women in midlife and beyond. Wisdom Sunday lands here every Sunday — subscribe so you don't miss it.

Love Faith xoxo

Routines and Rituals That Held Me This Week

This week's ritual has been the retreat manual. Next month I fly to Namibia to facilitate it, and instead of skimming it the way facilitators do checking timings, counting chairs, making sure the days hold- I have been going through it slowly, doing each exercise myself, in order, as though I were one of the women who had paid to be in the room.

It is humbling. Some of the prompts I wrote have taken me somewhere I did not expect, and I have wept at my own material, which is either excellent preparation or very poor taste.

You cannot hold a room through a door you have not walked through yourself.