The Door I Built Myself

People ask me, quite often and very kindly, what made me start my own business.

I have a good answer. I have given it on panels. It involves purpose and service and the gap I could see in the market for women over fifty, and every word of it is true, and it is also not the reason.

Here is the reason.

I was tired of being assessed by people who had already decided.

I did not start again because I was brave. I ran a fashion agency for fourteen years, all the way through my forties, and at forty-eight I closed the doors — for reasons that were mine, and that is a different letter. Then I did the ordinary, sensible thing.

I went looking for a job.

And that is when I found out.

Fourteen years of running my own business. My own payroll, my own clients, my own contracts, every decision mine and every consequence too. On paper, precisely the experience a company will tell you it needs. In the room, I watched the arithmetic play out on people's faces, older than she looks on paper—then spent the next forty minutes trying to outdo a conclusion reached before I sat down.

The doors did not open. Not one of them.

So I built my own door and walked through it, because nobody does the arithmetic on the woman who owns the building.

I did not start a business. I built a room nobody could refuse me entry to, and then I called it entrepreneurship because that sounds a great deal better than fleeing.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this letter that is just bitter, and that is not what I mean at all.

The door worked. The Healing Process is mine. Silver Sirens is mine. I have built two things that do good in the world, and I am not going to be modest about my hard work. When I walk into my own practice, nobody is deciding whether I am credible. That is not a small freedom. For a woman who was left at one year old and spent the next fifty proving she was worth keeping, owning the room is not a business decision. It is a nervous system finally putting something down.

And — here is where I have had to be honest with myself this year — it is also a strategy of avoidance that I dressed up as a triumph.

Because a woman who builds her own door has stopped knocking on others. And when enough of us stop knocking, something very convenient happens for everybody else: the problem disappears from the data.

Nobody counts the women who left. No one tracks those who gave up applying and started something small. From the outside, we look like success stories. We get invited to speak about resilience. And the rooms we walked away from carry on exactly as they were, congratulating themselves on how many women over fifty are starting businesses these days, as though it were a fashion rather than an evacuation.

Now let me show you the bill, because this is the part nobody tells you at the start, and it is the part I most want you to hear.

Self-employment is a magnificent way to escape discrimination and a terrible way to fund an old age.

Women aged sixty to sixty-four in this country retire with roughly a quarter less superannuation than men. That gap is not a mystery. It is unpaid care, part-time years, lower pay for the same work — and, for a great many of us, the years we spent self-employed and paying ourselves last, because there was a quarterly bill and there was always something more urgent than our own super.

More than one in four Australians over sixty-five now live in poverty.

And here is the figure that stopped me cold when I first read it, and which I think every woman in this community should know: homelessness among older women in Australia rose by almost forty per cent between 2011 and 2021. Older women are the fastest-growing group of homeless people in this country. Not men on park benches. Women in their sixties and seventies, in cars, on daughters' sofas, in the spare rooms of friends — mostly invisible, because women are very good at not looking homeless.

These are women who worked. Many of them worked continuously. They did it in the years, sectors, and arrangements that Australia decided not to pay properly for.

Set that against one more number, which I offer without comment because it needs no comment: Australians over fifty-five contribute seventy-four and a half billion dollars a year in unpaid caring and volunteering.

We are not a cost. We are a subsidy.

So — was building my own door freedom, or was it flight?

Both. It is always both, and I have stopped needing it to be one. I got out, and getting out was the right call for the life I have, and I would do it again tomorrow. And I paid for it in a currency I couldn't see at forty-five, and I will never get back years of superannuation, but I made that trade because I had the education, the energy, and the particular stubbornness that comes from being the one who got left. Plenty of women don't have those, and they are no less brave than me. They just didn't have the raw materials to build a door.

Building your own door is a magnificent act of self-rescue. It is a catastrophic substitute for the building having one

That's what I mean by advocacy, and why this month is called what it is.

For years, everything I did was empowerment. Help her see what she is worth. Help her back into the room. Help her build the door. That work is real, and I will never stop doing it — but it is individual, and ageism is not an individual problem, and there is something faintly absurd about training women one at a time to survive a building that could simply be fixed.

Advocacy is the other half. Advocacy is what happens when we stop treating each of these women as a personal success story and start treating them as evidence.

It looks like a woman saying, "That was my age," out loud instead of in the car. It looks like the women still inside those buildings, refusing to sit on a hiring panel that has quietly stopped shortlisting anyone born before a certain year. It looks like telling your daughter what your superannuation actually is, so she does not repeat you. It looks — and I say this as the founder of a membership community, fully aware of what it sounds like — like several thousand women deciding to be counted at the same time.

I built my own door because I was tired. I am building Silver Sirens because I do not want the women coming behind me to have to.

Next Sunday, the last letter of the month, and the one I have argued with myself about most: ageism doesn't run in only one direction, and a movement of women over fifty that sneers at women under thirty isn't a movement. It's the same disease, wearing our face

With love,

Faith

Routines and Rituals That Held Me This Week

The routine or ritual that has held me this week

After eight days of holding space for others, my ritual this week has been simple and slightly ruthless: I have claimed every scrap of alone time I could get.

Not much of it, and none of it scheduled. An hour stolen here, forty minutes there, a door closed with no explanation offered. But oh, what I did with it.

I walked the streets of Cape Town with nowhere I needed to be. I went hunting for African print frocks—wax prints in colours that would stop traffic in Sydney, and do so happily here—and I took my time over every rail, because nobody was waiting for me to finish. Then I sat on the waterfront and drank hot chocolate on my own, facing the water, answering to no one.

Such delicious pleasure.

I have spent a lifetime treating solitude as something you earn once you've taken care of everyone else. This week I took it before the list was done, and the world did not end. Being alone is not the opposite of caring for others. It is how the well gets refilled.

If you spend your days holding space, I would recommend stealing an hour back this week. Go somewhere with colour in it. Order the hot chocolate.