Writer’s Monologue — 1973, Raised Without a Map

I was born in 1973, dropped into a world run by men who decided what girls should know, which was almost nothing. The gatekeepers were all male, the predators were on primetime TV, and the rest of us were expected to smile, behave, and grow up useful. Not powerful. Not informed. Just useful.

I grew up in the age where Jimmy Savile would’ve “fixed it” for me, and Rolf Harris would’ve “fixed it” too. That was the culture: men doing whatever they wanted because no women were allowed near the controls. No one told us that. We just lived inside it.

My parents divorced when I was eight, and the world didn’t pause to explain anything. You just coped. You helped. You pleased. You became the child who didn’t ask for too much. That was the deal. And I didn’t even know it was a deal until much later.

Sex education? Two hours in a classroom, a leaflet I probably threw away because embarrassment was the only thing we were taught properly. We learned how not to get pregnant. We learned that sex was something men enjoyed. We didn’t learn about the clitoris — because apparently it wasn’t “discovered” yet. Imagine that. A part of our body treated like a myth.

And then menopause arrived, and suddenly the whole structure collapsed. Nobody told me that losing oestrogen would feel like losing the scaffolding that held my life upright. They said “a few hot flushes.” They didn’t mention the brain fog, the rage, the grief, the sense that your entire personality has been unplugged and rewired without warning.

I wasn’t angry before. I didn’t have the hormone for it. But once oestrogen left the building, I finally saw the deal I’d been given — the silence, the gaps, the missing education, the way girls were raised to endure instead of understand. And now I’m furious. Not at my life, but at the world that shaped it without ever giving me the information I needed to survive it cleanly.

I listen to women now — women who speak openly, who name things, who refuse to lie. One of them re‑tagged me today. She saw me. And maybe that’s all I ever wanted: to be seen by someone who understands the era I came from, the rules I was handed, the body I was never taught to inhabit.

I wanted a career. I wanted a map. Instead, I got a rollercoaster and a hormone that vanished overnight. But I’m still here. Still writing. Still naming the things my generation was never allowed to say out loud.

This is my monologue. This is my era. This is my anger finally having somewhere to go.

Footenote

I’m 1973 born, late to my own language, but getting there. Every day I learn something new. Every day I get louder.