Say it out loud

I have been meeting more women this year than in a long while. And, Ive noticed something in nearly every conversation I have had which, personally delights me, but also feels so telling. And it took me a while to see the pattern because it never arrives as the headline - it comes in sideways, halfway down a second cup of coffee, after kids, weather and work. Somebody mentions she isn't sleeping; someone else mentions her cycle has done something strange and she doesn't know whether it is a thing or if it is just a random month. Someone says she's been lifting weights for the first time in her life at 45 and feels stronger than she did a 25. Someone says she went to the doctor and came out feeling ridiculous. Then, almost always, another woman says: 'Oh god, you too?'

This moment is the whole thing, I think. It's the bit I keep coming back to and turning over.

None of that came out an appointment or a consultants room. It came out in the kitchen, the car park, a group chat that originally existed to help with pick-ups but evolved into something entirely different. I would say most of what I now know about my own body and emotional state has come from another woman saying it out loud. Not from a leaflet, or a medical white paper. But from a friend, going - right. I'm going to tell you something and it's not glamorous. And this exact moment I can also pinpoint, a conversation I had with a very close friend shortly after I gave birth and she was still waiting. And that conversation was very much 'Tell me about your birth' and us being very frank with each other. She later shared with me that I was the only person honest with her about that, and it filled me with pride at the time but now I wonder - why?

There's a word for all of this and we have been taught to be ashamed of it.

Gossip. It didn't always mean what it means now. It began as godsibb - god-sibling. The person who stood with you at a christening, and then, more usefully, the women who came and sat with you while you gave birth. Which, once, was a group of women rather than an assortment of nurses, consultants and a midwife. Your gossips were the women in the room. They knew what was happening because they too had lived it themselves and this combined knowledge shared meant there was no better place on earth to learn it. The word meant, more or less, the women who attend you.

And then it curdled. At some point, it became women's talk, then idle talk, then dangerous talk. There were bridles for it. Stools. Depending on which stories you follow, women were shunned for it, punished for it and worse. The real history is messier and more local than the tidy version we pass around. The direction of travel, however, is unmistakable. Women talking to each other was treated for a very long time as something that ought to be corrected out of us.

I don't honestly believe anyone would do that for a harmless thing. You dont invent a device to lock a women's tongue because she is saying nothing important.

What was being interrupted, I suspect, was women comparing notes. Which remedy works. Which midwife to call and which to avoid. Which man was not safe to be alone with. What was normal, what wasn't and what you could survive. That is not chatter. That is the working body of wisdom held entirely in speech, passed between women because it existed nowhere else and it kept people alive.

Still with me? Cos here is the bit that gets me: We are still doing this and it is still not written down anywhere.

The thing's I have learned from other women in the past few years - for example, that perimenopause can start a good deal earlier than most of us expect, that 'normal' covers an enormous amount of ground, that strength work was worth that awkward first month, that it's fine to go back to the GP and advocate for yourself, that the symptom you were embarrassed about has a name and half the room have it to - none of that arrived through official channels. It arrived through women talking. I am obviously not a medical professional and this isn't the place for medical detail, but I have come to think that it isn't necessarily the public bodies in our society doing the work all the time - its you. Us. Women. And this is not limited to our bodies and health. Its the emotional, financial, relational, societal shared knowledge too.

Because carrying something alone and carrying it in company are two completely different weights. The problem doesn't shrink when you say it out loud, instead what changes is what it costs you. A private worry has shame stitched into it - the low hum of whats wrong with me, and the moment another women says 'me too' it stops being a flaw in you and becomes a fact about life.

Facts are just that much lighter to carry than shame and the woman who say's it aloud to four friends in my experience is the one who goes back and asks again, who books the appointment, who doesn't spend years thinking she is unusual or peculiar.

So this is not a small social nicety. Its hugely load bearing. But, I want to be honest about this, there is another side of it. Talk has a shadow. The same circle that saves you can turn on you. We have all been in a room where the conversation curdles and most of us have been the subject of that too at some point. So the question I actually care about is not should woman talk, but rather how do we keep it wisdom instead of allowing it to become rumour.

I don't think its complex, but it does need saying straight. Wisdom moves toward a woman; rumour moves around her. Wisdom is mostly me telling you something true about my own life; rumour is me spending someone else's. Wisdom leaves a person larger, better informed, less alone, more able to act; rumour makes her smaller and the teller, briefly, bigger.

The test I use for this myself is rather simple - would I say this in the exact same way if she walked in right now? And the other, harder test - am I telling this to help her, or to position myself as the woman who knew?

And the very last thing in all of this, which is truly the whole thing, is that somebody has to go first. Wisdom only exists because one woman was willing to say the unglamorous, slight exposing, this-is-probably-just-me thing out loud before she knew anyone else would meet her there. Thats the act. Everything else is an echo. If you have ever been the one to go first, you'll know it doesn't feel brave at the time. It feels like oversharing at a birthday party. And then, that beautiful moment, when someone leans in and says 'Oh thank god, I though it was just me' and you realise you have just handed four women something they needed.

This is, more or less, the whole of the work Reground does. Not health, finance, psychology - they aren't my lanes - but the mechanisms are the same. A room of women, a circle, nothing shared unless you choose to share it, and then someone says the true thing about where she actually is with her career, motherhood, marriage, body. Other women in the room realise it is not just htem. We are all moving through transitions we were given absolutely no language for - the stories are the language, passing them on is how we get through.

So - be a gossip. Take the word back off whoever took it from us; they clearly weren't using it properly anyway. Put the kettle on. Ring the friend you have been meaning to ring. Say the slightly too honest thing and see who leans in. Be someone's godsibb. Attend her.

They were right to be nervous about us, you know. Just not for the reasons they thought.