Chrissie Swan just wanted to be alone for five minutes. Every woman over 40 gets it.

When she was 45, Chrissie Swan’s life looked pretty fantastic from the outside. She was one of the most successful women in Australian media with lucrative TV and radio contracts, national fame, a lovely bloke, and three great kids. She was respected by her peers, admired by strangers, and adored by fans.

This would seem an unlikely time to be anything other than stoked. But Chrissie wasn’t so stoked. She was mostly just lost. 

At what seemed like a high point in her life, all Chrissie Swan wanted was some time by herself. To think. To remember who she was. To figure out what she wanted from the second half of her life and whether she really wanted it to continue in the same direction.

Watch: Superwoman is dead. Post continues below.

Slowly, she realised things needed to change. She didn’t yet know what things exactly, or maybe she did but it took a while for them to make themselves known to her because of the noise. She certainly knew what everyone around her needed but her own needs had been drowned out for so long she wasn’t even sure how to access them.

The noise is familiar to women in their thirties and forties or whenever you first become dislodged from being number one on the call sheet. Partners, children, caring responsibilities, aging parents, work commitments, troubled siblings, friends who are struggling... it’s an imperceptible slide that accelerates until you are so far down your own list of priorities that you forget what you even want from your own life. 

And then? Your oestrogen - that happy hormone responsible for making you malleable and agreeable and approval-seeking - begins to wane. 

That’s when a funny thing happens. Things you’ve always tolerated become intolerable. It’s no accident that this is the age when Chrissie Swan started asking some pretty big questions about her life, as she recounts in an interview this week on The Imperfects podcast:

"Am I happy with this going on? The way it is? Am I happy with who I am with other people? Am I happy with who I am for me? What do I want to change?"

She realised, "My day was full of sh*t I didn't want to do. And it was one thing after the other." So she thought about what she used to like to do, way back when she was a little kid, The answer surprised her. She liked to be alone as a five-year-old girl and she needed to be alone now, as a 45-year-old woman. Desperately.

"I realised that I hadn't been alone for 10 years," she said. "I'd never been by myself, I went to a studio with lots of people. I had a house full of people, everywhere I went was people, and I love people. But I needed time alone."

When I heard Chrissie say this, I made an involuntary noise. Part snort, part exclamation, it came from somewhere unknown and startled my dogs. It was a noise of recognition. Of understanding. It was a noise that said, 'Oh babe, same.'

"To get some time alone is really, really hard," she added. "That's why we hide in toilets. And I thought, I've got to get out of this house, what can I do that is still acceptable?"

Acceptable is a funny word, isn’t it. It’s a word in the form of an apologetic crouch. Because it’s not like Chrissie wanted to smuggle drugs across the border or even pierce her eyebrow. She just wanted to be by herself. Just briefly. Please.

That’s when she started to walk. And walk. "I started with five minutes. And then I did it every day. I did it every single day. That was my time."

Five minutes. Just five. How modest women are about taking what we so desperately need. How grateful we are to just 'steal' five minutes from those we take care of.

Walking transformed Chrissie and not just like that. So I have made much of her physical transformation because weight loss has unrivalled cultural status among women and it’s so very visible. But what Chrissie wants to talk about, what makes her so emotional that she breaks down in tears several times during the interview, is what else walking did for her. Slowly, over hundreds of kilometres spaced over weeks and months and then years, Chrissie walked back to herself.

I’m aware that sounds cheesy and they’re my words not hers but if you’ve ever felt like your identity has been submerged in your obligations and responsibilities to the point where you don’t actually know who you are anymore then you’ll understand exactly why Chrissie needed to walk and why it makes her weepy to talk about.

Listen to Mamamia Out Loud, Mamamia’s podcast with what women are talking about this week. Post continues below.

Are they symptoms of a mid-life crisis, the weeping and the need to be alone? Undoubtedly. But a good one. A common one. A necessary one for so many of us. Because it’s not until you’re out of the trenches (usually when your children are less dependent on you) that there’s even room in your head to ask the question: Who am I at this point in my life?

Never ever did I think that being alone was something I would want; not just want but crave, like an addict. Of course that was before I became a mother and before my time was somehow parcelled out to all the people in my life. My kids. My husband. My parents. My co-workers. My dogs. My kids' schools. My therapist and all the specialist appointments you need for your breasts and cervix in case something goes wrong with them and then you discover that all your time has been handed around and there’s none left for you.

When I was younger, solitude wasn’t something I imagined might ever be scarce. That time was about collecting people and being needed. Friends and co-workers and sexual partners and acquaintances and love interests and then their friends and their family and one day, hopefully children because I wanted children, always. Being with other people who needed you seemed like the scaffolding of love and I was always hungry for more of it. 

The physicality of having small children was a surprise but mostly a good one. My body was their body, and they roamed it and ate from it and slept on it and needed to be touching it all of the time. 

Another thing I couldn’t have imagined was that after becoming a mother, time spent away from my children would often feel like stealing from them. It was like an implicit curfew across my whole life, an invisible string that tugged on my leg if I had a wander around the shops or had dinner with a girlfriend.

I was part of the wave of parents who internalised the idea that a good mother was with her children as much as humanly possible. Intellectually, I’ve always known that was absurd but so much of motherhood by-passes your intellect and goes straight to your heart, your gut, your guilt. And what about being a good partner? My husband deserves my time, my attention too. And so do my parents and my friends and my business and my followers on social media. And in what order should all of that be? My time is in a constant state of triage. Who needs me most in this moment? Everyone? Ok cool. I’ll just chop myself into tiny pieces and scatter myself around like a farmer feeding chooks.

Maybe it’s my life stage. I’m sure it is. But every woman I know in her 40s and 50s is desperate for some solitude just like Chrissie described. Some time to remember who we are and consider who we want to be.

We speak of it in our WhatsApp groups. We fantasise - not about sex but about having a Room Of Our Own. My mother said when she was my age she looked into renting a garage somewhere. Anywhere. "I would have been happy to just have the door half open so some air could get in and just maybe a little desk and a chair and I would have been quite happy so long as nobody knew where to find me and I could just... be by myself, even for just a few hours." Solitude.

It’s no accident that Chrissie chose walking. It’s a solitary activity but one with purpose. It has physical health benefits, it’s free, it can be done at any time, it doesn’t impinge on anyone else, and you can wear what you like. It is, in fact, the perfect way to have some time alone while the world nods approvingly that you are also somehow being productive. It needs no equipment and takes up no space. It doesn’t require a commitment of a particular amount of time and it’s transeasonal. It depends on nothing and nobody.

Chrissie walked and thought and felt and thought some more. She says that she still takes her problems on walks and that the answer always comes to her, sometimes quickly and sometimes over days and kilometres. Walking is her thinking time. Her processing time.

In the last few years, Chrissie has separated from her partner, quit one job, and started a couple of new ones. I cannot imagine how many steps those decisions took, but she got there.

Not every woman needs to change course so dramatically. I’ve come to see solitude as something of a truth serum. It reveals what you need to know about yourself, when you’re ready to know it. For Chrissie, her alone time is walking. "I walk for my mind," she says. "Yeah. And I started with 300 metres."

You can listen to Chrissie Swan on The Imperfects podcast. 

Feature Image: Instagram.

Calling all parents! Take this short survey now to go in the running to win a $50 gift voucher!