Why In Her Element?
Making Room for More of Who I Am: what happens when the life you have carefully built can no longer fully contain the person you are becoming?
A few years ago, I made a decision that seemed relatively straightforward. I wanted to spend more time building KaraSpace (karaspaceug.com).
At the time, I had built a consulting practice that was both meaningful and fulfilling. For more than twenty-five years, I worked as a development practitioner who contributed to stronger communities and institutions across Africa and globally. My children were older and increasingly independent. Life was still full, but something had shifted. For the first time in many years, I realised that I could fully choose me and invest in something I simply enjoyed, not because it advanced my career or fulfilled an obligation, but because it was part of who I was.
What kept drawing me back to KaraSpace wasn’t simply the business. It was what the space made me feel. I’ve always loved gardens, books, art, fashion and thoughtful design. I like places that are calm, where good coffee encourages long conversations and where creativity feels like an ordinary part of everyday life. Those interests had always been part of me. Years earlier they had inspired Kara Designs, a boutique for African-inspired fashion that I set up about fourteen years ago, but I had never really given my full attention.
So I decided to be deliberate. I wasn’t changing careers. I was making room for something I genuinely enjoyed. Looking back, that “small” decision was the first answer to a question I had not yet learned to ask.
For many years I had built a professional life, that I remain proud of. Yet I also realised that I was becoming someone who wanted to create as well as advise. To build as well as analyse. To make space for entrepreneurship alongside consulting. To allow creativity to sit comfortably beside strategy. I wasn’t trying to become someone different. I was trying to occupy more of who I already was.
Around the same time, I began noticing similar shifts in conversations with other women around my age.
One afternoon, I got into conversation with a woman who had brought her teenage daughters to make art with their friends at KaraSpace. Her children were more independent now, she said, and she was pondering what to do with this phase of her life. I later spoke to another, who had spent eight years in the same job, had just left it and was venturing her way into consulting. A friend at a global organisation was thinking about how to establish herself as a thought leader. Another told me about women in a company she worked with who had taken voluntary retirement, still full of energy, but with no plan for what came next.
Each of them, in her own way, asked me the same thing: share what you know. Share what you have lived.
Sometimes the questions were practical. How do I build a stronger online presence? How do I position myself as a thought leader? How do I start something new? But as I listened, and reflected on my own journey, I began to see it differently.
We were not looking to reinvent ourselves. We were looking for the courage, and support, to become more fully ourselves. I have come to think of this as courage more than permission. And yet permission is part of it too: permission to know that it is all right to focus on yourself. This is harder than it sounds. When you are used to carrying a load for others, with a structured life, and a long list of people to tend to, freedom does not arrive easily. We assume freedom is simple, that once you have it you simply step into it. But after years of prioritising everyone else, turning toward yourself sometimes comes with guilt.
So is it permission, or is it courage? I am still grappling with that question. I think it is both, and I think the tension between them matters; enough that I will keep writing about it. For now, what I know is this: becoming more fully myself has meant finding the courage to fully take up space, and freeing myself from the guilt of fully choosing me.
We are entering a generation in which more women than ever before are reaching midlife with decades of experience, longer life expectancy, greater financial independence, and a desire to contribute in new ways. At exactly the same moment, artificial intelligence is reshaping work, knowledge and enterprise. The question is not simply whether AI will replace jobs. The question is whether women have the capabilities, confidence and support to use AI to shape their own next chapter.
Much of what I have read about life after fifty focuses on reinvention, second careers or preparing for retirement. Those conversations have value, but they do not fully reflect my experience, or that of some women I know here in East Africa. Our lives are rarely organised into neat chapters. Enterprise, family, community and care are deeply intertwined. Women are often navigating several transitions at once while continuing to carry significant responsibilities for others.
The persistent question is not always, “Who do I want to become or what do I want to do?” More often, it is: “How do I make room for more of who I already am?” And what support and capabilities do I need for this?
That is the question that led me to start In Her Element. Not because I have found the answers. But because my journey to find them is taking a new turn.
What helps women in midlife navigate transition with confidence? What gives us the courage to become more visible after years of working quietly behind the scenes? What role do creativity, community and place play in helping us flourish? What capabilities and support do we need to effectively use technology and AI in this next chapter? How do we become more fully ourselves while remaining deeply connected to the people and responsibilities that matter to us?
These are deeply personal questions. They are also questions about leadership, enterprise and society.
Communities need the wisdom, creativity and experience of women in this stage of life. Organisations need leaders who continue to grow rather than feeling they have reached the end of their journey. Younger women deserve to see examples of lives that continue to expand rather than contract with age.
In Her Element is my invitation to explore these questions together.
Over the coming months, I will be sharing reflections from my own journey, conversations with other women, and insights from research and practice. Some of these reflections will begin in boardrooms, others in gardens, cafés or creative spaces. Together, they will explore what it means to navigate a meaningful next phase.
I don’t know exactly where this inquiry will lead. What I do know is that I no longer see this stage of life as a time of reinvention but integration. An invitation to honour everything that has brought us here while making room for every part of us that is still yet to emerge.
Perhaps the next phase is less about permission and more about courage: the courage to take up the space that was always ours, and the freedom to do it without apology.
Ashanut