There’s a book coming out in April next year that I cannot wait to read. Tilda is Visible follows a 50’ish woman called Tilda who is diagnosed with ‘invisibility’ and needs to start seeing herself again. I am intrigued by the notion of invisibility in mid-life women. I don’t feel or act invisible, but whether that is my perception or yours is, I guess, the question.
I recently sat down with Jane Tara, the author of Tilda is Visible, and the General Manager of Better Reading, Australia’s largest book community, and it would be hard to meet a more dynamic, engaged, awesomely visible woman, ever.
Jane is an author, and a prolific one at that having written over 100 books – most of these, she shares, are travel and educational books written after her divorce when she was writing for rent. Now that her kids are older and she has that wonderful new lease of freedom that many of us in our 50’s are starting to experience, she has returned to the luxury of writing for joy.
In thinking about what life experiences led Jane to where she is now, she reflects – I’m at a stage in my life where I understand that the stories that make up a person are simply that – they are just stories. Jane’s first story revolves around surviving a traumatic childhood. She doesn’t dwell on the details, noting that it has taken her years of various healing modalities to remove the trauma memory. However, she is and always has been very deliberate in ensuring that her childhood experiences have not become the framework for the rest of her life: I rewrote the narrative of my childhood, she shares, and found a lot of joy there as well. Plus, it shaped me to be incredibly resilient and curious about myself and how to be the best version of me.
Jane has written somewhat about her childhood through ‘Tilda’, but notes that she chooses to be careful about how she navigates the discussion: Family violence often plays out in generational cycles – sometimes it’s the perpetrator’s expression of their own childhood trauma. I’ve found it beneficial to acknowledge that pain when healing my own. This is about me breaking that cycle. It’s incredibly empowering to know that generations of dysfunction stop right now, with me.
This is such a brave and giving discussion, with Jane sharing that offering forgiveness and being willing to discuss her childhood has arisen from lots of spiritual work – for Jane, it is important to share her story so that it might, in some way, help others understand how to heal from trauma.
In her second story, it is clear that place and spirituality are of paramount importance to Jane. Her quest for healing and her deep curiosity for people and place has led her on a decades long journey across the globe working with different spiritual teachers and ultimately, a reliance on herself, to grow through meditation. She left Australia as (what she describes) a damaged 21-year-old, for a 3-month adventure in Japan. She stayed for 5 years. Jane still feels an intense connection to Japan and was last there just before Covid. She shares that she is feeling drawn back to Japan again and has added learning Japanese properly to her own Life List. Jane says that you can have relationships with people, but you can also have relationships with places. “I healed a lot in Japan. My kids are part Japanese. Japan has been good to me. I feel like my relationship with the place needs to be more fully explored.”
Today, Jane is loving living and working amongst words. But her world centres around her meditation – I put it before everything: before family and friends and work because it enriches my experience of everything else. I love this – her focus is on prioritising what makes her happy and fulfilled and better – knowing that it allows her to turn up for everyone else as the best version of herself.
Jane is also loving ageing. I could not love this more. Like me, Jane just does not have a problem with her greys or her wrinkles. However, Jane’s ambivalence to ageing is grounded in the most extraordinary story of all.
At 45, Jane was diagnosed with a degenerative sight disorder that would result in her total blindness. She was referred to the NSW Centre for Eye Health, but their next available appointment was three months away. After absolutely freaking the fuck out for a few days, Jane invested her time in researching her condition and spent hours in front of the mirror memorising her face. Her curiosity led her to considering very deeply the question: ‘What does it mean to see?” After three months down that fun filled rabbit hole thinking that she was on a fast track to becoming blind, quite jarringly, further tests showed that she had been misdiagnosed. She did not have a degenerative sight condition after all, rather a rare and completely harmless pigmentation issue.
What?
Jane is philosophical about the misdiagnosis: It was a gift. It made me look at ageing very differently. I love my face and I love my wrinkles. I had a complete shift in perception.
Next on Jane’s Life List, apart from honing her Japanese and releasing Tilda is Visible is a burning passion to be a cheerleader for all women to age well. This ties very nicely into ‘Tilda’s’ story – a woman so lost that she starts to physically disappear, one finger at a time. I also need to write my next novel before Tilda comes out, Jane adds: and I want to visit my son in Canada; and I want to meditate daily. Everything else is a bonus, she adds, because life is great.
And so is Jane.
