Share Your Experience
The Interlude Café is interested in lived experience that reveals where the old script no longer fits.
Knowing that someone else has navigated something similar, kept going, found a way through, or simply stayed standing can be genuinely useful. It reminds you that you are not alone and that what you are feeling is not unique to you.
But that kind of story only goes so far.
Most of the time, it locates the interest in the age rather than the experience. The implicit message is: look what they did despite being older. Which means the age becomes the story, rather than what they learned, what failed, what changed, or what it revealed.
It also tends to flatten the experience into a before and after. Struggle, then triumph.
Which leaves out everything in the middle: the uncertainty, the things that didn't work, the compromises, the parts that still aren't resolved.
And often, it doesn't transfer.
Reading that someone started a business at 57 or changed careers at 62 might be briefly motivating. But it doesn't help you think more clearly about your own situation. It inspires without informing.
The Interlude Café is interested in a different kind of story.
Not one that asks readers to admire someone for doing something "at their age,"or a tidy tale of reinvention or triumph.
We're looking for experiences that make something clearer: a career that stopped making sense, a financial assumption that failed, a change in health that altered the shape of freedom, a relationship that no longer fit the old categories, or a realisation that the life you were handed was not designed for where you are now.
Your experience does not need to be dramatic. Neither does it need to end neatly. And you don't need to prove that everything worked out.
But your story does need to help us and others see something more clearly.
If that sounds like something you have, we would like to hear from you.
