About
Don't lose yourself. Run towards yourself
Menopause. Women. Stories. Laughter. Acceptance.
Why Unpaused Exists
UNPAUSED exists because women have spent long enough being told to put up with things.
Menopause might be what brought us here, but this is about far more than hormones. It’s about what happens when women reach a point in their lives where they start questioning the things they’ve been expected to accept — about their bodies, their healthcare, their careers, their relationships and the space they’re allowed to take up.
We see menopause as an opportunity. A chance to understand ourselves better, regain some of the power we’ve handed over along the way, and decide what we want the next part of our lives to look like.
UNPAUSED exists to help women do that — by sharing our experiences, giving women useful information and tools, calling out the bullshit when something isn’t good enough, and pushing for change where change is needed.
Not just for us.
For our daughters, so they inherit freedoms we didn’t.
who is behind it
I’m Lorna. I’ve spent much of my working life in service-centred roles, studying neurodiversity and mental health before eventually training as a life coach. Somewhere along the way, I started noticing a pattern.
Perimenopause has a habit of breaking apart the things that no longer fit. Our tolerance changes. Our relationships change. The way we see ourselves changes. It can feel like everything is falling apart, when sometimes we’re being given an opportunity to put ourselves back together differently.
I recognised that because I’d already lived through a version of it. Years spent finding my way through grief taught me how easily we can give pieces of ourselves away — to motherhood, relationships, work, responsibility and simply getting through the day.
For me, perimenopause has started giving some of those pieces back.
UNPAUSED grew from that realisation: perhaps this chapter isn’t about becoming less of ourselves. Perhaps it’s our opportunity to become more.
where we're going
We want to turn conversation into action. To challenge what isn’t good enough, celebrate women who refuse to disappear, and create change that reaches beyond us.
We want our daughters to inherit freedoms we didn’t.
A woman can spend decades becoming herself.
She builds a career, raises children, falls in love, leaves love, makes friends, loses friends, pays mortgages, changes her mind, learns what she'll tolerate and what she absolutely fucking won't.
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Then somewhere around the middle of all that, her own body starts changing the rules without asking permission.
Oh, That too?
MAYBE THERE IS NO GOING BACKWARDS.
She forgets words she's known forever. She walks into rooms and can't remember why. Her confidence disappears from meetings she once dominated. Sex can change. Sleep changes. Her body changes. Her patience develops an alarmingly short fuse. Some days she feels completely herself and other days she wonders where the woman she knows has gone.
And because we don't talk about enough of this properly, millions of women can experience the same ridiculous, frightening, funny, infuriating things while privately wondering whether they're the only one. When she finally does, the rhetoric is that it is a HER problem. That women must shoulder menopause on her own. This is where we start to change our story.
When you walk through a city wearing WHY DID I WALK IN HERE?, another woman might read it and laugh because she knows exactly why it's funny. For a second, two strangers know something about each other. I get it. Me too. You're not the only one.
NOT MENOPAUSE MERCHANDISE.
SIGNALS BETWEEN WOMEN
DON'T LOSE YOURSELF. RUN TOWARDS YOURSELF.
why a comic book?
I've always loved pop art and the power it holds in its simplicity. Bold colours, strong lines and ordinary moments transformed into something extraordinary. There's something about it that makes you look twice, and I've always been drawn to that.
Comic books, on the other hand, bring to mind superheroes. Larger-than-life characters saving the world, usually with a man at the centre of the story. There are female superheroes, of course, but for decades it's been the men who have taken the lead.
Yet when I look at the ordinary woman, I see a superhero.
A woman juggling a career, raising a family, navigating relationships, maintaining friendships, caring for others and somehow trying to find a little space for herself in amongst it all. A woman who can create life, hold a family together, rebuild after everything falls apart and still get up the next morning because somebody needs her.
And despite all that, we live in a world where women are so often expected to play supporting roles in their own lives. Where our strength is taken for granted, our anger is treated as a problem and our refusal to accept things as they are can make us the villain.
Not in my comic book.
Here, the ordinary woman takes centre stage. She doesn't need a cape, extraordinary powers or somebody to rescue her. She can be exhausted, furious, funny, flawed, uncertain and still be the hero of her own story.
Because every woman is a hero, in all her ordinary, extraordinary power.
