Tamzin Outhwaite chats to Michelle Ford about becoming more confident and comfortable in her own skin, and her desire to help women heal from within.
Words: Michelle Ford. Images: Jude Edginton, with Hair and make-up by @desmondino.
The first eight years of my career were in musical theatre, whether touring around the country or in the West End. And then I did a couple of bits of TV and got EastEnders. Although theatre was my home, EastEnders was three and a half years learning about how to act on TV, and all in front of millions of people. Since then, it’s been a delightful journey. I still absolutely love it. I try to do theatre at least every couple of years because it feeds me and reminds me why I’m an actor.
I do adore doing TV and playing different characters but there’s something about the theatre – you never have to watch it back so you don’t have any criticism or ego about it. You’re just in the moment and there’s the immediacy from the audience; how you affect them is probably the root cause of why we start acting.
There’s the instant gratification of being able to affect an audience immediately that’s almost addictive. You get a bit of a dopamine rush for sure. Abigail’s Party [which Tamzin starred in last autumn at Stratford East] was a comedy, but on so many levels a tragedy as well. As a performer, some bits are hit harder than others and how the audience can react varies from night to night.
I’m not saying every job gives the same buzz or dopamine but I can usually find something in every job that I learn from. Or a friend on every job I get inspired by. Every transaction as an actor feels important, especially as I get older.
Friendships have always been important. I don’t think I really knew and acknowledged the power of women until I got older, because it feels like women get more powerful as they get older. The transferring of power from friendships is a wonderful thing, being able to give that back to your female friends.
I’m single and I don’t feel like I have time for romance because I’m so fulfilled by the other great loves of my life: my children, my girlfriends, my male friends, my family – it doesn’t feel like anything’s missing. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m just at that stage in my life where a romantic relationship is kind of a bit null and void, because I get so much from everything else. I suppose I’m not really looking for romance. I’m just having the best fun!
Also, I think it’s important to realise that we learn from the failures. When you work that out, it feels like failing is almost important. Failing at relationships, failing at anything, that’s how you learn. You don’t learn from being continually successful. It’s good to be comfortable with failing.
Menopause for me feels like a rebirth, but I’ve had to go through some messy bits to get to the rebirth. A friend of mine advised me to get on HRT before I started getting “the rage” and before night sweats. So I was ahead of the game because of friends who warned me what happened to them.
I definitely had a couple of moments with my partner at the time, Tom, and my kids where they were like ‘Mum are you all right?’ and they were taking the mick out of me, but instead of finding it funny I’d start crying. Now, I love it when they tease because it means they’re listening and they’re safe enough to do it; but at the time I didn’t know why I felt the way I did.
It was like spinning a lot of plates, looking after people, running different businesses, as well as trying to be a good human, trying to keep fit, trying to stay in the loop work wise. Suddenly I couldn’t hold the plates. I was overwhelmed by everything.
I’d always been a bit scatty, messy and disorganised, but I would still make my deadlines and know my lines. My kids would be at school on time, their food was done. But when I hit menopause, even doing the school run and dinner felt massive. Having 17 emails to answer was too much.
But the minute I got on HRT, everything felt more doable. It also felt a little like my power had come back – like a rebirth. Suddenly everything felt exciting and sparkly and like there’s possibility and hope. I felt like I got my Ready Brek glow back! I think I lost that when I hit perimenopause.
But when it starts to come back, it’s just a wonderful thing – liberating.
So many people are like, ‘You think you’ve got ADHD? You know, it’s just the menopause’ but it can be both. And I think I would love to get that message across to women: to not feel embarrassed if they miss appointments or are late and lose things. It could be hormonal changes, but it could also be undiagnosed ADHD. And it’s always worth going to chat to your doctor about it.
I have one child that’s diagnosed with ADHD, and I often think I’ve got it, and I’ll meet people who have been diagnosed, and they’ll say, ‘There’s no doubt about it!’. People recognise it in each other.
You’ll be having a conversation, and go off at a tangent about magpies or something, and then come straight back into that conversation and hit the same point. I think that that’s a classic sign. But who knows, I might not actually have ADHD. I might just be, as Dad would say, jumping on a trendy bandwagon.
Although, I do think it is a superpower when you’re creating because you can hyper-focus. You can get completely unfocused, but also you can hyper-focus and almost get obsessed with things to make them happen.
When Mum died, which is seven years ago this April, I felt like I was given her superpowers. Spiritually, I feel like I’m morphing into her or trying to because she was an incredible human. She was very much about helping other people and she was so appreciated by those she helped.
There was something in her that was naturally very kind and empathetic. The empathy she had, I think I’ve had too but since she departed, it’s increased. I often wonder whether it’s Mum guiding me or it’s something that’s happened just because of age. I’m a very open person because I’m in a phase of my life where that’s the only way that I can live. I just feel like she’s with me.
I definitely feel like everything I’m doing now is helping the grief journey. And the journey doesn’t end, but you kind of have to flip your own narrative a bit. Because I think it’s very easy for grief to just be dark and sad. But there are so many other elements to grief.
Now I, like Mum, really want to help other people, which is what drove me to create We Free Women. It’s a community interest company that’s completely nonprofit. We do retreats for women who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them.
It came about when I was on a retreat in the Dolomites on my own, because I like to do a solo retreat, and I had hit perimenopause and couldn’t hold everything together. I needed to go away by myself to refill my own cup. I’d come back rejuvenated and with better boundaries.
The ripple effects of that retreat were huge. It’s helped me be a better, kinder, happier human. It was about two years ago, and I had lots of different treatments including a session with a shamanic healer and at the end I said, ‘I’m really sorry I fell asleep’ to which he replied that I hadn’t fallen asleep but had been shaking the whole way through it.
I was like ‘Wow!’. He told me to go back to my room, lie down and just allow whatever was happening to come through me. And I did, I laid there for a few hours. That night, I felt like something had cleared.
Later I posted my experience on Instagram and then loads of women responded saying this was just what they needed but couldn’t get away from home or couldn’t afford it. So, I thought, how could I help other women experience this too?
And so I began to connect with people on Instagram and suddenly there were all these practitioners that were volunteering to help. Within 24 hours, I had a team of people to set up a retreat, which felt like my purpose.
The first retreat I financed myself and we did it at my home. It was the most magical thing with my Retreat Angels as I call them. Now they’re my co-founders: two were good friends already while the other four I met through Instagram.
We’ve started what feels like a movement because everyone still does it for nothing, we just pay their travel expenses. It’s done as much for us as it has for the women who attend. We did our sixth retreat earlier this year.
Now we literally have five grand in the bank and we use it to rent a location, although some people lend us their place for nothing. M&S give us all the food every time.
The last place was so perfect because there was a yoga room and there were peacocks on the land and the place was beautiful. The first retreat was literally in my house and there were people sharing rooms and beds! So, we’ve obviously moved on from that!
So far we’ve done this for women who can’t usually afford it, but others come to us who can. So we’re thinking of finding a way to do these retreats for people who can pay, and they’re paying it forward to someone else.
At the first retreat, the 10 women were so enamoured by the amount of love they were receiving that they wanted to volunteer on the next one.
Last June, in Kent, we welcomed 10 women who came in broken. Some were struggling with their family or with addiction. These women needed a break to find their own power and learn the tools that we teach so they could go back and feel their worth.
We cover breathwork, exercise, yoga, walking in nature, foraging, nutrition, cooking, and mindfulness.
We’ve had women come who said they hadn’t taken a deep breath for years. It’s like they were holding their breath whilst holding things up for everyone else and then they hit menopause and couldn’t anymore.
So, we’ve had one retreat with a menopause theme where the women were ill-informed, but being bombarded with a lot of information. And another with a cancer and nutrition theme.
We have this wonderful woman called Luisa Bradshaw-White, who does ecstatic dance and breath work. It’s like a silent disco, and she takes you on a journey of an hour through music.
Everyone’s in bare feet on the grass, so we’re grounding at the same time. It’s therapy without sitting down and talking about your problems – it’s feeling them, letting them exist, letting them rise and dancing through them.
We could do a retreat every weekend and still not help enough people. A lot of it is finding a group we think will blend well because they leave with a new support network and a WhatsApp group and everyone stays in touch.
We now have a database of women and we’re trying to visit different areas and use practitioners in each place, to form a network for the attendees. We have mental health experts as part of the retreats to support the women if anything comes up.
All of the co-founders have “trauma bonded”, so we’ve seen and been through things all together. That means the friendship is on a different level.
We’re really trying to help women who ordinarily wouldn’t be able to afford a retreat. It changed my life going on retreats, without a doubt. Lots of people come to me and say they can afford it but they still want to experience a We Free Women retreat because of all the great reviews from others.
If you speak to any of the women we’ve helped they will give you a really honest and incredible testimonial about how it’s helped.
Right now, it’s not time for me to sit down under a blanket and just watch TV. And so it’s a very interesting and experimental time in my life. And it’s come as a surprise.
Find out more about Tamzin’s retreats at wefreewomen.org, where you can donate, apply to be a volunteer, and also nominate someone you think deserves a place on the retreat. Also visit instagram.com/wefreewomen.
Tamzin spoke to Michelle Ford, host of popular midlife podcast Two Women Chatting (twowomenchatting.com), where she speaks to celebrities and experts weekly.
