What the Italian Sea Kept: Appetite, Beauty & Being Alive

I didn’t expect the sea to feel like this.

Standing on the Italian Riviera, salt air tangled in my hair, light bending across the water in colours too bold for English skies, I felt something loosen. Not just my shoulders. Something deeper. Something that had been braced for too long.

The sea didn’t ask me to perform. It didn’t care about my inbox, my deadlines, my carefully held mask of competence. It simply kept moving, endless and unapologetic, reminding me what it means to belong to something bigger.

And in that moment, I realised: this is what I’d been hungry for.

Appetite as Aliveness

We often talk about appetite like it’s dangerous. Too much food, too much desire, too much longing.

Women especially, are trained to shrink it. To push our hunger down — for nourishment, for beauty, for touch, for freedom.

But the sea reminded me: appetite is life. To be hungry is to still be here, reaching for more. To want is to still believe in possibility.

Midlife can dull that hunger. Decades of responsibility, exhaustion, and tending to everyone else’s needs leaves appetite buried. But appetite doesn’t vanish. It waits. Quiet, restless, ready to return when you finally make space.

Beauty That Refuses to Be Contained

Walking through Alassio, beauty was everywhere. Not curated, not perfect, just overflowing. Salt-worn shutters. Plates of pasta glossed with olive oil. A grandmother carrying her shopping with grace that no Instagram filter could imitate.

It struck me how beauty can’t be domesticated. It refuses to stay tidy. It spills into cracks, into corners, into the way light hits stone.

And maybe that’s what it means to be alive: to notice beauty not as something to consume or capture, but as something to receive. To let it undo you a little.

Midlife & the Return of Desire

Travel has a way of waking desire. Not just sexual desire, but the broader, wilder kind: the desire to taste, to touch, to risk, to feel.

At the table with bread and seafood, I noticed how easily joy can return when you stop policing it.

Appetite is contagious. You take one bite of something perfectly salted, and suddenly you’re laughing, speaking with your hands, forgetting to check your phone.

That’s what midlife is asking of us: not to deny desire, but to reclaim it. To let appetite, for food, for intimacy, for beauty, for rest, remind us that we’re not done yet.

What the Sea Kept for Me

I stood at the shoreline and thought about all the ways we abandon ourselves. We silence our hunger.

We dismiss our longing. We tell ourselves: not now, not yet, maybe later.

And still, something in us waits. The sea kept that part for me. The part that remembers I am not here just to endure. I am here to taste, to notice, to belong.

Why This Matters

Therapy often brings people to this edge: the hunger they’ve silenced is starting to roar. The longing they’ve buried is pushing through. It feels dangerous, but it’s not. It’s life.

Because appetite is not excess, appetite is evidence that you are still alive.

The sea doesn’t apologise for its tides. And neither should we.

Sarah x