What I'd Tell Myself in Early Perimenopause

If you are somewhere in early perimenopause (guest what it starts way earlier than people think) and nobody has given you a word for what is happening, there is one thing worth knowing before anything else: you are not losing your mind.

I did not know that. I spent years reading every hard thing as evidence against myself.

This is the page I would send back to the woman I was ~ sitting in a parking lot, not ready to go inside yet, ten minutes before someone needed her again.

You are not losing your mind

Start there, because everything you are about to spend the next years doing is downstream of believing that you are. You are going to read every hard thing as evidence against yourself. Don't. What is happening to you has a name, and nobody has told you the name, and that is not the same as it being your fault.

The formula stopped working, you didn't

I know it feels identical from the inside. You push the way you have always pushed and less comes back, so you push harder, and less comes back again. You have decided that means you have gotten soft.

It means the terms changed.

You are going to spend an enormous amount of energy trying to restore an arrangement that is already over. Let it be over sooner.

The doctors who do not listen are not the last word

You will be offered the fastest way to make the inconvenient thing stop. You will be handed answers to questions nobody asked you. And you will walk out of those offices assuming you are the difficult one.

Keep going.

There is a doctor who will run the tests, look at you, and say yup, and we can fix that, and that one sentence is going to reorganize your life. Being believed is where this starts. Not a protocol. Not a plan.

Go find her. Go find him. Do not stop at the first no.

Your friends are not unkind, they are certain

Everyone is going to should all over you. Every one of them will mean well, and every one of them will have the answer that worked for somebody. There is no shared map. That is the loneliest part of this passage, and it is also, I have come to believe, the entire point. Some are even going of of old beliefs around defunct studies...their version of "truth".

Stop looking for someone else's map. Start listening to your body, your journey is YOURS.

The surrender nobody sees

Not the loud kind of giving up. Nobody will see this one. It is the small private thing behind your ribs that says maybe this is just what my life is now. Maybe this is what I get.

You will call it being realistic.

It is not. It is the moment you hand the wheel to something you cannot name and give it a gentler word.

Notice it. That is all I am asking. Notice the day you decide the door has closed ~ because everything after that day gets built on a decision you made in the dark and never once examined in the light.

The answer was never less

And the dream you are quietly filing away. Don't.

You are going to conclude that wanting more was the mistake. That the answer, from here, is less. Less ambition, less appetite, less room taken up. It is the tidiest lie of this whole passage, and you are going to find it comforting.

The answer is not less.

Write your own letter

That is the letter. I cannot send it. She has to walk it. That is not tragedy ~ that is just how a threshold works.

But here is what I have learned doing this work with women: the letter still does something, even arriving late.

Because the woman in the parking lot is not gone. She is underneath. And most of what she needed to hear then, you still need to hear now. That you are not crazy. That you did not fail. That the door did not close. That the answer was never less.

So write yours.

Actually write it. One page to the woman you were before you understood what was happening to you. Not advice. Not a performance review. Just the truth she was never given.

Then read it back and notice how much of it is in present tense.

That is your work, right there. That is the whole thing.

A Journey Back to You is coming this winter. It is the long version of that letter ~ the book I would have handed her in the parking lot if it had existed.

It lives underneath your medical care, never instead of it. Find the doctor who listens. Do your own research.

And then come back, because there is a room full of women doing the deeper work, and she was built for you.