It’s 2022 and I am celebrating my 50th with friends. Within just a few months of this I have left a 14 year long relationship & relocated to a new town where I know no one. Next up, I’m undertaking an 11 day solo hike across the island of Kythira in Greece and at its completion I call a meeting with my team back in Aus to say, ‘It’s over. The thing I have loved doing for so long, group mentoring, it’s a wrap.” With each and every seemingly sudden decision I made across this period, the spectrum of responses included surprise, disbelief and shock. And numerous times, I genuinely asked myself, ‘Is this a breakthrough or a breakdown?’
I’ve never experienced vasomotor symptoms, even cycle changes of any great significance, nothing that might act as some kind of signpost. So like so many other women, I wasn’t able to know it and name it, for the most part.
But this is perimenopause.
All I had was what I was experiencing: a dramatically reduced bandwidth. Not the classic irritable woman trope. Just that I couldn’t do as much without some kind of inflated cost to myself which came in a variety of forms. And when I overrode ‘new me capacity’ with ‘old me expectations’, the wheels started to wobble, especially cognitively. Scary sh*t, right? When Rhiannon and I spoke this week on perimenopause to many of you, I mentioned I dislike the term ‘brain fog’ as a description of what happens for women during this stage. It’s diminutive. Minimising. Yet the evidence of its impact is breathtakingly BIG. Almost a third of women during perimenopause cut their work hours and more than 1 in 10 consider quitting work altogether. In addition to this, suicide rates jump up by 48% in women between the ages of 45 and 54 – where for men it increases only by 1.4%. This is not just some kind of bad mood of middle age – it’s a FEMALE physiological rollercoaster.
Amongst the attendees at our event there were a few tears being shed, as several shared with me afterwards that literally it was our conversation, right here, right now, that had enabled them to see at last, their own perimenopausal picture.
Me too
It wasn’t until we were prepping for this perimenopause conversation that I literally learned my increased susceptibility to injury with exercise over the last year comes courtesy of the same bloody carnival-house-of-horrors-big-dipper mash-up. Again, thanks Rhi! And what about my cognitive concerns and what, early on, seemed like a pathological drop off in drive?? I was lucky. Without knowing what I was doing , all those big decisions I made from 50, turned out to be the right ones, in the sense that I deloaded. Which just happens to be my top rec for all women during perimenopause. Wherever and in whatever way they can – accept and better yet embrace the ‘new you capacity’. Because once I did this my cognitive concerns etc disappeared and I realised there’s nothing wrong with me just what I was asking of me… and what the world asks of women too, by the way.
Anyway, I normally wouldn’t have posted such a personal P.S but some of you shared so honestly with me, I felt anything else wouldn’t be right. A big thank you to Give Back Health for such an innovative format than enabled something more valuable to be shared. Let’s keep the conversation going.
Image by Ukrainian photographer Kateryna Hliznitsova via Unsplash
