I’m going to get real here. Maybe a little too real.
No one prepares you for perimenopause. Like, really prepares you.
People warn you about the hot flashes. They make jokes about mood swings. They mention “The Change” like it is a single event you wake up to one morning.
It isn’t. It is a thousand tiny changes that slowly convince you that you are somehow slowly becoming someone else.
Some nights, I fall asleep just fine. Then, for no earthly reason, I wake up in the middle of the night, tangled in blankets, soaked in sweat, and unable to get comfortable again. Morning comes anyway. The alarm still goes off. There are people to get dressed, emails to answer, kids to love, work to do, and somehow I am still supposed to function.
Other days, my emotions feel like they have no protective layer anymore. A song that never would have made me cry, suddenly does. A minor inconvenience feels impossibly heavy. Someone’s harsh words linger for hours. Busy days feel busier. My heart has become softer, but somehow more easily bruised.
Then there is my brain. I have always relied on my ability to organize, plan, juggle, and remember.
Now I walk into rooms and forget why I am there. I lose words I’ve known my entire life. I start one task, remember another, then stand in the kitchen wondering what I was doing in the first place. My executive function, the thing that used to keep all the spinning plates in the air, has quietly packed a suitcase and left without so much as a forwarding address.
It is frustrating.
It is humbling.
And sometimes, if I am honest, it is a little frightening.
Then there are the symptoms no one warns you about.
Yes, apparently your ears can itch. Not the outside of your ears. The inside. The kind of itch that somehow appears at 3:30 in the morning and convinces you that if you could just reach another half an inch with your fingernail, your life would finally have meaning again. I know that I am not actually trying to excavate my eardrum, but the level of itch makes it feel like a perfectly reasonable plan.
Perimenopause has a strange sense of humor. It also has the uncanny ability to lower the volume on your patience. Things that normally wouldn’t register suddenly feel…enormous.
Take my sweet dog. She waits for me all day, and the second I walk through the door she launches herself at my feel as if I have been gone for years instead of hours. She follows me from room to room until I have properly reassured her that yes, I came home, no, I didn’t abandon her, and yes, I still love her.
Objectively? It is one of the sweetest displays of unconditional love I will ever experience. Subjectively? If she boops my ankle one more time while I am trying to set my stuff down, I may briefly consider changing my identity and moving to another state.
Both of those things can be true at the same time.
That is one of the strangest parts of this season. I can be deeply grateful and completely overstimulated. I can adore my family while simultaneously feeling like every sound, every question, every interruption is one tiny straw away from breaking my nervous system.
Perimenopause isn’t just a change in hormones. It is a change in bandwidth. The world hasn’t gotten any louder, my nervous system has simply lost some of its noise canceling headphones.
The hardest part isn’t the symptoms themselves. It is looking in the mirror and wondering where I went.
I don’t always recognize this version of myself. The woman who gets overwhelmed so quickly. The woman who needs more rest than I can get. The woman whose patience runs out sooner than she would like. The woman who feels so disconnected to the capable person she has known herself to be.
For a while, I thought I was failing.
I thought I just needed to try harder. Be more disciplined. Get more organized. Drink more water. Wake up earlier. Buy yet another planner. Surely there had to be a way to become the “old me” again.
But maybe that isn’t the goal. Maybe this season isn’t asking me to become who I was. Maybe it is asking me to become who I need to be now.
A woman who needs rest without apologizing. A woman who asks for help instead of carrying everything herself. A woman who gives herself the same grace she freely offers everyone else.
A woman who understands that hormones don’t just affect ovaries. They affect sleep. They affect memory. Emotion. Patience. Energy. Confidence. Relationships. They affect nearly every system that helps us move through the world.
If you are reading this and quietly wondering why you don’t feel like yourself anymore…you are not imagining it. You’re not lazy. You’re not too emotional. You’re not weak. You’re living through an enormous biological transition that reaches beyond the occasional hot flash.
And if you love someone who is walking through this season, the greatest gift you can give isn’t advice. It is grace.
Believe her when she says she is exhausted. Understand that she isn’t choosing to wake up drenched in sweat for the third night this week. Know that when she cries over something that seems small, it is because her emotions no longer have the same filters they once did.
Be patient when she forgets why she walked into the room. Help her brainstorm how to best reach that itch between her eardrum and her brain. Remind her that she is still beautiful when she doesn’t recognize the reflection in the mirror.
And on days she seems unlike herself, remember this: She probably misses herself too. She is still here. She is just navigating a season that is asking more of her than most people can see.
So if she is a little quieter…a little more forgetful…a little more tearful…a little more easily overwhelmed…she is not asking you to fix her. She is asking you to walk beside her.
No one told me that I could feel deeply grateful for this beautiful life while also wondering why I suddenly feel like a stranger in it.
So if this was a little too much…a little too honest…maybe that is exactly what we needed.
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