I Am Not Losing My Mind, I Am In Perimenopause

I am the narrator of the 52 versions of every woman in perimenopause. Crying, laughing, angry, grateful, soft, hard, masculine, feminine, doing yoga, bodybuilding, eating the salad, eating the snack food, bingeing, sleep deprived, hating her dull skin, all of it. Every version. Not one tidy character.

For a long time I thought I needed to pick a lane. Be the put-together one, or the falling-apart one. Be the wellness girl or the mess-in-the-car girl. Turns out I'm not supposed to pick, because none of those are separate women, they're all just me, on different days, in different phases, in a body that's renegotiating its terms with me monthly and sometimes daily.

If you've felt like you're losing your grip on who you are somewhere in your late thirties or forties, like the version of you that used to have consistent energy and consistent moods and a consistent relationship with your own body just up and left, I want to tell you what I've had to learn the hard way: you're not losing yourself. You're in a body going through one of the biggest hormonal shifts of your life, and nobody prepared either of us for how much that would touch. Not just periods. Everything. Mood, skin, sleep, libido, confidence, patience, all of it.

You are allowed to be all 52 versions in the same week. You are allowed to not have it figured out. You are allowed to still be building the system while you're living inside the chaos it's meant to organize.

I'm not on the other side of this with a clean answer for you. I'm in it, narrating it in real time, same as you. That's the whole point of this space, not a guru with a finished formula, just a woman further into the fog with you, keeping the light on.

One thing to sit with this week: which of your 52 versions have you been hiding, and what would it feel like to let her be seen too?