I’m about to tell you about something really personal. It might make you a bit uncomfortable, but I promise, I’m going somewhere. Also, there’s a funny video to watch to take the edge off but promise me you’ll come back after you watch it okay?
Good.
So my body has been making some weird decisions lately. After a lifetime of fairly regular and light periods (I know, I’ve been lucky), I’ve started to have much heavier and less predictable ones. Recently, I got a surprise one two weeks early, the very day I was scheduled to leave for a conference. More often, they’re much further apart than normal but are preceded by a week of pain and rollercoasters of emotion like I’d normally feel on the first day. Frequently, they’re accompanied by deep sadness and a feeling like I can’t quite access my mind, which is perhaps the scariest part of all.
When I told a nurse about this, she suggested it might be the result of stress, but this last year hasn’t been an unusually stressful time for me. Even in my darkest days when stress made my hair start to fall out and caused me to develop an eye twitch, my periods were still more or less regular.
So, a question has popped into my brain: is it perimenopause?
You see, I’m 43, which is a totally normal time to start experiencing perimenopause. Why does that feel like such a startling admission? Why do I feel like even telling you my age is ripping a hole in the fabric of my credibility? Partly because I’m a woman and a lot of my value relies on youth. Then there’s the whole question of the midlife existential crisis–shouldn’t I have accomplished more by now? Shouldn’t I be more settled, more certain, more comfortable? Should I buy one of those Italian cars people seem to like? It’s far too easy to compare myself to others and judge myself wanting. But that’s not what this is about.
This is about the uncomfortable, inexorable questions that arise when your body insists on telling you that time is passing. My body is aging in ways that are increasingly difficult to ignore and it seems strange to have to hide that fact. I want to tell you about my experiences so you can tell me about your experiences, so we can see that we’re all aging together, that no one is exempt from time.
I enter this time in my life with far less information than I’d like. Many have pointed out that medical research on perimenopause is only just beginning and the medical establishment still struggles to understand it, let alone treat it. I think all the time about the classic Baroness von Sketch sketch above which was where I first heard the term. The confusion the character encounters from her friends, her mother, even her doctor is so sharply observed. I love how she says, appalled, “But I still wear jean jackets” as if changes to your body can only happen after you’ve settled into old lady leisure suits. I’ve felt that horror myself.
The problem is we just don’t talk about these things enough. The end of fertility means people born with uteruses often face changes in middle age that make people around us profoundly uncomfortable. Generations have been clamped into this vice of secrecy around the effects of ageing on our bodies, desperately smoothing out wrinkles and glibly telling people “you’re as young as you feel!”
Not only does this enforce a kind of solitude that has long kept us from understanding ourselves and supporting each other through occasionally frightening changes, but it makes us feel as if somehow the effects of time are our fault. We feel that we should have been more careful with our youth or that we could stop the clock if only we threw enough money at the problem. Industries arise to assuage our fear and shame.
I want to resist all this, but I can’t do it alone. So I guess I’ll have to keep talking about it.
Recommendation
On a completely different note, I recently devoured Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments and it’s still bouncing around in my head. Written as a series of pithy observations about life and writing, it’s a short, quick read that leaves an outsized impact.
This line in particular has stayed with me: “Instead of pathologizing every human quirk, we should say, By the grace of this behavior, this individual has found it possible to continue.” That could easily be a subtitle for the memoir I’m working on, but I felt that way about half the book.
Notes
I’ve been trying out the new notes feature here. So far, I’ve mostly been watching others engage. I think it’s a more satisfying experience if you already interact with loads of people via Substack. It isn’t quite a Twitter replacement for me yet—there are just too many people I value interacting with over there. If you’ve got thoughts about how to make better use of this new feature, I’d love to hear it.
As usual, I’d love to hear from you about anything at all. And if you liked what you read, please hit the heart button below, leave a comment and feel free to share widely.
~Erika
I discovered I'd started perimenopause somewhat early when I entered into fertility treatments in my mid/late 30s.... all of my numbers and the way my body was behaving was looking that way, although officially they called it "Diminished ovarian reserve."
This is a totally inaccurate name, as it's not the reserve of ova that has diminished, (you have millions) but your body's ability to respond to hormones (particularly FSH, follicle-stimulating hormone) that trigger the ovaries to mature an ova is wearing out, so the body responds by pumping out more FSH to try and get things going, and then all kinds of stuff goes out of balance and gets weird and wonky, and it keeps being weird and wonky for a long while. (Menopause is basically when the ovaries are like, yeah, you can send out all the FSH you want but I'm done here, at which point levels stabilize and it's a new balance... I am almost there.)
In retrospect, I can see that I probably had some early indicators in my early 30s, but the excuse was always stress, my cycle has always been a little weird, blips are normal, etc. Overall, it's not a well-defined state.... it's basically, "your body is in an adjustment period between one steady-state and another, so basically everything is bizarre right now."
Weirdly grateful for fertility treatment and a doc who was good at explaining things because there is such a massive information gap about this. The female reproductive system and hormone interactions throughout is complicated and not well-understood, and very under-researched.
In other words, yes, it's probably perimenopause.