Life of a perimenopausal woman

The body is a sacred place. It is a place of love, joy, pleasure, rest, restlessness, anger, anxiety, sadness, pain...of heat, of cold.

My body has been in shambles recently. I had experienced hot flashes when they put me on hormonal therapy after my surgery in 2023, so I had a taste of what it feels like. But who knew the trailer was only the tip of the ice-berg and the real show is much intense? 

I have difficulty writing these days because I cannot remember spellings accurately. During a meeting two weeks ago, my mind shut down. I could not remember the names of my colleagues or of the programs were working on. For a moment, I wished I could just disappear rather than have to make a fool of myself. But the names didn't come back.

There are a dozen other things I currently feel. My skin crawls, my ears ring, I get itchy spots, and I get terrible hot flashes and I break into cold sweats. My body is either on fire or on spikes. And when it gets cold, the night feels freezing. One moment I'm on the verge of burning, another moment, I sweat profusely.

I finally know what was happening to other women my age, when I had seen women wiping themselves off with tissue until the eyeliner smudged and the lipstick smeared across one cheek, or fanning oneself with whatever she could lay her hands on. She was struggling like I struggle now. On some occasions, I feel like my system is shutting down.

Mamu has been talking of these experiences for years now and I didn't even realize how hard this must have been for her.

I missed two periods this year. Last year, I missed one. In a few years, I will be 50 and I hope that the missing of periods will at least be a gradual process until then, instead of being something like hitting the wall.

Perimenopause is lonely and scary. I keep wondering what's going on inside my body. But no one knows. The body is sacred and the body also keeps its own secrets. 

Here's what we need to know.

meltdowns get more frequent

it tends to build up slowly and then breaks into a million little things and then it cracks open and you feel like your brain is about to burst open and then you break into sweat and tears and of course it makes you look pathetic because you will cry and you will end up in distorted expressions, disheveled hair, snot jamming your nose and you wailing like a child and people will just stare at you and wonder why you're behaving as you are and will try to make excuses for you or tell you to shut up, but you don't know how to react to that because something just cracked open inside you and there's no way to shut it down this quickly because closing it takes time and energy, and energy just got spent in crying and sobbing and standing before everyone, making a fool of yourself and becoming the horrible, evil person who cries so easily and weeps over the rearrangement of things, things are just objects, item, non-living things, but things that are important because you have come to rest some comfort in those things being there and so when someone moves them, it stirs feelings of instability and all you can do is cry and know there's no hold over it, and then you come back to it later, feeling guilt and heaviness and shame, wonder if you should run away or stay or run away and never come back, your loved ones will understand or won't, or they will hurt and hate you and all you can do then is to think about them and stay, stay even when you don't want to, stay even when your mind cannot, and then you will Google, show then a link on what an autistic meltdown means, but they think you are being dramatic and besides, the article is too long to read, and so you pick yourself up one more time, like you've done for over fourty-five years of your memory, you carry on, a little less whole than last time, a little more brittle, a little more smaller than ever, the body imitating how the heart feels