A few early observations about a seismic shift

What it feels to land upright after a stormy year into menopause

Me in Petra, Jordan, 2009.

If I could describe the way I’m feeling these days, now that I’ve passed through into menopause after an epic perimenopause, it would be a mixture of the following things.

Please forgive the drama. (Menopause is nothing if not dramatic.)

First up: I feel like I did in the moments after I was run off the fast lane by a careless bozo on Highway 416 heading to Toronto from Ottawa in the early 2000s.

I felt the wheels of my white Chevrolet Cavalier hit the gravel and lose their grip, watching helplessly as the car descended down into the grassy median, spinning around I don’t know how many times. (A calm came over me; everything slowed down, and I remember thinking calmly: I think this is it, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and it’s okay). But then, like a goddamn miracle – because it was, it was a miracle and I still know there was another hand or set of hands guiding me because I did not touch the steering wheel, it was spinning on its own and I broke two nails trying to grab it – suddenly the car was headed in the right direction. And it was climbing, it was climbing without me steering I swear to you, all these years later I still cannot believe this, it was heading up the embankment and then it was back in the fucking fast lane of Highway 416 heading towards Toronto just like it was before.

And all of a sudden it was like I came to, in utter disbelief, the windshield wipers flapping back and forth, with pieces of long grass whipping to and fro with them, the water from the bottle that had been between my legs spilt everywhere, a shot of adrenaline leaving me fighting for air and laughing maniacally and looking around to see if anyone – anyone – had witnessed this conversion of altered realities that just saved my actual life. (Because every time I passed that stretch after, I noticed the cinderblocks and cement structures that had it been in any other spot would have done me in).

I looked in my rear view mirror and saw a wall of cars, people who dropped back to allow whatever was going to happen happen. And then, slowly, a long, low, formerly luxury car in a dark colour with tinted windows moved forward from the pack, in the slow lane.

It approached and I looked over on my right. The driver’s window rolled down, and a man with long silver hair and aviators (I think he wore aviators) looked over at me with a wide grin, and gave me a long, slow thumbs up, before pulling ahead.

I’ve never been inside a tornado and then dropped back to earth, but I can imagine how I feel, and the way I imagine that feeling is how I feel right now.

I met so many beautiful women this summer when I went to New York City for the Perry talk in June. Inside the boisterous, dark, loud Sugar Monk Lounge in Harlem at Omisade Burney-Scott’s (Black Girl’s Guide to Menopause) Menopause Multiverse Cocktail Hour, I huddled for a magical few minutes with Mona Eltahawy, the author and commentator and editor of the upcoming menopause anthology I contributed to, Bloody Hell!

I’d seen her online talking about how menopause was kicking her ass in her crazy last year, and I told her it was kicking mine. I said I did not know what end was up. She told me it got better when she passed through the transition – not all at once, not right away – and that it would for me too. I feel like I’m in the ‘not all at once, not right away’ part.

You know how brand-new babies look at you like they literally can’t believe their eyes? Like they just landed somewhere and they are mind-boggled about it? Yeah, also like that.