I want you to forgive yourself

I'll go first...

If there is anything I’d like people going through perimenopause to know, if there’s anything I’d like you to know, it’s that no matter what route you take, no matter how you feel physically, the very best thing you can do emotionally and spiritually is begin the painful, healing, scary but fruitful reckoning with your past so you can properly face your future.

The last few years have been a transformative minefield for that, for me. And I want you to be able to experience this too. Let me get you started with my ‘I forgive you letter’ to myself. I’ve been working on it for months and months. Some of it is serious, some of it is not so much. But it’s all real.

Dear Ann Marie,

I want you to forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself for all the people who wrote this year and asked to partner with you on all the different platforms that you lost track of and cannot find. I know you are sure someone wanted to do a newsletter swap and you were really excited about it, and now for the love of all things holy you cannot find it anywhere.

Forgive yourself for losing the contact info of the people who sent you those CBD calm and sleep supplements – who were they and how do you get in touch with them? Let’s hope the mystery can be revealed.

Forgive yourself for all the emails you meant to reply to. For the DMs lost. For the ‘meant tos’ that went into the ether.

Forgive yourself for that night you spilled butter chicken sauce on your favorite sweatshirt and then was too lazy to soak it and now it’s ruined.

Forgive yourself for not playing with your cat more.

Forgive yourself for not publishing more content.

Forgive yourself being impatient, and even mean, to your mom and dad.

Forgive yourself for all the financial mistakes, and for trusting the financial advisers who made your skin crawl.

Forgive yourself for trusting other people more than yourself, and for thinking everyone was smarter than you. Lots of people are. Not everyone.

Forgive yourself for your speeding tickets. At least you are paying them now and not letting them pile up to a shocker at the end of the year.

Forgive yourself for all those healthy foods that were really just processed and effing up your gut.

Forgive yourself for all the food you burned because the burner was up too high or you got distracted, and for all the people who couldn’t take the elevator in your building while your fire alarm was going off.

Forgive yourself for all the produce you wasted being too enthusiastic for your health kick.

Forgive yourself for all the awesome content that’s on your phone that you can’t even think about how to get out.

Forgive yourself for how many years you beat yourself up and wondered what was wrong with you for not getting married or having kids.

Forgive yourself for being mad that everyone is talking about retirement or saying things like “I’m too old for that”.

Forgive yourself for everything you want to do, but just can’t get to.

Forgive yourself for the times you should have called your dad, but it was late and you didn’t have the energy to talk about Donald Trump again.

Forgive yourself for all the bad behavior you’ve tolerated. From all the bad boys.

Forgive yourself for all the selfish sex you put up with and for how much of yourself you gave away when you did.

Forgive yourself for not cleaning out that massive cupboard again this year.

Forgive yourself for all the times you let yourself down. Just know you won’t be doing that anymore.

Forgive yourself for all the times you drank too much. And for all the times you felt shame about it.

Forgive yourself for still not understanding, at 54, how to buy sheets that fit the bed.

Forgive yourself for not focusing on strength training more. You’ve worked out pretty regularly and anyway, you are doing it now.

Forgive yourself for the things you’ve gotten wrong in your career, and in Hotflash inc.

Forgive yourself for not having the first idea how to organize this damn platform in the way you know it needs to be to grow. And for not understanding how to do affiliate programs better. And for every time you looked at how someone else runs their platform and thought “why are they smashing it and I am floundering?” You are figuring it out.

Forgive yourself for all the pieces you wanted to write and didn’t. Not many people have two full-time jobs.

Forgive yourself for how upset you get when you see doctors taking down other people, and influencers being mean about perfectly reasonable and non-harmful interventions, and how frustrating you find it when everyone suggests that menopause is one way. You know it’s different, and that’s why you are doing all this.

Forgive yourself for giving that guy with the emotional problems who always dangled the possibility of you being together so much damn time. You’ve stopped now, finally, and that’s the important thing.

Forgive yourself for not booking that facial peel with the dermatologist to get rid of the age spots that drive you nuts on your face. You are scared of having a burned-off face. It’s understandable you would procrastinate.

Forgive yourself for staying with the ob-gyn who won’t give you hormone therapy because you are too busy and worn-out to get a new one, and explain to them why you aren’t married.

Forgive yourself for the questions you didn’t ask, the times you let your ego get in the way of journalism, and for all that you don’t know.

Forgive yourself for how tired and sick you were over the last couple of years, and how much of your life you let go while you tried to find solutions and then heal.

Forgive yourself for the times you lost it, when you were impatient and when you were irritated.

Forgive yourself for all the times you ate after 6pm. After 9pm. And right before bed.

Forgive yourself for almost letting scammers into your Gmail because they said they were from Dubai CID and you were driving to a pelvic floor physiotherapist and you were scattered and it’s scary to get a call saying it’s Dubai Police.

Forgive yourself for buying courses on marketing, running a business without being on social media, face osteopathy, more marketing, face yoga, more marketing, vagal nerve regulation, effective communication, Vaginal Kung Fu, more marketing, AI, Chat GPT prompts, and again and again and again, and then not doing them and not even knowing for sure where they even are or how to access them. Because there are a lot of things you did do and those things are more important.

Forgive yourself for how angry, sad, impatient, lost and alone you’ve felt since your dad died, and for the times you know you needed to move your body but the weight was too much to bear.

Forgive yourself for not doing the Kegel exercises you’ve had on your to-do list since you first learned about them in the year 2000, when you were 30. She’s holding up pretty good.

Forgive yourself for watching 2.5 seasons of The Kardashians when you were tired in the last few weeks. You always have found their glossy hair, expressionless faces and monotone voices and obsessive cleanliness and organizational skills soothing for

Forgive yourself for the decades you spent with IBS, and for dropping it every time you raised it with a doctor who said ‘there’s nothing you can do’.

Forgive yourself for having a bunch of health problems (fatty liver, leaky gut, Hashimoto’s, low thyroid, pre-diabetes and insulin resistance) and thinking it was perimenopause.

Forgive yourself for all those years you believed that there was something wrong with you, and your brain, for all the sadness and anxiety and fear and loneliness and the despair. You’ve got you now. You never were and never are alone.

AMx

PS: Drop me a comment and let me know one thing :)