The real queen of perimenopause

Your weekend roundup of hopefully helpful things

Image courtesy of Netflix.

You have got to see the new Netflix documentary, Queen of the Mountain: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa.

No one is putting this together: She was 49 or around it when this was shot in 2022 – squarely in middle-to-late peri.

Lhakpa, who is from a small village in Nepal, holds the world record for most Mount Everest summits for a woman. No one else is even close. This film chronicles her 10th summit, and it’s just as unlikely and dramatic as the previous nine. The story of how this illiterate mother of three, who works at a Whole Foods in Connecticut and crowd-funded her summit, came to do all this is riveting, heartbreaking, inspiring and mind-expanding all at the same time. And if you look at it through the lens of the menopause transition? It goes to a whole other level.

The narrative you see here is nothing short of a menopause heroine’s journey. When Lhakpa – who turns 51 in September – says “my 10th summit. My darkness I leave behind”, I got shivers.

Talk about…