The wisdom of menopause

aka this is going somewhere good damn it

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

About five years ago I was really suffering from perimenopause, with symptoms including serious sleep problems, bad anxiety, lots of body aches, brain fog and more. But as I tried to find help, I also wanted information. So I created Google alerts for perimenopause and menopause. 

What I got was a flood of alarming and overwhelmingly negative stories, each one filled with a sense of loss, fear, shutting down, ending, dwindling and deficiency. (That is part of the reason I am here today, doing this.)

Yet none of this squared with what I had read about the experience back at age 45, when, not knowing I was already in the throes of perimenopause, I decided to prepare for what was ahead. 

I did this by digging into my well-thumbed, brick-like copy of Dr Christiane Northrup’s invaluable resource Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. I’d tucked Dr Northrup’s name away years earlier, after she was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show (check out my editor’s note for the r…