This week I’m thinking about a TikTok video, a lovely woman and a headline – and a desperate audio note I recorded 10 years ago.
Filled with despair, that note marks one of my life’s Great Low Moments: Sitting in my car, in the rain, in the parking lot of restaurant in a big box mall parking lot in my hometown of London, Ontario, totally lost.
Sure, it was a particularly screwed-up time in my life, but it was also the height of my earliest perimenopause – 10 freaking years ago – and I had no idea what was happening or what to do about it. No one I had seen by then did either, even though my eyelashes had fallen out, I was having panic attacks, nightmares, obsessive thoughts, sleep issues, heart palpitations, terrible headaches and the worst morning dread.
I felt like I could handle nothing.
The video making the rounds is of a 48-year-old woman (great job, grandkids) sitting in her car in Ontario, just like I was, except telling TikTok about being ravaged by symptoms (fatigue, heart palpitations, inflammation) and having nowhere to turn. She’d labelled it “I need help badly”, described her doctor saying all of her hormones were “in the normal range” and was asking if anyone knew of providers. More than 4,000 comments later, I hope she found someone – and understands she is not alone.
The lovely young woman – she seemed like a girl to me – I met yesterday at the #healthlove event, organized by TishTash Marketing at Dubai’s Times Square Center. She was in her late 30s, mom to a boy, married to a guy who “sometimes gets it”. As she looked at the sign I’d made with an array of perimenopause symptoms, she said “that’s me” and her eyes filled with tears. We talked for awhile, her on the edge of crying the whole time, and me on the edge of crying with heartache for her. What got me was the way she said she couldn’t handle anything she used to be able to: like even her husband saying someone was coming by to look at something in their house. She found herself wailing “I needed to know yesterday!” explaining she knew how crazy it sounded, even if it was true.
And then there is Charlotte Sumbland, a 47-year-old British nail salon worker and mom who struggled with perimenopause so badly she took her own life. Her friend Stacy, who organized a fundraising Menopause Walk in her honor, said she’d been open about her struggles with the transition – but never imagined she wouldn’t make it through.
“Part of the reason it's so hard to come to terms with is that Charlotte was always a problem solver,” she told the Manchester Evening News. “If you had an issue, she'd find a way forward. We had actually been on holiday to Spain the week before and she was enjoying herself but then would start panicking and sighing about her situation.”
There is a reason peri/menopause is a heroine’s journey. Despair, mental anguish and suicide ideation are all real – as are the women who follow through.
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As Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer write bluntly of this transition in their book Wise Power, ‘some will not make it’.
Ten years ago, I had just interviewed a psychologist who had launched a global business doing therapy for expatriates. After I made my voice note, my all-knowing inner voice popped his name into my head, with this message: “you can email him”. It was the first time I’d ever done that: gone back to an interviewee and asked for personal help. We had a Zoom call, he was the kind, objective listener I needed, and then he set me up with a therapist. It was just enough for me to hold on to. The therapist helped guide me out of that particular morass, and to some real self-understanding too.
(Although it would be five more years before I connected how I was feeling with perimenopause.)
Who knows why despair and mental anguish hit some people harder than others? Why some are able to at least imagine the hope that floats in the soft beauty of morning light in the dark night, and others lose sight of it altogether.
I hugged the lovely young woman on the edge of tears in the mall yesterday before she went on her way. I told her this too shall pass, and just as it would have been for me if someone had said it to me in that parking lot 10 years ago, it felt inadequate. She is vulnerable, I know she feels alone, and I can’t stop thinking about her.
I am heartened that the word is getting out about perimenopause. That at least now she knows what she is dealing with – and many more women with her. Talking about it is half the battle, something executive coach Hannah Heart wrote about well this week in Forbes.
I don’t think the answer is as simple as “better care and hormone therapy”, but being able to access our options more easily, so we can think enough to tackle everything else, sure would be a great next step.
Science stuff
MENSTRUAL CYCLES + MORTALITY: A reminder of the massive role our prior reproductive lives play in our “perimenopause vulnerability” to later disease: a large 2020 study published in the British Medical Journal found higher mortality rates in those who reported irregular cycles. The data came via the Nurses’ Health Study II, which ran for 24 years from 1993 to 2017. Researchers looked at 79,505 premenopausal women without a history of cardiovascular disease, cancer or diabetes, checking in on their menstrual cycles at three age sets: 14-17; 18-22 and 29-46. They documented 1,975 premature deaths (that’s before 70), with 894 from cancer and 172 from cardiovascular disease. In the women who reported irregularity between 29-46, the mortality rate was 39 percent higher. At the time, researchers stated the obvious when they told the media that irregular periods are a symptom of a larger problem.
Hotflash inc takeaway: While the majority is busy blaming our increased vulnerability to disease on peri/menopause, and that’s certainly part of it, the larger picture gets ignored. If you have a history of irregular periods, be aware, get informed and talk about it with your doctor, along with anything else of note in your reproductive history. Now is the time to take prevention steps.
Quote to keep you going:
“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.”
E. Joseph Cossman
Show I’m looking forward to
Score another one for late bloomers: British standup Bridget Christie has been working on her new six-part series The Change (June 21, Channel 4) for six years now, and has had most of her success later in life.
She tells The Guardian: “I think it’s great that things are happening to me post-50. It feels really exciting, and I hope it inspires other women to think that they don’t have to have done everything by the time they’re 30.”
The show sounds good, too: “Christie has packed so many themes into six episodes. There is sexism, the menopause, sexual harassment, the climate emergency, capitalism and greed, the importance of local community, our lost connection with the land, folk traditions and who they are for, gender identity, the inescapable sense of time passing, even a fair bit about eels. It’s funny, touching, sometimes unsettling, and singularly Christie’s voice.”
Click, read, listen, watch + follow
• This Olympian is planning for perimenopause, and that is just the way it should be: Periods, perimenopause and performance: what Jessica Ennis-Hill wants you to know Get the Gloss
• I think this might be a first: Why menopause is a business issue Construction News
• Dr Jen Gunter is doing a weekly series on HRT The Vagenda
• What American journalist Tara Ellison exposes in this article about the US$1,600 Goop Immersive experience is the stark divide between integrative and mainstream perimenopause care. And I think that’s what is really f***ing us all up: Inside Gwyneth Paltrow’s $1,600 hormone summit there’s plenty of Goop, but also some good. Los Angeles Times
• The FDA approved a new OTC gel for erectile dysfunction that works in 10 minutes. I had thoughts Hotflash inc IG
• All the rage: the rise of the menopause novel The Guardian
• Cold flashes during menopause: Is it normal? (Yes, I’m getting them, but also: low thyroid) Health News
Editor’s note
People are loving the Wise AF (and a goddamn delight) T-shirt The Empress’s Alisa Kennedy Jones and I launched last week. Vivian left this note: “Awesome! I’m ordering now….for me, my daughter & my daughter-in-law!”
Please send pics if you get one. This entire venture is a thrill. I’m still waiting for mine :)
You’ve got me thinking back now to earlier times when I didn’t even know perimenopause was a thing. All those symptoms ring some big bells!