THE REWIRE NO ONE IS TALKING TO YOU ABOUT.

I spent the better half of my thirties learning how to stop making myself smaller in order to make others feel big.

Slowly testing my own boundaries- forcing myself into situations I knew would make me uncomfortable (in a good way). I chose my voice in situations I tried to hide it in before- I was learning to sit in these uncomfortable feelings a little longer until than normal until eventually, I was able to show up anywhere and stay there long enough to see what the other side of that anxiety felt like.

And then thirty-nine happened.

I really wasn’t prepared for this next stage of life; in fact, I was more or less blindsided by it. No one I knew was talking about it. It was not a thing my group was living through – so as far as I could tell, I just felt extremely off, and I didn’t know why.

I spent the last 9 months thinking I was cycling back into a depression. It was a narrative I was owning because I had been through it before. It was familiar.

I felt like I knew the steps to start moving through it, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, find the motivation to leave my house or do the things I loved.

I was gaslighting myself into workouts, literally driving by the studio on my way home from work, so I didn’t have an excuse that it was too far away.

Then, once I got there, I told myself that if I changed into my workout clothes, I would feel silly just walking back out the front door to my car.

I had paid for the hour, I was there, I was changed. So what’s the excuse at that point?

The joy I found in using my workouts as a release had become another task I had to do… & don’t get me started on the cancellation fees frustrations – for the days I just forgot… because, you know, brain fog. (We call it brain frogs around here, btw.)

I started isolating myself from my people. I took two months off work and thought that’s why I was depressed, but it didn’t explain the rest of my symptoms.

MY CURRENT SYMPTOMS:

Trauma survivors know that emotional states can fluctuate throughout the healing process.

One day never looks like the last-

Mood swings, depressive lows, and anxiety can be triggered by the littlest things.

My nervous system was all over the place for the last 10 years. My son is 2 months from moving out to college – I have big feelings around this, so was it really that weird to be feeling this weird?

I thought I could diagnose myself, because so much of what I was living felt familiar. I had been through it before, and I had developed the tools to move through whatever it was that had me working through it again.

However, the tools weren’t working, and that’s the part I couldn’t explain. It was so much more than, but just as simple as I just didn’t feel like myself.

I won’t sit here and say I’ve finished all the work on myself; that I have all the answers- because whoever really does? I’m just now getting to the other side of whatever this is…

But after years of studying psychology, specifically trauma recovery and the neuropsychology behind what it does to survivors, and nearly 30 years of therapy? I know myself well enough to know when something isn’t adding up.

There is a certain kind of courage in admitting that your own toolkit isn’t enough. That the work you have done on yourself, as real and as hard-earned as it is, has a ceiling in this particular moment. And that the next right move is not to dig deeper alone, but to reach out.

I have also spent the last 10 years intentionally rebuilding a village around me, not by accident and not out of convenience, but because I learned a long time ago that healing in isolation only gets you so far. My family, my boyfriend and friends, my therapist, my doctors… People who have been with me since the very beginning of my recovery journey, who know me, who have shown up for me, and who I trust enough to say the unedited version of what is actually happening. They have all played a huge role in helping me stay tethered to this reality.

So that is what I did. I used my village like a phone tree. I told my boyfriend what was going on – although he had been living it with me, so he knew something was up. I sat with my therapist, and I walked into my G.P.’s office and told her I had not felt like myself in almost a year. The list of symptoms was long and weird.

Click here for info on Perimenopause symptoms & Information

That was the turning point.

Not because any one of them had the answer immediately. But because saying it out loud, to the right people, in the right rooms, was the first honest thing I had done for myself in nine months.

I am lucky in that my G.P. is also a hormone specialist. So as soon as I told her what was going on, her immediate response was Bioidentical HRT. The first time she suggested this to me was a few years ago, but because my trauma responses had created some intense side effects, I just wasn’t ready to do testosterone. More or less, I was scared of all the cosmetically unpleasant things I had heard about taking it. I had just gotten my skin under control, and my hormones were balancing out after having a stable nervous system for the past seven years. I hadn’t heard the word “perimenopause” yet. I just heard hormones.

So when I came to her a year or two later with “I’m just not feeling like myself,” it wasn’t up for debate.

She explained I was, in fact, perimenopausal, and I had options. Two of which included needles, one was a cream, and the other a vaginal application of hormones. Naturally terrified of needles my entire life, I opted to try the cream first before looking into any other options. So she put me on testosterone cream and progesterone every day.

I remember leaving her office excited.

Excited, I wasn’t going crazy. Excited because it was normal. Excited because I could breathe knowing this was the beginning of a new chapter for me. And this time, walking into a new chapter, I was ready with all of the tools. I was excited for a new phase of being a woman. This time I felt in control of the plot; I wasn’t lost, losing space, and making myself smaller because I didn’t have answers or confidence.

This current curated version of me took planning, effort, and self-trust. I brought myself out of my own trenches, and I was ready to take on whatever was next. I had the manpower, the brainpower, and just the power to dive both feet into this next chapter. I called my boyfriend and told him the prognosis. I could feel the relief in his voice to hear the relief in mine. I had an answer. I felt good about it.

I obviously then texted my three best friends, and truly, this is where I was shocked. They weren’t on the same page at all.

1: “OMGGGG NOOOOOO!!!!!”

2: “You’re too young for your body not to be functioning properly or fully- I’m 40, and this hasn’t happened to me yet.” (She’s a ride or die; she just knows nothing about this…yet- we listen, we don’t judge)

3: “STFU”
My response: “My body knows we’re done with kids, she’s over it.”
Her response: “trueee that! Amen to losing your period.”

I was shocked. I went from being on cloud nine and having a feeling of resolution to feeling like there was something wrong with me. I was unhealthy because I was perimenopausal, and I had somehow failed wellness. Ha.

Ridiculous as it sounds, it really crashed my peri-party.

I sat with that feeling for a minute. The deflation of it. Going from the most relieved I had felt in nine months to suddenly feeling like I had announced something shameful.

And then it hit me. They just didn’t know. None of us really do until we’re in it. That’s the whole problem.

My man talked me off the ledge on the ride home, because that’s what he does. And eventually, one of my girlfriends circled back with “well, what do I know,” and honestly, that was enough. I wasn’t looking for them to understand it. I wasn’t looking for someone who had been through it. I just needed them to give me grace while I figured it out.

Turns out that’s all any of us really need.

I am nowhere near a finish line; I don’t even know if there is one. I am only four weeks into my Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy, so I don’t have a neat ending for you. Some days feel clearer. Some days, the brain frogs are still very much present and accounted for. But for the first time in nine months, I know what I’m actually dealing with. I have a plan. I have the right people and enough self-trust built up over a decade of hard work to know that this, like everything before it, is not the end of my story.

Perimenopause is not a failure. It is not your body giving up on you. It is a rewire. And rewires are uncomfortable and disorienting, and nobody warns you they’re coming. But they are not the end.

So if you’re in it, if you’re using every tool you have and nothing is moving, if you feel like a stranger in your own skin, if your people aren’t in this season yet and the loneliness of that is its own thing to carry, please hear this:

Are you in this season? Have you been through it? I want to know. Drop it in the comments. This is exactly the conversation we should be having.

Follow along for more Brain Frogs and Peri Parties!!! 🙂

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