To whom it may concern,
I have a complaint to make, and it regards when I reached my 40th birthday. Just to clarify, I am now 44 years and 8 months old. For some reason I find myself rounding up and calling myself 45, but maybe when you get to this age it’s just easier to round to the nearest 5 or 0. Anyway, I digress.
So my somewhat delayed complaint is about when I turned 40. I expected to wake up feeling different—a monumental transition into midlife. I didn’t. I felt the exact same as I had in my mid to late 30s and weirdly felt disappointed, mis-sold the big milestone birthday. Maybe I was naive and clearly just didn’t know any better, but nobody seems to want to talk about these things—the midlife changes we eventually have to go through and when they’ll kick in. Actually, that’s a blatant lie: celebrities like Davina love banging on about it—but maybe I’m needing a more real-life, relatable person to talk to about it all, not someone looking to promote themselves… I need authenticity.
It feels like we are expected to just get old and get on with it without a fuss. Don’t ask any questions, or if you do, get on with it in private using an AI bot as your confidante. Sort of quietly fade or disappear into menopause with a pair of shrivelled up ovaries as the final outcome.
However, I feel cross, no more than that… I feel really pissed off, because what I wasn’t anticipating was that when I neared the 44-year-old mark it would hit me hard. I wasn’t ready, I was off guard, I felt tricked.
Instead there was me drifting along thinking, “What’s all the fuss? Nowt much to see here, aging gracefully yada yada.” Well, now I’m 44, touching 45. I don’t feel like I did in my mid to late thirties. I feel frankly a bit shit and lost in life. I don’t quite recognise myself in the mirror, or even the texture of my hand skin when I look down, and with that comes a sad despair. I don’t quite get the point of life anymore and wonder what it’s all about, and what the point will be in what is yet to come. I worry a lot, and my anxiety can make me overthink to the point I feel exhausted some days.
Apologies if I’m sounding a tad self-indulgent, but it’s how I feel, and I like writing about it as it helps me make sense of what’s going on in my somewhat overly complicated head. A wise woman once said to me, “It’s ok to not be ok.” I agree. I’m struggling, looking for answers and a magic solution, and to somehow revert back to the me I used to know—the one who didn’t know what was coming, blissfully ignorant.
Maybe that’s why no one talks about it beforehand, a bit like childbirth: you’re better off not knowing, so when it happens you think, “Why did no one warn me and give me the heads up?” You feel a bit betrayed that they kept it all on the down low. So you just have to breathe hard through it when it comes, endure the pain, and also the shock of not knowing it would be this hard, while dealing with your own foolish naivety to boot.
I’m trying a few things and experimenting with HRT now (I’ll email about that separately), but I’m also starting to learn to accept and grieve. It’s a painful process. Sorry if that sounds dramatic… I’m being self-indulgent and dramatic now, but I’ll try not to beat myself up about it. It’s how I feel, and I’m going to own it. Maybe that’s who I am: I have a deep soul, and when it hurts I really feel it and seek some way to make it stop hurting by finding the fix—the elusive elixir that will revert me back to a younger, former carefree self… if only I’d known back then how I’d feel now.
Maybe therein lies the problem: I’m a problem solver and a fixer. However, I’ve started to feel a shift recently due to some major life decisions I recently made (more about those in another email). I’m starting to realise it’s about stopping, or at least slowing down a bit, and accepting what is. There are things that you can’t run away from, and life transitions are one of them. They are always going to get you in the end, however blissfully ignorant you make the approach.
Writing and/or talking to an empathetic ear so you can express your thoughts and feelings will always be a good way to help with any transition, particularly menopause. In my humble opinion, society still isn’t there regarding menopause and the challenges it can cause women with regards to both their mental and physical health. But perhaps we are slowly moving in the right direction, with more work and policy happening around menopause in the workplace.
As long as a menopause policy isn’t a tick-box exercise for an employer to write/get AI to create and then never actually utilise or honour, somehow that feels worse than not having a policy at all.
Let’s talk about how this transition can make us feel. Let’s be honest and raw. Let’s not disappear quietly from sight.
From my soul to yours,
Becky
x
