It has the energy of a plumber whose ceiling has just come down. Or a fire safety officer standing outside a building he was, until recently, extremely confident about. I have spent years telling other women what is coming. It has now knocked on my own door with a clipboard and a look of professional interest.
The internet, meanwhile, has been very clear that I am simultaneously too old to start over, in my absolute prime, entering my villain era, and possibly hormonal. Four things. All at once. From the same app, occasionally from the same woman, within about ninety seconds.
Only one of those has any evidence behind it, and it is not the one you think.
So, in the spirit of the work, here is what I wish someone had told me before I got here. Some of it is silly. Some of it is not. I have not sorted them for you, because nobody sorted them for me.
1. Nobody talks about perimenopause. Nobody.
Not your mother. Not your friends, at least not at first. Not the internet, which will cheerfully tell you what to eat for your hormone type and never once tell you what your hormones are actually doing. Certainly not at work, where the word lands like a dropped plate and everyone becomes fascinated by the agenda.
We have all had the menopause conversation, more or less. The hot flushes. The fan. The thermostat joke. Fine. Sorted.
Nobody told me about the ten to fifteen years before that, which is where most of the damage actually happens. The decade where your periods are still turning up, your bloods look fine, you are ostensibly a functioning adult, and yet at 3am you are lying there with a heart rate you cannot account for, having lost the word for “fork”, conducting a calm internal review of whether you have simply become a difficult person.
That is perimenopause. It can start in your late thirties. Mine, apparently, has been reading this newsletter over my shoulder and taking notes.
The reason nobody talks about it is not mystery. The symptoms are diffuse, unglamorous, easy to dismiss, and they land almost exclusively on women already carrying three other people’s calendars. So we do the sensible thing. We file it under stress, or burnout, or personal failing, and we say nothing to anyone.
I have now spoken to hundreds of women about this. Almost every one of them thought she was the only one. Hundreds of women, all independently concluding they were uniquely defective, all in the same fifteen-year window. At some point that stops being a coincidence and starts being a public health problem.
2. Nobody is coming to explain your own body to you
I assumed there would be a moment.
A conversation. Some point at which a calm professional would sit me down, produce a diagram, and say: right, here is what happens next, here is roughly when, here are your options, any questions.
There is no such moment. There is a pamphlet, if you are lucky. It is mostly about hot flushes. It has a photograph on the front of a woman in linen laughing at a salad.
The most useful thing I have learned this decade is that the information is not going to arrive. You have to go and get it, and then you have to carry it into the room yourself.
3. “Your bloods are normal” is not a diagnosis
It is one measurement. On one day. Of a system currently behaving like a dropped slinky.
I have heard from hundreds of women who were told their results were fine, went home, and quietly concluded that the problem must therefore be their personality.
It is the single most efficient way to make a woman stop asking questions. It works nearly every time. It costs nothing and takes four words.
4. The rage is real, and it is pointing at something
Yes, it is hormonal. Oestrogen supports serotonin. Serotonin provides the gap between having a feeling and doing something about it. When oestrogen lurches, the gap goes.
But here is the part nobody says out loud.
That gap was never what made you nice. It was what made you tolerant. And a great deal of what you were tolerating, you were tolerating because you had the capacity to — not because it was ever remotely acceptable.
The rage is not always about the dishwasher.
Sometimes it is about the dishwasher. I want to be fair to the rage. But not always.
5. Your body has begun making sounds you did not authorise
Standing up. Sitting down. Getting out of a car in a way that can be heard from inside the house.
I have no scientific insight to offer here. It is simply happening. There was no consultation period. I have decided to find it funny, largely because the alternative is available and I do not want it.
Related: menus have moved further away. In the last two years restaurants collectively agreed to print everything in 7pt, and my arms independently decided they were twenty per cent shorter. These two developments are unrelated and I accept neither.
6. Pain is not the price of getting older
Right. Serious one.
If sex hurts, that is not a natural consequence of ageing that you are required to absorb in silence. It is genitourinary syndrome of menopause. It is extremely common, it is very treatable, and it is dramatically under-treated for exactly one reason: nobody asks, and nobody tells.
I have watched women give up an entire dimension of their lives rather than say one word in a doctor’s office.
The word is “pain”. Say it. Say it first, before the small talk, before you lose your nerve somewhere between the blood pressure cuff and the door.
7. Your partner is not rejecting you. They are guessing.
You stop initiating, because it hurts. They stop reaching, because they do not want to be That Person. You each independently conclude that the other one left first.
Two people. Both hurt. Both silent. Both wrong.
It is the most common relationship story of this decade, and it is fixable in one conversation that neither of you wants to have and both of you have been rehearsing for two years.
8. Strength training is not optional, and I resent this deeply
I would love to tell you the answer is something gentle and restorative. Something involving a bolster.
It is not. It is picking heavy things up and putting them down again, repeatedly, forever, because muscle and bone are quietly leaving and you have a genuinely brief window in which to argue with them about it.
Nothing in a bottle will do this for you. I know this because I sell supplements, and I have looked, and I still cannot sell you one that does this. If I could, I would have named it something insufferable and retired.
9. You will care less, and it is the best thing that happens
Here is the part nobody warned me about at all.
I say no faster now. I stop explaining myself roughly halfway through the sentence I used to finish. I have stopped auditioning for people who were never going to like me — a role I performed, unpaid, for approximately twenty-five years, to modest reviews.
Somewhere in the last few years, the thing that used to feel like it needed constant management quietly became a thing I could simply put down.
Everyone warned me about the hot flushes. Not one person mentioned this.
The actual point
Here is what I have learned, doing this work and now walking into it myself.
This decade is not a decline you have to manage gracefully.
It is a transition. And transitions are the only points at which anything is genuinely up for renegotiation. Your body. Your relationship. Your work. What you tolerate, and what you have been quietly carrying since you were twenty-two.
Medicine can treat the tissue. It cannot rebuild the woman.
That part is yours. And honestly, it is the interesting part.
If any of the above landed harder than the rest, start by getting it into words. I have built a short, private reconnection assessment for exactly that. It will not diagnose you. It gives you language specific enough to carry into a room - with a doctor, with a partner, or with yourself at 3am when you are still awake and would like to know why.
A few minutes. Free. The thing I wish someone had handed me at thirty-five, instead of the woman with the salad.
So: 40. Extremely on brand.
The cake is gone. The villain era is only just getting started. And I intend to enjoy this considerably more than anyone warned me I would.
Nothing to fix.
Hope