Transition isn't an ending. Sometimes it's a necessary unraveling before the calm returns.
Menopause changes far more than your body. It can change how you sleep, how you think, how you feel inside your own skin, and it does all of this on a timeline you didn't choose and no one adequately explained. For something half the world will experience, the silence around what it actually feels like is staggering.
And in that silence, a particular kind of loneliness takes root. The people around you may minimize it or make light of it, and the world at large treats it as a footnote in a woman's life rather than one of its most significant passages. So much of what you're experiencing goes unspoken, not because you don't have the words but because you're not sure anyone is prepared to hear them.
These letters close that silence. They come from a woman in the middle of menopause herself, not looking back on it, and they speak to what this passage actually feels like without reducing it to a phrase or a pamphlet. They offer steady, honest company through the change, and the recognition that the woman on the other side of it is not a lesser version of who you were — she is the same woman you have always known.
The feel of the writing
All too often, menopause gets reduced to a couple of symptoms and a prescription, when what's really going on is that the biggest change of your adult life is working its way into every part of your world. It shows up in your sleep, your memory, your relationships and your work, until it starts to feel as though you're sharing your life with a stranger. You cancel lunch with friends when you can't zip up yesterday's jeans, or you catch yourself reacting to a completely normal moment with sudden frustration or exhausting tears, and you wonder where the woman you used to be went.
I thought I was prepared for this time in my life. I was braced for the heat and a shorter fuse, but hot flashes and irritability cover about as much of this as a Band-Aid covers a broken leg. I had no idea how much of the rest of my life it would reach. The woman I've always known is in here somewhere, and some days I would very much like her back. She never missed a birthday, and she did the grocery shopping without a list. Most days, though, I'm glad to be the woman who took her place. I have a lot less tolerance for nonsense and a lot more confidence to speak my mind, both of which came standard with the updated model.
You should know that menopause isn't something I've made my way through. I'm in the middle of it right alongside you, with the same restless nights and unpredictable days. My mornings start the way yours probably do, wondering who I'll see in the mirror and how I'll feel by lunchtime. And even though we share a lot of the same frustrations, I'll bet we also have some of the same stubborn determination to keep going, and to find as much humor in it as we possibly can.
Who these letters are for
Wherever you are in it, the first confusing signs, the thick of it, or finding your way out the other side these letters are for you. However it's showing up in your body and your life, you deserve to feel understood here.
