Is it just us, or is everyone talking about perimenopause right now? Why it’s coming for a lot of us earlier than we might expect, and why it might explain a lot of the life challenges we’re currently going through.
Not to start an article with a wild generalisation, but to me – any mention of hormones always makes me think of growing up, not growing old. Hormonal acne, periods, boobs – the awkwardness of youth. Or maybe, the scant knowledge of hormones that accompanies fertility – the peak of one hormone, the lows of another. The sliver of a window that arrives each month when you try and get pregnant. That’s where my knowledge ended – I just had a vague understanding that after three to four decades of hormonal maintenance, I would simply drift into a period-free heaven and never have a hormonal problem, ever again.
What a relief!
Then I learned that there’s actually a whole other thing to worry about.
I have spent so much of my thirties being preoccupied with the pressure of cranking out a baby before the sands of time run out in my uterus, that it has never really occurred to me to think about what comes next. Sure, I read articles about it – even on this very website – but it always felt like something that happened to other people! Years, maybe even decades away? Certainly not something that I, as a fresh wee 39-year-old would need to think about.
(cough)
But then this year, the topic of perimenopause has kept coming up, again and again and again. It was like the Voldemort of topics of conversation, hovering just out of sight. There was a real sense in women I knew, women in my age bracket of 35-45, who were suddenly wanting to blow up their lives. Those who wanted to end top careers on no notice, exit relationships, move countries, start over. Those who were reaching the edges of their mental health, faster and harder than before. Suddenly, their choices – their lives – seemed unrecognisable to them. What the hell was going on? Weren’t we too young for this??
Turns out, no. The average age we hit menopause is 51, and perimenopause tends to last for the five to 10 years previous. And the first symptoms are not what we’ve been told to expect – hot flashes, no periods, etc. Nope, the first symptoms are often emotional, or mental health related. Irritability, exhaustion, 3am anxiety spirals, inability to remember anything. All those symptoms that we might just have associated with The Way Life Is Now… might actually be perimenopause.
Millennials Are Hitting Perimenopause
People love to write think pieces about millennials – how we are stunted, but ageing well. How we are burning out, but quiet quitting. How we lost out on the housing market due to brunch, or whatever. But now that millennials are hitting midlife, we are no longer synonymous with young people – heck, we’re not even the second to youngest generation.
Millennials are now old enough to have mortgages (if they’re lucky) AND mid-life crises; they’re just less well-funded than their older counterparts. And now, millennials have entered the perimenopause conversation as well, following the rage breadcrumbs left by our Gen X sisters.
Just like the world of pregnancy and postpartum, menopause is a fairly routine part of the life experience for half the world – and yet, we don’t know much about it. It just sort of… happens. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it goes badly, who knows why? *shrugs in male*.
But while previous generations of women have been expected to suffer in silence, those now going through menopause are used to talking out loud about the shadow lives of inhabiting a female body – periods, ovarian cysts, infertility, post-partum depression. You know, the second-glass-of-wine tier of conversation where you ditch the small talk and really lean in.
And the zeitgeist is leaning in as well. The internet’s favourite OB/GYN Dr Jen Gunter wrote a book called The Menopause Manifesto, and NZ editor and journalist Niki Bezzant has just released a follow-up to her best-selling menopause book This Changes Everything, called The Everything Guide. But it’s not just the science and wellbeing side of it – there’s a growing movement to capture the ‘all bets are off’, life-blowing-up side of perimenopause and menopause as well.
Author Miranda July has been hailed as writing “the first great perimenopausal novel,” in her new book All Fours, about a 45-year-old woman who bails on a life-changing road trip – and her family – to move into a hotel permanently and have an affair. An artist’s take on the mid-life crisis, it’s been described. Another book, I’m Just Here To Enjoy Myself – which we wrote about here – looks at a single, child-free 46-year-old’s tour of pleasure through Paris, as she rejects what she’s been told to think about her middle-aged body and just have a lot of sex and cheese instead.
Author Angela Garbes – who wrote two brilliant non-fiction books about motherhood – turned her lens on perimenopause in her Guardian column Halfway There: A Column About Midlife. Anne Hathaway as a 40-year-old mother was worshipped by a younger man in the fan fiction movie The Idea Of You – confusing a bunch of young people about what 40 is supposed to look like in the meantime. The reality is, midlife goes hand-in-hand with the highs and lows of perimenopause; they cannot be disentangled from each other. You can’t talk about being a teenager without the crushing blows of puberty, so you can’t expect to talk about your 40s without the mixed bag of perimenopause. It’s messy as hell.
And this is where Capsule excels – we love to live in the TMI parts of being a grown-up. We’ve got a series of expert chats coming up, as well as some rants, and we’d love for you to join us. Because whatever age bracket you’re currently sitting in, if you’ve got a uterus… then it’s coming for you as well.
Got a perimenopausal point you want to get across? Email hello@capsulenz.com
