As part of our ongoing look at perimenopause, Capsule talks to Niki Bezzant on menopause, the messy years of midlife and the battle between blowing up your life or sticking to your comfort zone when you know something has to change.
The minute Capsule started dipping our toes into the perimenopause and menopause conversation, there was one name that kept coming up: Niki Bezzant. The journalist and editor released her first menopause guide, This Changes Everything, back in 2022 after failing to find anything on the topic that seemed up-to-date or relevant. “The books that I found in the library had these ladies in cardigans on the cover and as a Gen X woman, they didn’t speak to me at all,” she laughs.
So, she wrote the book she needed. And it was such a hit that there’s now a follow-up, The Everything Guide, which is an even more practical and informative guide to surviving and thriving through midlife. Niki is as surprised as anyone that this is where her career has gone – “I didn’t think the book was going to end up changing what I spend a lot of my time now doing” – but it is such a giant, all-consuming topic that up until recently, half the population was expected to endure in silence.
“When I started doing a little bit of research into menopause, I realised how much I did not know,” Niki says. “Having written about health for 20 years, I still had this huge blind spot myself about menopause. I hadn’t thought about it… there was some education of myself, and then of others, that needed to happen.”
A large part of that 20 years of writing about health was spent as the founding editor of Healthy Food Guide, one of NZ’s leading health magazines. It was prime training for sifting through the weeds of misinformation, emotion and straight-up grifting that comes with any kind of health talk, she says.
“There is so much noise around what to do and why you should do it, what’s wrong with you and ‘I’ve got the solution here,’ ‘no, I’ve got the solution here,’ ‘everything you’ve been told before is wrong,’” she lists. “And that word ‘should’ keeps coming up time and time again with menopause, just like it does with food.”
Body Acceptance & Menopause
One of the key threads that weaves its way through her writing on menopause – and the message she wants to get through to those currently going through it – is the idea of body acceptance. In The Everything Guide, Niki details the insidiously toxic messages that Gen X were given about body image. As she says, it can be a tall ask for a generation of women who were taught to be hyper critical of their bodies to then love a body that’s going through the ageing process.
“It’s hard to understand just how ingrained that is in us,” she says of the self-criticism that Gen X grew up with. “It’s hard to develop acceptance of our bodies and of change, as well. We think that we should stay the same – our bodies should stay the same shape, the same size through our whole life. And that’s a ridiculous expectation that we have grown up with, from when we were little children. The messaging we got was: the smaller, the better.”
“It’s a harmful idea in any case, but it’s particularly harmful as we get older,” Niki says. “We don’t want to be small, and frail, and weak. We want to be strong. And that’s a very difficult mental shift for someone of my generation, and younger women as well, to go from the idea that ‘whatever I do in terms of eating, exercise and self-care is in service of making me smaller,’ to ‘what I’m doing is helping me get stronger and be healthier and have strong bones, and a strong heart and brain.’”
Gen X & Menopause
As Gen X hits menopause, they’re not only changing the conversation around menopause, but they’re also changing our idea of what menopause looks like, as well. As Niki mentions in her menopause presentations she takes round to different groups and workplaces, it was only a generation ago that we had The Golden Girls as the poster girls for being in your 50s. And sure, there’s a lot to love about the Golden Girls gang – great friendships, even better jokes – but 55 now is the age of Jennifer Aniston, not Betty White. The reason that Niki includes them as an example is to show the change in what we consider mid-life to be.
“I show photos of Jennifer Aniston and Halle Berry to show ‘this is what we’re actually talking about here,’” she says. “When we talk about women in their 50s, we’re not talking about little old ladies. We’re talking about women in our prime.”
That of course also refers to the aesthetics of ageing – and obviously, the physical side of getting older is a big deal. But there is also the emotional side of mid-life, what one of Niki’s psychologists she talks to in the books refers to, both ominously and intriguingly, as ‘the reckoning.’
“Perimenopause is a time of reckoning because physically, you are changing. Your hormones are changing, your brain is changing. Everything is in a bit of turmoil, and it does force you to face up to: where am I, and where do I want to be?”
The word ‘dense’ comes up a lot in both books as Niki’s keyword to describe what mid-life is like – so does the word ‘messy’, which feels just as appropriate. It can be hard for a lot of women to work out what is going on in their lives – is it simply the uncomfortable soul itch of living through change, or is there something deeper at play – are there big life decisions that need to be made?
The Messy Middle Of Midlife
It’s when the importance of self-care comes in. Not the fluffy, fun stuff – but, as Niki calls, it the nitty-gritty of self-care: the deep self-reflection that comes with hitting a milestone birthday and asking: what do I want for the next half of my life? Do I still want to keep making the same choices, accepting the same card of hands I think I’ve been dealt?
Because if the secret answer is a quiet, internal ‘no’, then that’s when the urge to blow up your life can get louder and louder. This is part of Niki’s lived experience with midlife – and part of why her books have resonated with such a wide audience. Because the messy years of her own midlife included leaving her high-profile job and leaving her 18-year marriage.
“It is a very difficult thing to blow up your life,” she says. “And it can be very tempting to stay in the comfort of where you are now, even if you’re not happy.”
Such moves, she says, are not for the faint-hearted, but she was surprised at the responses her decisions received from other people.
“I remember back to that time, when I had left my marriage and I had left my job, and I would have that conversation around the marriage side of it with other women, and the thing they would always say to me is, ‘oh, you’re so brave.’ And I didn’t think I was being brave at all,” she says. “I felt like it was just something I needed to do – no matter how messy or difficult it was.”
But once the dust settled, a sense of great joy arrived. At 54, Niki says, she is considerably happier than she was a decade ago. “I am excited about the next part of my life, I want this to be the best part,” she says. “But to get there, you sometimes have to go through a bit of messy stuff.”
For people who are at the start of that messy middle, Niki advises that women learn how to be more selfish in taking the time to work out what they need and want.
“We get very used to putting other people’s needs ahead of our own, so that when we do actually do something that’s just for ourselves, we feel guilty about it,” she says. “I reckon ‘being selfish’ is important self-care, and it’s like a muscle; we need to build it up.”
“So, I reckon do one small thing every day that you might have thought was ‘selfish’ in the past.” Ever the health journalist, she’s clear it’s your long-term choices, rather than the day-to-day chaos, that make the biggest difference. “It’s about zooming out and looking at the bigger picture and understanding that it’s not about what you do on any one day, it’s about what you do over a long time – that really determines how well you are,” she says. “Just give yourself a bit of a break, be kind to yourself and think, ‘what do I need to be kind to myself today?’”