Why does nobody tell women what an absolute bitch perimenopause can be? I feel like nobody told me anything about it, save for hot flashes. I also feel that doctors don't know enough about it as well. I basically had to diagnose myself.
Like, seriously, women should be educated about their own bodies.
So if you're on the other side of 45 and suddenly everything is twice as difficult, you get more migraines, your blood pressure goes funny, you can't sleep and you feel like your entire psyche is unstable, you might be experiencing perimenopause. My gyn was like,oh, like think of it like reverse puberty, your entire body rearranges itself. I was like, Great, nobody ever told me it can be this bad. My GP didn't even ask me about my period or hormone levels or anything. He just told me I was probably depressed and sent me to a psychiatrist, who also didn't ask about my period or my hormones. If I hadn't experienced something akin to postpartum depression and therefore know what my body does when its hormones are out of whack, I would have had no idea.
Seriously, nobody tells you how much hormones fuck you up as a woman. Nobody prepares you for this.
I've been trying to talk openly about what's fucking me up right now, and I've discovered that it's a lot more common than I thought it was. I feel like every phase of life finds another way to fuck women over. Puberty: have fun with your period as it adjusts itself. Childbirth: prepare for a hormonal rollercoaster. PMS: oh, it can get BAD. Like, BAD. After birth: hormones out of whack for months, maybe longer. Perimenopause: can fuck up everything. Like literally everything. Osteoporosis is also hormonal. Post menopause: supposedly things get better, but they don't have to.
And I feel like we're left pretty alone dealing with all of it. And we know so little about it that we're left wondering why suddenly nothing works anymore. So we flail about and feel terrible about our sudden inability to cope with life, when it's in fact our bodies screwing with us. Again.
So. Let's talk about it, let's be open to each other and learn from each other. Thank you especially to anyone who shared experiences with me. It helps to feel like you're not alone.
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Gather around, my young friends and fellow dinosaurs, let me tell you about some BULLSHIT no one ever tells you about. I'm talking about menopause and perimenopause. Now, menopause has a very stringent medical definition. You have to not have had a period for exactly 12 months and a day to be considered in menopause. All the bullshit before that day once you start going through The Change is considered perimenopause. Here's some bullshit you might experience that people actually talk about when you're in perimenopause:
- shorter time between periods
- irregular periods
- hot flashes and/or cold flashes
- fucked up sleep
- OMG NIGHT SWEATS
- Vagina as dry as the Sahara desert
- lighter periods and/or endless bleeding like it's The Flood but it's in your pants
- lack of interest in Adult Fun Times
This time of joy can last anywhere from a couple of years to a god damn decade and there's no medical way right now to predict it.
Here's some of the REAL bullshit they don't tell you about but your dinosaur aunt is here to let you know:
- You can start perimenopause in your 30s, don't listen to idiot doctors who tell you you're "too young" because they don't know your body like you do.
- Perimenopause will make you HELLA DUMB. Seriously, I'm talking Bigly broken brain. Brain fog? Check. Short term memory? Wave goodbye to it. Ability to make words form out of thoughts? Yeah, good luck to you.
- Perimenopause can cause horrible fatigue because in addition to losing estrogen, you're also losing testosterone. Oh and that also leads to muscle wasting, cool cool.
- Things might suddenly hurt more because estrogen is known to be neuroprotective.
- If you're super lucky like I am, and like to collect rare illnesses, you might even get Burning Mouth Syndrome đ
- And meanwhile, while you're going through this bullshit, you'll be getting gaslit by doctors who are operating based on 30 year old debunked data about how HRT causes breast cancer (not really) and that they shouldn't put you on it until you're in actual menopause. (Data shows starting HRT early can potentially prevent Alzheimer's in later years.)
- There are entire online clinics right now (I use Midi Health) focused on providing care for peri and menopausal patients and they will happily prescribe you HRT even if your regular PCP or OBGYN do not (if you meet the criteria). I've been pretty impressed with how holistically they view the patient. For full disclosure, I learned about them from my integrative health doctor and they do not accept Medicare (yet).
I'm 46 years old right now and I've been symptomatic for perimenopause for the last 8 years, although it's gotten the most dramatic in the past 2 years or so, which I hope means I'm almost done, holy hell. Yeah I was on the early side, but if it can happen to me, it can happen to you, so it's never too early to think about these things. And I hope to at least spare some of you the mind-fuckery I've been through because no one told me about most of this stuff, including my own mother who just DOESN'T REMEMBER what happened to her and now I completely understand why. And because I also have a connective tissue disease, I used to just dismiss my pain and fatigue as being caused by that illness rather than the loss of hormones.
Anyways, this is why we need Elders in our lives, so they can do Grandma Story Hour like I just did and validate you when the entire medical field tries to gaslight you. I hope you've found some or all of this educational/useful. Please share with your friends because we really do NOT talk about this stuff enough. (Ewwww Moon Blood!)
Stay well, and don't let the bastards grind you down!
The fire has burned down to amber coals, throwing low light across the bedroom ceiling, and you lie there staring at the familiar map of cracks in the plaster, trying to figure out whatâs wrong with you.
Joel's hand rests on your hip, patient and still, like it has been for a while now.
"We don't have to," he says, the same words he's used three times this week alone, delivered in the same careful register â not cold or resentful, but something more exhausted than either of those things. Like a man whoâs learned to keep his voice very level around something that spooks easily.
"I know we don't have to."
You hear the snap in your own voice and hate yourself for it. "I'm sorry. I didn't meanâŠ"
"Itâs okay."
But it isnât okay. Not because heâs angry, but because he isnât and somehow thatâs almost worse. You'd prefer anger. Anger would give you something to push against, something to explain yourself to. Instead, thereâs just this careful, considered gentleness that makes you feel like a wounded animal being handled by someone who doesnât want to lose a finger.
You shift onto your side, facing away from him. His hand stays on your hip for a moment longer, then withdraws to his own side of the bed.
The coals tick and outside the wind moves through Jackson in long dark sighs that mirror how you feel.
Tears prick at the corners of your eyes, because you havenât always been like this.
You can remember â with a vividness that now feels almost cruel â the way it used to be. The hunger and ease of it. Joelâs not a demonstrative man by most measures. He doesnât talk about his feelings any more than he absolutely has to or offer reassurance or emotional narration. But in bed, in that particular dark, heâs always been completely present with you in a way that feels like its own language.
His hands know you, have learned you with the patient attention of a man who genuinely wants to learn something and who finds the subject endlessly interesting.
Youâve wanted him just as badly, more some weeks. You've been the one reaching across the space between you in the early morning light, when he makes a low pleased sound and pulls you closer, and itâs been easy. Not effortless, but easy in the way that breathing is easy, the way you don't have to think about it.
Now it feels like breathing at altitude. Like your body has quietly, without consulting you, moved somewhere the airâs thinner.
It started, if you had to name a starting point, maybe eight months ago and it was small things at first. Like when you went to bed on a regular Tuesday intending to reach for him and found yourself simply...uninterested.
You werenât tired, not upset, not distracted by anything specific. You were just blank where the want usually lives. You rolled over, went to sleep and told yourself it was nothing. That it was a phase, or a bad week or, more likely, the cumulative weight of living in this world doing its usual arithmetic on desire.
But the blank Tuesdays became blank weekends, the weeks between stretching. And when you do try â because you love him and donât want to lose the thread of this thing between you â thereâs the dryness.
You've never experienced it like this, that specific discomfort that makes everything feel wrong, that makes you tense when you've always melted, that turns something thatâs been pleasure into something youâre simply enduring and hoping he canât tell.
Of course he can tell.
Joel Miller has spent twenty years before ever laying eyes on you learning to read threat and deception in the smallest tells of human behaviour. He isnât going to miss the way you go a little still, or the way your breathing shifts from something good to something controlled.
He pulled back the first time, quietly, without making it a thing and kissed you carefully.
But you saw his face in the low light, saw the confusion there, the careful way he smoothed it back to neutral, and you felt a cold shame settle into your chest that hasnât fully left since.
****
The hot flashes start in October.
Thatâs what finally makes you go to Dr Vee.
They come at night mostly, though not exclusively â this drenching, furnace-blast heat that wakes you from sleep damp and disoriented, your heart clattering, kicking the blankets off while Joel sleeps beside you oblivious. Sometimes you get up and stand at the window in the cold air until your skin cools and your pulse settles.
Once he wakes, finds you there and asks if youâre all right. You tell him youâre fine, just warm and that he should go back to sleep. And he does, slowly, with that same careful patient stillness he's been wearing like armour for months.
The sleep disruption makes everything worse. Youâre tired in a way that sits in your bones. Your moods become unreliable, small things snagging at you. You snap and then feel terrible and then snap about feeling terrible. Your cycle has gone strange too â irregular, showing up when it pleases and sometimes not for two months running.
The brain fog is the worst indignity. You stand in the kitchen trying to remember what you've gone to get and find the word for it has just â slipped.
Like a wet bar of soap.
Gone.
Youâre forty-six years old, youâre falling apart and you donât know why. And you havenât told Joel any of this properly because you donât know how to explain something you donât understand yourself.
Dr Vee is sixty-something and was a family physician before the outbreak, keeping meticulous notes in a series of composition notebooks and has a memory like a steel trap. She stitched your shoulder up two winters ago after a patrol gone sideways and, in some way, you trust her.
You sit on the paper-covered table, whilst she listens to you with the particular quality of attention that good doctors have. The kind that makes you feel like youâre the only person in the world and your problem is the only problem.
You tell her everything. The libido, the dryness, the hot flashes, the fatigue, the mood swings, the irregular cycle, the brain fog. Your voice stays level and clinical because youâre holding it that way with both hands.
When you finish, sheâs quiet for a moment, tapping her pen against her notebook.
"How old are you?"
"Forty-six."
She nods slowly. "And these symptoms â all of them, taken together â when did they begin?"
"Eight, nine months ago, I guess. But theyâve come on gradually."
She nods again and sets her pen down. "I'm going to ask you something and I need you to think about whether any of this is new information or whether some part of you has already been thinking it."
You frown.
"Perimenopause," she says. "Thatâs the transitional phase before menopause. It can last anywhere from a few years to a decade. The hormonal fluctuations account for every symptom you've described â the hot flashes, the night sweats, the sleep disruption etc. The irregular cycle is also textbook." She pauses. "You're not falling apart. Your body is doing something it's been designed to do but just doing it rather loudly."
You sit with that for a moment.
Some part of you has known. Some quiet, careful part that you havenât wanted to examine too directly because examining it means acknowledging it, and acknowledging it means â what? Youâre not entirely sure what it means and thatâs the problem.
"The obvious treatment is hormone replacement therapy," Dr Vee says, "which we don't have."
"Right."
"But there are things we can do. I have some dried black cohosh root which helps some women with the symptoms. There are also things you can do in your overall lifestyle things, which in Jackson, mostly amounts to what you're already doing. A cool sleeping environment is essential and help with managing stress which is, of course, not simple in this world.â
She writes something in her notebook.
"The genitourinary symptoms â thatâs the dryness, the discomfort during sex â that's a direct effect of declining oestrogen affecting the vaginal tissue. I have some things that can help with that too. Vitamin E oil and coconut oil for example. Itâs not the same as actual oestrogen cream, but they can provide some relief and work on lubrication, externally and otherwise."
You nod slowly.
"This is a normal transition,â she says gently. âItâs not a failing. A lot of women go through this without ever talking to anyone about it because it's been treated as something shameful or taboo for most of recorded history, which is frankly absurd, and I won't have that in my practice." She looks at you steadily. "You doing alright?"
"Yes," you say, your voice only wavering slightly. "I justâŠI didn't know what was wrong with me. I thought I wasâŠ"
"Thought you were what?"
"Losing something."
She pauses for a long moment. âAre you still with Joel?â
"Yes."
"Have you talked to him?"
"No."
She looks at you with the particular expression of a woman whoâs seen a great many people avoid a great many necessary conversations.
"That might be worth doing."
****
You hold off for four days, telling yourself that youâre waiting for the right moment, the right mood, the right confluence of evening light and privacy and emotional bandwidth. In truth youâre waiting for the courage to arrive, and itâs taking its time.
The morning of the fifth day you wake before dawn from another hot flash, the searing flush cresting up through your chest and neck, and you sit up in bed breathing through it while Joel sleeps beside you.
You watch his face in the dark â the lines of it, the grey at his temples, the slight parting of his lips in sleep â and you think that this man has has watched you cry, has stitched you up, has held you through nightmares, has seen you covered in mud and blood and worse, has loved you through four winters and the particular relentless grinding difficulty of this world, and the idea that you can keep something from him because youâre embarrassed seems, in this predawn hour, genuinely absurd.
You get up and head to the kitchen. Standing at the window, you watch the first pale light come into the sky over the ridge and put the kettle on. When you hear his footsteps come up behind you, you donât turn around.
"You're up early," he says casually.
"Couldn't sleep."
He comes and stands beside you at the window. You hear him pour himself a mug of coffee and lean against the counter drinking it quietly. If thereâs one thing youâve learned since you hitched your wagon to his itâs that Joelâs good at quiet. Sometimes itâs the thing you love most about him and sometimes it drives you absolutely insane.
"Joel.â
"Yeah."
You turn away from the window to see him watching you with those dark eyes that always seem to be calculating something, reading something or running some private assessment that you stopped trying to decode years ago. Heâs in his undershirt and flannel pants, a crease from the pillow on his cheek, and heâs so familiar it aches.
"I need to tell you something," you say, "and I need you to not make it into something it isn't."
He pauses. "Okay."
"And I need you to not try to fix it immediately."
The pause lasts longer this time, and you can see his brain already working through a million different scenarios. "I'll try."
You wrap your hands around your mug and look at the table rather than at him.
"I went to see Dr Vee."
The quality of his silence shifts. You feel him go still in a specific way â the way he goes still when the information arriving requires him to revise something, to quickly run new calculations.
"When?" he asks, carefully.
"A few days ago."
"You didn't tell me you were goinâ."
"I know, I'm telling you now."
You make yourself look up and instantly see that his jawâs tight.
"I'm okay. It's notâŠit's not that kind of thing. I'm not sick or hurt. I'm..." You exhale. "I'm going through the change of life. Itâs called perimenopause."
The word sits in the kitchen between you.
Joel says nothing. He looks at you with that particular expression that means heâs processing and isnât ready to respond yet. Youâve learned over the years not to rush that expression because rushing it gets you something defensive and half-formed rather than whatever he actually thinks.
"It's theâŠit's the hormonal transition before menopause," you say, because the silence is getting heavy and you need to keep talking or youâre going to lose your nerve. "The hot flashes I've been having, those are a symptom. TheâŠthe sleep stuff, being tired, the moodsâŠ"
You swallow.
"The...the not wanting to. The difficulty withâŠwith being dry when weâŠwhen we try."
The last part costs you something and you havenât known how much until you say it, until the warmth hits your face and you realise youâre actually blushing, actually mortified in a way you havenât been in front of this man in years.
Joel sets his mug on the counter and stays quiet for so long that youâve started to construct catastrophic narratives â he's disgusted, he's disappointed, he's realising he's stuck with someone whose body is doing something irreversible and unglamorous andâŠ
"Why didn't you tell me?" he says, his voice low.
"Because I didn't know what was wrong," you reply, "not exactly. Not until I saw Dr Vee. And before that I just thoughtâŠ" You press your lips together. "I thought I was losing something. Or becoming⊠less. I don't know. It's embarrassing, Joel. It's embarrassing to not want someone you love, and not know why, and not be able to explain it to them. It's embarrassing toâŠ"
Your voice threatens to fracture, and you hold it level.
"To be lying there while someone you love tries and feeling nothing and not knowing if it's ever going to come back."
Joel looks at you for a long moment. Then he crosses the kitchen, takes the mug out of your hands and sets it next to his, his hands coming to rest on either side of your face, large and warm.
"Look at me," he says and you raise your eyes to meet his. "You thought I'dâŠwhat, think less of you?"
You donât answer, because yes â that is precisely what you thought, and saying it out loud to his face feels even more foolish than it seemed in the privacy of your own catastrophising.
"Hey." His thumb moves along your cheekbone. "I've been worried sick for weeks. I didn't know if I'dâŠif I'd done somethinâ or said somethin' wrong. I didn't know if you were tired of me, I didn't know if there was somethinâ wrong and you weren't tellinâ meâŠI've been lyinâ next to you not knowinâ what was wrong, watchinâ you pull away and notâŠnot known how to ask without makinâ it worse."
Oh.
You havenât thought of that. Youâve been so consumed by your own experience of this thing â the confusion of it, the embarrassment, the quietly devastating sense of your own body becoming unreliable â that you havenât fully reckoned with what it looks like from the other side of the bed.
Joel, who loves you, canât fix things, canât explain things and has been waking up next to a wall he doesnât know how to scale.
"I thought you knew it wasn't you," you say.
"How was I supposed to know that?"
You close your eyes briefly, because heâs being entirely fair.
"I'm sorry," you say. "I should'veâŠI should've said something earlier. I was ashamed and I didn'tâŠ"
"Don't." His forehead comes down to rest against yours. "Don't apologise. I'm notâŠI'm not angry with you, baby, I just." He exhales. "I just needed to know."
You stand there, and something you've been carrying for months loosens in your chest. Not entirely, but enough that you can breathe differently.
"Dr Vee gave me some things," you say. "Botanical stuff, and someâŠsome preparations that are supposed to help with the physical symptoms. She said it's normal. She was very clear about it being a normal process."
"Good."
"It doesn't mean the wanting is gone forever. She said for a lot of women it adjusts and evens out eventually. Just the transition isâŠa lot.â
"Okay." He pulls back enough to look at you, his eyes moving over your face in the way they do when heâs committing something to memory or making a decision.
"What do you need?"
The simplicity of the question almost undoes you.
What do you need. Not, what should we do about this or how do we fix it. Just, what do you need.
"I need you not to make me feel like something's broken," you say. "I need you toâŠI need it to be okay when I can't. And I need you to notâŠnot pull away entirely, just because I've been different. I still need you close, Joel. I still need to feel like youâŠlike you still want to be close to me, even when it can't go anywhere."
Joel holds your face in his hands for a moment longer, and you watch him work through something â that interior processing, the careful assembly of a response thatâs actually true rather than just immediately comforting.
"I pulled back because I didn't want to push," he says finally, ânot because I didn't want you. Those two things ainât the same."
"I know that now. I think I just needed to hear it."
He makes a low sound that isnât quite a word and pulls you into him, one hand flat against the back of your head, your face against his shoulder, and you stand there letting him hold you with the particular solidity he has and feel, for the first time in months, like youâre in the right coordinates. Like you've been slightly displaced and have finally found your way back to exactly where youâre supposed to be standing.
"We're gonna figure it out," he says into your hair. Not it'll be fine, not don't worry, but rather the specific practical commitment of we are going to work this problem together, which is the most Joel Miller expression of love you can imagine, and it breaks something loose in your chest that you havenât realised was still clenched.
****
The first week after the conversation is its own kind of awkward.
You've spent so long not saying things that having said them leaves you both slightly exposed and uncertain how to proceed. The way you feel after finally lancing something â relieved but also raw and tentative about what comes next.
Joelâs careful in a new way now, a way thatâs warmer than the previous caution. He touches you more in the small ways â his hand at the small of your back when you pass in the kitchen, the deliberate way he drops a kiss to the top of your head when youâre reading by the fire. Not loaded touches, not leading anywhere, just present. I'm here. You're here. This is still us.
You keep meaning to use the preparations Dr Veeâs given you and keep finding reasons to put it off. They sit in the small box on your side of the dresser, and you regard them each morning with the complex emotional relationship one develops with necessary but humbling things.
On a Thursday evening, almost two weeks after the kitchen conversation, Joel picks the box up off the dresser and you look up from where youâre taking off your boots to see him turning it over in his hands with an expression you canât immediately read.
"This what she gave you?"
"Yes."
He opens it and looks at the small, stoppered bottle of vitamin E oil, the tin of coconut oil and the cloth packet of dried black cohosh with Dr Veeâs careful handwritten label. He examines each one with the focused attention he gives to anything mechanical or practical, the same way he assesses a weapon's condition or a vehicle's engine problem â with genuine interest and no apparent judgment.
He sets the black cohosh aside and holds up the bottle. "This one?"
"And the tin."
He nods slowly, sets them both on the nightstand and sets the box on the dresser.
"Okay.â
Thatâs it â okay. No commentary, no visible awkwardness, no performance of being fine with something heâs secretly weird about. Itâs such a profoundly Joel response that you find yourself laughing and he glances over at you.
"What?"
"Nothing. JustâŠyou."
The corner of his mouth moves. "Me?"
"The way you justâŠfiled it."
"What else was I gonna do?"
You donât have an answer for that, so you finish pulling your boots off, set them on the floor, look at him and feel, quietly and simply, that you love him very much.
****
The hot flashes continue. The black cohosh helps by blunting the worst of them and taking the edge off the frequency. You still wake sometimes in the small hours with that internal furnace blast, but more often now Joelâs awake too, or half-awake, and he simply folds the blanket back without a word, and you lie there in the cool air until it passes. He waits until, eventually, you're cold again and he pulls it back and then settles back into sleep.
He starts leaving the window cracked without being asked. One night you wake up to find itâs cracked, and it always is after that.
The mood swings are harder to navigate cleanly. There are evenings where something small catches at you and becomes enormous without your full participation.
Some hormonal amplifier turning minor friction into something that feels catastrophic. You hear yourself say something sharper than you intend, see his jaw tighten and know heâs choosing to absorb it rather than return it.
Afterward, when the chemical weather has shifted and you feel like yourself again, you apologise and tell him itâs not about him, and he says he knows and means it, you think. Or is at least working on meaning it.
Once he says, almost under his breath: "This what it was like livin' with me for years?"
You look at him.
"The moods," he says. "The not knowin' where it's comin' from."
Heâs mapping it onto something he recognises, offering a kind of symmetry that you havenât expected. A quiet, private acknowledgment that the territory of being difficult and not fully choosing it is not unfamiliar to him.
"Probably something like that," you say carefully.
He nods once, looking at some middle distance. Then he goes back to whatever heâs been doing, the conversation over, and itâs been one of the most unexpectedly intimate exchanges you can remember.
****
Itâs a Saturday night in late January, the cold absolute outside, the woodstove doing its best, when things shift.
You havenât planned it. Thatâs the thing about desire â when it finally finds its way back through the fog and the flatness, it doesnât arrive with ceremony. It arrives the way returning feeling arrives in a limb that's been asleep â tingling, slightly shocking and suddenly present.
Joelâs at the table reading one of the battered paperbacks from the community library, and youâre watching him from across the room with a cup of cooling tea and registering, with something like surprised relief, that you want him.
Not a polite wanting, not a decided wanting, not I should try. Just clean simple want, easy as breathing, the old thing returning like a word you've forgotten you know.
He looks up and finds you watching.
"What?â
"Nothing."
He holds your gaze for a moment, and you see him recognise something in your expression, something he hasnât seen in a while. The particular quality of his attention shifts and he closes the book.
In the bedroom, with the lamp turned low and the cold pressing at the windows, you let him relearn you slowly. Not rushing, not the practiced ease of a routine you can both do without thinking â this is more careful than that, more deliberate, His hands move over you with the genuine attention you remember from the first year and also entirely unlike it because youâre not who you were in the first year, neither is he and the difference isnât loss.
He finds the oil on the nightstand and uses it without comment or making it a thing, with the same practical and focused care he brings to anything that needs doing right. His hands are warm and unhurried, and you feel the tight-held embarrassment you've been carrying for months release its grip. Because thereâs nothing here to be ashamed of, nothing clinical or distancing about it when done like this, in the low light with his eyes on your face and his attention fully and specifically yours.
"Okay?" he asks.
"Yes," you say, genuinely meaning it.
"Tell me if it's not."
"I will."
He believes you. Thatâs the thing â he believes you now, because youâve finally told him the truth about whatâs happening in your body, have let him into the actual territory instead of leaving him to navigate it blind. The trust moves in both directions, and it makes everything different.
Itâs slower than it used to be. Some things are different, some sensations subtly altered, some angles better than others. You tell him what you need as you find it and he adjusts without question, without ego in it, which is its own language, its own kind of devotion.
Afterward you lie with your head on his chest in the dark and his arm around you. The woodstove ticks and outside the wind moves and you feel quiet in a way you havenât felt in months.
His hand moves up and down your back in a slow unconscious rhythm.
"Still with me?" he says. He sometimes asks that, after. Itâs never entirely lost the meaning it acquired in the first year â are you here, are we here, is this still the thing we're building?
"Still with you," you reply.
"Good."
You press your lips to his collarbone and think about what Dr Vee said. Youâre not losing but rather becoming â which is harder to hold in the mind but feels, in this moment, truer.
"It might not alwaysâŠ"
"I know."
"Some nights it might still beâŠ"
"I know." His arm tightens slightly. "And some nights you'll wake up at two in the morninâ like you're on fire and I'll open the window and we'll lie there 'til it passes. And some morninâs you won't be able to find a word you're lookinâ for, and some days the smallest thing's gonna catch you sideways, and I'll figure out which days those are and give you a wider berth."
He pauses.
"And I'll still be here."
You lift your head to look at him, his eyes finding yours with the ease of long familiarity.
"You rehearse that?"
"Little bit."
You laugh â really laugh, the kind that comes from somewhere warm and involuntary â and feel him smile against the top of your head, that rare private smile he only wears when no oneâs watching, which means heâs wearing it for you.
"Joel."
"Mm?"
"Thank you for beingâŠ" You stop and try again. "For not making it smaller than it is or bigger than it is. JustâŠ"
"Just what it is," he finishes.
"Yeah."
He pulls you back down against his chest. "Get some sleep while you can."
You close your eyes and realise that you donât feel like somethingâs ending. Rather you feel, in the particular stillness of this room and those arms and this quiet dark, like somethingâs continuing â not unchanged, not unmarked, but continuous.
Still yours. Still his. Complicated and warm and stubbornly, essentially here.
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genuine question, because I guess I don't really understandâŠ
you mentioned that that article on menopause for trans and nonbinary people was aimed at transmascs and didn't have much ifo for trans fems.
that makes perfect sense tho in my mind, people who were have uteruses are the ones who experience menopause. trans fems dont. or am I incorrect in that??
its just that in my mind/to my knowledge, info on menopause isn't useful to trans fems because they wont experience menopause
Good question! (Believe it or not, you're not the only person who was wondering about this.)
So, peri/menopause isn't something only experienced by people who have uteruses. You can even have a uterus and/or ovaries, get them removed, and still experience peri/menopause.
Which is funny, by which I mean, makes it blatantly transmisogynistic, because transfems can experience peri/menopause but are frequently told it "doesn't count" because most transfems don't have a uterus and/or ovaries.
Peri/menopause, much like periods, is largely about estrogen and your general hormone levels. Not necessarily just about whether you have a uterus and/or ovaries.
There's actually a number of transfems who prefer to lower their estrogen doses as they age, as well as transfems whose estrogen levels drop for other reasons, and that can cause what's usually referred to as "menopause symptoms".
Its referred to as "menopause symptoms" in much the same way transfems having periods/PMS/PMDD is referred to as "having symptoms of X" instead of "experiencing X".
By which I mean, they can go through menopause, its just often differently than considered "normal" and the way its talked about is often transphobic.
So far, it seems as if it's not very common but given the fact that's been said about many transfem health related issues that people refuse to study, it's hard to say how common it actually is.
So information on menopause can be useful to transfems, they're just largely excluded from it! Even in discussions of trans people experiencing peri/menopause, unfortunately.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions, Anon! <3
TMI perimenopause menstruation fuckery, but does anyone else afflicted with this bullshit have their period give them a goddamned "last hurrah"? Like, day 2 and 3 are my heavy days, and day 4 is usually very light. But sometimes, day 4 decides in the middle of the day to go "just kidding!", suddenly stab me with severe cramps, and then turn on a goddamned firehose for about 6 hours and then.... done.
I hate it. I want to stab myself in the uterus. This organ is stupid.
Naturalist confession: after all these years I still have to relearn spring ephemeral wildflowers and spring birdcalls every year. I retain a few more each year, but between the sheer number of species to remember, perimenopause brain fog, and ADHD, I've learned to just give myself grace and use iNaturalist to remind myself the name of the thing.
