This is Going Somewhere Good

A few years ago I was really suffering from perimenopause, with symptoms including serious sleep problems, bad anxiety, lots of body aches, brain fog and more. But as I tried to find help, I also wanted information. So I created Google alerts for perimenopause and menopause. 

What I got was a flood of alarming and overwhelmingly negative stories, each one filled with a sense of loss, fear, a sense of shutting down, ending, dwindling and deficiency. 

Yet none of this squared with what I had read about the experience back at age 45, when, not knowing I was already in the throes of perimenopause, I decided to prepare for what was ahead. 

I did this by digging into my well-thumbed copy of Dr Christiane Northrup’s invaluable resource Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. I’d tucked Dr Northrup’s name away years earlier, after she was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, brought aboard when Ms O realized she wasn’t having cardiac issues but menopause symptoms. 

Reading Dr Northrup’s words – at a time when I thought I was years away from menopause – completely changed how I thought about what was to come, and I closed the book feeling oddly upbeat about something I had long feared. 

I loved her emphasis on the heart and soul aspects of this journey and the transformation that would be necessary. (I love growth) There was such a sense of possibility there; and I already knew many of the older women I’d come across carried with them a sense of lightness and freedom. All of this was a total reversal to the narrative I was reading in most media. 

“If we’ve been pressing the snooze button on any parts of our lives that need attention, the years surrounding menopause will bring them to our attention in ways that we can no longer avoid if we are truly to flourish in the second half of our lives,” she writes. “Once a woman understands that the true meaning of menopause has been inverted and degraded, like many of the other processes of her body, she can reverse this programming and make her way through the rest of her life fortified with purpose, insight and pleasure.”

The way  Dr Northrup explained the hormonal processes involved blew my mind. During our fertile years, levels of luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), which act synergistically, are highest at ovulation. Not only is this when women are maximally fertile, it’s also when many of us – myself included – feel most “on it”, together, productive, open and expansive. I have long marveled at how much I can get done, how much more centered and like me I have felt on those days than the others; I’ve often wished that more of my days could be like that.

That’s why what happens chemically after menopause, Dr Northrup explains, creates what are sometimes called women’s “wisdom years”. 

“After menopause, these neurotransmitter levels stay permanently elevated in the ovulation range for the rest of our lives,” she writes. “Which, in my view, renders us more open to the continual flow of wisdom that heretofore was available only at ovulation.” 

We live in a world where we are constantly told about the ending aspect of menopause: the ceasing function of our ovaries and the drop in estrogen, and loss of progesterone and other hormones, and all the chaos that causes, not to mention the resulting risks for cardiac issues, bone deterioration, dementia and more.

There’s rarely ever a mention of the other tissues and organs that are designed to pick up some of this hormonal slack; and let’s face it, there’s little attention paid to the fact that this is natural, and if there is, it might be in the form of someone shouting about the evils of HRT. (Not helpful). It’s at these times, when I begin to lose my way, that I go back to Dr Northrup for comfort and hope.

Dr Sharon Malone touched on the same aspect of this when she compared menopause to “puberty in reverse” during the groundbreaking discussion heard round the world in 2020 on The Michelle Obama Podcast. 

“It's not just the presence or the absence of the hormones, because once you get done… everything has settled down, then you're kind of back to a baseline,” she says. “A different baseline, but you don't have those mood fluctuations that you have in the transition.”   

We need to remind ourselves that while conventional medicine is a miracle in itself, it is still steeped in the mindset – as is much of society – that menopause is a deficiency disease, not a natural process. 

From a marketing standpoint, the deficiency disease model is always going to be more lucrative. And more so now than ever, with 1.1 billion women expected to be going through menopause by 2025 – a potential market most recently pegged at $15 billion. 

That’s why I have to keep reminding myself that this is actually meant to happen and that there is a lot to be gained by it too. Menopause may be more difficult for us these days, but we need to remember there’s nothing about it that’s wrong. 

That is why I made the Hotflash inc tagline “this is going somewhere good”. And it’s why I’m going to do everything I can to support myself, body, mind and soul, through the coming years. Because mindset is everything. And if I can help any of you do it too? Well, that would be just fabulous.