I didn’t learn I was in perimenopause until after a girlfriend of mine pulled down her pants and showed me and the other women sitting at the dinner table her estrogen patch. The revealing of that little transparent patch led to us sitting for hours, sharing the most private, confusing, scary, and often hilarious details of what our lives had become. That dinner party turned out to be one of the most informative and important get-togethers of my life.
When I started experiencing the worst symptoms, I had no other reason to believe I wasn’t dying and/or losing my mind. I thought something was seriously wrong with me because what I experienced was terrifying and terribly uncomfortable.
At the time, less than five years ago, mind you, there were no public conversations happening … anywhere. Nada. Crickets. I didn’t have anyone close to me talking about it, nor did I have a mother or any other female family members or older friends mention any of this shit. Not one single person thought to give me a heads-up. I was alone in a hell I didn’t have a name for.
Now wait, if you are in your 20s or 30s and you think this will never happen to you, please, before you slam your computer shut and get on with your sunny, fertile self, I want to give you my best version of one of those 1990s public service announcements, The More You Know. I hope you never go through what I went through. I hope you never have a GYN tell you that it doesn’t matter, nothing will change. I hope you don’t ever have to waste your time investigating whether or not some random symptom will be the death of you (kidding, not kidding). I hope you never have to deal with a doctor belittling you so much that you have to fire them for being an ill-informed, asshole. I especially hope you learn to spot the ill-informed assholes way before they give you misinformation, waste your time, and take away your ability to advocate for yourself by shutting you down. But most of all, I hope you take the time to learn about all the things that will naturally change as you all get older. May you be so lucky, may we all be so lucky!