What Perimenopause Is Really Asking of You

It isn’t a breakdown. It’s a becoming — and it just might be the most important education of your life.

Perimenopause is no joke. For many women, it lives up to its reputation of how tough it can be to live through. But I have to say, even though perimenopause was a trial by fire for me, it brought gifts I never saw coming. And I want to talk about both.

I Was Completely Unprepared

Let me start here: I had nothing to draw from.

Both my mother and grandmother had hysterectomies before they experienced significant perimenopausal symptoms, which meant I walked into this transition without a map, without a story, without a single woman in my family who could say here is what this was like for me. I was on my own.

And the timing could not have been less convenient.

I was recovering from a recent divorce. I was still raw, still sorting through the complicated layers of grief and relief and anger that come with the end of a marriage. I was rebuilding who I was as a person, a woman, an entrepreneur. I was also trying to make up for time I felt I had lost not attending to my personal and professional growth as fully as I’d wanted during my marriage. I can still feel the urgency of that season in my body when I think about it.

I was taking classes and workshops. Attaining certifications. Learning how to get visible with my business. (As someone with strong introverted tendancies, this was its own particular kind of uncomfortable.) I was studying with spiritual teachers. I was also moving my home. A lot. Nine times in fourteen years. My life was absolutely nuts.

I didn’t have time for perimenopause. I was busy doing other things.

But Mother Nature took me by the scruff of my neck and said, in her outdoor voice…

Pay attention, sis. I’m not playing around here.

What She Hit Me With

She came with all of it.

The sleepless nights. The night sweats. The getting “moist” at the drop of a hat. (You know exactly what I mean.) The fatigue that sat on my chest like a stone. The weight gain and body changes that showed up in spite of absolutely no changes in my diet, which felt wildly unfair. And the adrenal fatigue that spiked whenever I tried to push through with physical activity. My body was having a field day with me.

I tried to ignore the physical symptoms for as long as I possibly could.

But here is what I eventually recognized: every symptom was an invitation. Slow down. Observe. Be with your transition. I had gotten so busy doing my life that I had lost the ability to simply be in it. How often do we move so fast that we forget to stop and notice what is actually happening inside us, around us, to us?

The gift inside that part of the transition was learning how to care for myself in a completely new way. I gave myself permission to rest differently. If I needed a nap or to go to bed at 7pm, I did so without apology. I became more mindful of food, understanding it as medicine and paying attention to how different foods felt and were digested in my body. I became more attuned to how my body responded to situations and I worked to keep my environment calm. Every practice I put in place deepened my ability to listen — really listen — to what my body was telling me.

That listening changed everything.

The Emotional Gifts Were Harder to Unwrap

I also want to name something that doesn’t get talked about enough.

Perimenopause doesn’t just affect the body. The hormone fluctuations can create significant emotional turmoil. For me, that included mood swings that arrived without warning and left without apology, and at the most severe end, suicidal ideations.

I’m naming that plainly because we need to talk about it. Women end their lives during perimenopause believing they are genuinely suicidal when what’s actually happening is hormones running completely amok. This is real. It is more common than anyone tells us. And it deserves to be said out loud.

I felt ashamed of what I was experiencing. That shame kept me quiet longer than it should have. When I finally, reluctantly, admitted what was happening to my healthcare practitioner, she told me how common perimenopausal suicidal ideation actually is. That conversation changed things for me; I got the care I needed and my ideations subsided. So if you are experiencing something similar, please reach out to your doctor, naturopath, herbalist, acupuncturist, or any trusted healthcare provider. You do not have to carry this alone, and you do not have to be ashamed of what your hormones are doing. And if you are in crisis, please call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

What the emotional intensity of perimenopause ultimately gave me was a different relationship with all of my feelings, not just the ones that keep everyone comfortable. I began to make space for my anger, my confusion, my sadness, my grief, my rage, my resentment, my anxiety. And I began to honor the full range that included my joy, my excitement, my exuberance, my wonder. All of my emotions had space to be. Not managed. Not suppressed. Simply felt, witnessed, and allowed to move through.

That is a gift I carry with me every single day.

What Perimenopause Was Really Asking

Both the physical and emotional struggles of perimenopause were gifts because they became a consistent, insistent invitation to go inward. To stop, observe without judgment, offer myself discernment when I needed it, and honor exactly where I was.

I know that sounds almost impossible when you are in the middle of it. When the symptoms are real and the exhaustion is bone deep and everything in you wants to push through and get back to your life. I know that feeling intimately.

But here is what I want to offer you, from the other side of it:

What if your experience of perimenopause is not getting in the way of your life? What if it is part of your life? What if it is part of what you need to move through in order to live more authentically on the other side? What if the sleeplessness, the rage, the heat, the emotional intensity are not obstacles to who you are becoming, but the very process of becoming itself?

What if everything you are being asked to feel, sit with, and survive is building a wisdom inside you that you will draw from for the rest of your life?

When I hit 50, I felt myself step into my Crone phase (my wise woman years) and I understood for the first time that I had arrived there because of everything I had lived through. Not in spite of it. Perimenopause had been calling me inward, over and over, until I finally learned to go. And what I found when I went inward was something I had been looking for my whole life.

Perimenopause gave me myself. And I would not trade that for anything.

Myself.

If You’re In It Right Now

If you are in your chrysalis years — in the gooey discomfort, the confusion, the exhaustion, the feeling of being behind — I want you to hear this:

You are not broken. You are not failing. You are being asked a question your body has been trying to ask you for years. The answer is inside you. And you don’t have to find it alone.

There is body-centered support that meets you where you are; in your body, not just your mind. And it helps you move through this transition rather than just survive it. If something in this is stirring in you, pay attention to that. And when you’re ready, I’m here.

Natalie Gentry is a body-centered practitioner, somatic coach, and Maya abdominal massage therapist based in Denver, Colorado. She offers individual sessions, women’s healing groups, and body-centered shadow coaching for women in transition — in person in Denver and virtually. Learn more at nataliegentry.com.