The Cave

It started as mild irritability, just something that bubbled up every now and then. Nothing I couldn’t handle. I mean, I’m a woman – I understand cyclical irritability; I had set my watch by it for the past 33 years. Except, it wasn’t cyclical, or at least not a cycle I could decipher.

And anyway, the irritability was mild. I thought it was probably just life being extra hard and extra mundane. Except life wasn’t that hard. It WAS mundane, but that’s life when you are on the rinse and repeat cycle of raising a child, cleaning, husband, mortgage, bills, cleaning, meals, gardening, shopping, cleaning, and oh, more cleaning? Ok then. I found the mundane a bit eye-rolling at times (what’s for dinner? Again?! Didn’t we do that yesterday?), but I was also old enough to appreciate my drama-free life.

Then the irritability kicked it up a notch. Now my husband was just the worst. How much more annoying could he be? The thing is my husband WAS annoying. Genuinely! So was I, but we don’t need to talk about that. My husband and I had been together 9 years – we were bound to irritate each other. Right? It’s normal. Right?

Then the irritability went viral and infiltrated a space where I had prided myself on my ability to hold space and maintain calm: my son. He was 4. He had just reached a magical age where he was more independent, and he was in kindy 2.5 days/week, so I had this unprecedented thing called freedom. I had finally started to glimpse echoes of my former self and was busy gathering up the fragmented pieces. Life should have been on an upward trajectory.

But it wasn’t.

The irritability took over and flared up at random times for random reasons. It was joined by friends, and they were all negative, energy sucking arsehats: Impatience, low and often no resilience, brain fog, and zero motivation. There I was squandering my newly found kid-free time by the complete lack of ability to get off the couch. I didn’t want to do anything or go anywhere. And I knew that if I did do something and go somewhere, it would drain me of the energy reserves I barely had, and I needed those energy reserves to get through the evening shift with my child.

I would love to tell you this was pretty easy to work out, but it was not. It happened slowly and sneakily. It happened quietly and so stealthily that it managed to steal pieces right from under my nose. One day I decided I didn’t want to go to Pilates anymore. Just couldn’t do it. It was the right decision, I told myself, you can’t keep pushing yourself beyond what you can give. I justified it and it felt right to give it up. And that was the start of letting go one-by-one of all the good habits I had built over many years. My muscles began to atrophy, and my eating habits declined so I began to put on weight. I stopped writing. I stopped creating. I told myself I was just taking a break. I wasn’t.

And it still wasn’t easy to work out what was going on. I started to tell myself to get it together. You know what you have to do, so just do it! You know what works, so get on it! I thought I could motivate myself back to being myself.

Then one day, I yelled at my son. I am not a yeller. I don’t yell at my son. I know there are lots of parents who yell. I don’t.

And that was the day I started dreaming about my cave. It was a beautiful, quiet, serene space devoid of demands. It was a place where I could sink into myself and disappear. I started to identify with those monks who live solitary lives and meditate in caves overlooking spectacular vistas. To be left completely alone, to BE completely alone sounded blissful.

I have an unbelievably amazing friend who had gone through and was still going through the ringer of mid-life herself. She had travelled to the depths of perimenopausal hell and had, against her will, set up base camp right there in that smoldering hellscape. And it was from that charred vantage point, that she unequivocally told me she was putting me on amber alert. She was my little singed perimenopausal angel sitting on my shoulder telling me in no uncertain terms to get myself to a doctor asap and get help.

I didn’t of course. It took another few months of decline and her prodding me before I finally went to see a doctor. I started MHT (formally HRT) that same day. And I was cured!

No, no I wasn’t.

After about 6 weeks of religiously applying estrogen gel and swallowing progesterone, I woke up one day and thought: “I might have a look at my stories…” The next day, I woke up and thought: “I wonder if I should start working on a new Halloween project…” And slowly, slowly over another 6 months, I began to feel motivated and resilient and happy and patient. I wasn’t irritable anymore… well it wasn’t completely gone, but it was manageable. I still thought about my cave, but I didn’t yearn for it.

That was 3 years ago, and today if anyone tried to take my hormones away from me, I would … not react well. I’m a 47-year-old woman whose body is aging and in decline. I’m not trying to throw a pity party; these are just facts. I am still trying to recover my good habits. I’ve got my eating habits back on track, but exercise which I know to be crucial is proving elusive. I’ll get there but damn, once lost, it’s hard to regain!!

But I will not go quietly into the night. I will shout to every woman I know: TAKE THE HORMONES! Fuck natural medicine. You can’t replace estrogen with herbal teas and Lion’s mane mushrooms. You can’t exercise or meditate your way out of this. You can only replace estrogen with estrogen.

TAKE THE HORMONES!!

ps. do the exercise and meditation too and definitely overhaul your diet to a more suitable perimenopause diet but do it in conjunction with…. let’s say it together – 1, 2, 3, … HORMONES!

Please see your doctor and discuss your options.

This is Belle – I would have taken her to the cave, snaggle tooth and all.