Perimenopause Pollyanna, I am not.
I am not going to describe my hot flashes as my body releasing stored energy. I am not going to suggest you journal through your rage or that brain fog is an invitation to slow down and be present. I grew up making my own after-school snacks because nobody was home, and I survived the Cabbage Soup Diet. I am not flaking out now because my estrogen dropped.
But when I stopped fighting it and started researching it, I found that the truth is better than they told us. Way better. The women who understand what is actually happening during this transition come out the other side not as diminished versions of themselves, but as the most clarified, most capable, most precisely themselves they have ever been. This is not an infomercial. This is what the research shows.
Women are done being quiet about this transition, and they are done accepting the narrative that it is something to manage into invisibility. Melani Sanders and the We Do Not Care Club decided that apologizing for perimenopause is no longer on the schedule. Dr. Mary Claire Haver spent years fighting to get women the HRT information the medical establishment withheld for two decades. Tamsen Fadal wrote How to Menopause because even she, a journalist with access to every expert imaginable, still did not know what was happening to her own body. Halle Berry went on television and announced she is having the best sex of her life in her 50s. No disclaimer. Revolutionary.
These women are not pretending this is comfortable. They are refusing to accept that the discomfort is the whole story. It is not. Not even close.
The Hot Flash Is Not a Malfunction. It Is a Recalibration.
Your hypothalamus (your body’s internal thermostat) is recalibrating in response to shifting estrogen levels. It reads your temperature as too high and does exactly what it was designed to do: cranks up the A/C. Blood vessels dilate, heat rises, you possibly turn the color of eggplant. And then it passes. Your body is doing its job aggressively and with great verve, adjusting to a new hormonal landscape. Not betrayal. Recalibration.
READ: Why So Many Women Are Wide Awake at 3 a.m.
The Brain Fog Is Not Decline. It Is a Renovation.
Standing in a room with no memory of why. Losing words mid-sentence, not the big ones, the easy ones. Pencil! That was it! Pencil! Our generation came of age painting our nails while chatting on a Nokia as The Real World played in the background. We know how to multitask. Suddenly struggling to hold a single thought is alarming.
The hippocampus temporarily becomes less efficient at certain retrieval tasks. But that same hormonal shift increases activity in the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for judgment, long-term planning, and complex decision-making. Researchers call this crystalized intelligence. It peaks in our late 40s and 50s. Right now. Exactly when we are convinced our brains are giving up on us. The fog is renovation noise. What it is building is sharper than anything that came before.
The Rage Is Not a Symptom. It Is a Compass.
The dishwasher loaded incorrectly. The question that could have been Googled. “Here, Jennifer, LMGTFY,” muttered under your breath. The meeting that could have been an email. These situations are now triggering.
The progesterone drop removes a neurological buffer that has been softening your responses for decades. What remains is the unfiltered signal pointing at something real. Something tolerated longer than it deserved. The rage knows. It always knew. It just finally has a microphone.
READ: I’m Sorry for What I Said When I Was Overtaken By Menopause Rage
The Zero F*cks Are Not Rudeness. They Are a Course Correction.
Somewhere in our mid-40s, the constant background hum of am-I-being-perceived-correctly, am-I-taking-up-too-much-space just stops. We grew up reading Bridget Jones, absorbing from every direction that the correct amount of space to take up was less than we were inclined to take. Decades of practice perfected this.
Perimenopause ends this arrangement. The f*cks given indiscriminately were never generosity. They were compliance. The tax paid to be found acceptable. The women who stop paying that tax do not become less warm. They become more precisely warm, toward people and purposes that have actually earned it. Not a woman becoming difficult. A woman becoming precise.
What to Actually Do
Talk to your doctor, specifically, with written questions about HRT. The 2002 study that scared everyone off it has since been significantly revised. It remains the most effective intervention available for most symptoms.
Lift heavy weights, two to three times a week. Estrogen is muscle and bone protective; as it drops, both can go with it unless you actively counter that. Eat more protein than any fad diet ever suggested. Real food. It’s time to drop the Snackwells.
Find your women and talk about it out loud. The transition is lonely, not because it is rare, but because we were taught not to discuss it. Say something. The conversation changes the story.
This Is Where the Superpower Part Comes In.
A thermostat that recalibrated. A brain that renovated. A compass that got loud enough to follow. A filter that dropped. Assembled together, this is a woman with superpowers — not the cape-and-spandex kind, the considerably more useful kind.
The woman who ends the relationship that was never working. Who says the thing she has been not saying, with a sharp new directness. Who builds the thing she was always meant to build and stops explaining herself to people who were never going to get it anyway.
We were handed a story about perimenopause as loss. That story was wrong. The hot flash, the brain fog, the rage, the zero f*cks. They are not symptoms of a woman declining. They are the assembly instructions. Every single one is the body and brain doing exactly what they need to do to get to the other side as the fullest, most capable version of themselves that has ever existed.
She is not falling apart.
She is falling into place.
About the Author
Kristy Riley is a Florida native born in Key West, but Jacksonville has always been her home base. She is wife to Craig, her partner in life and in whatever business idea they’re currently convinced is “the one.” She is a mom of three teenagers — Madeline, a competitive bodybuilder, and Baylor and Connor, who both play pretty much every sport that involves a ball. It goes without saying that Kristy’s hobbies are sitting on the sidelines of various courts and fields, typically getting caught gossiping on GameChanger cameras. Kristy is the author of Perimenopause: The New Superpower and also produced the album of the same name featuring boppy bangers like “Hit Me With Your Hot Flash” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Sleep.”
