Meet Angela- Perimenopause at 43 and Not Being Believed
Angela hasn’t cried since 2005, which is a strangely specific fact to know about yourself, but crying has never really been Angela’s thing. There’s no dramatic reason for it, no childhood vow that nobody would ever see her tears and no carefully constructed emotional wall waiting for a therapist to dismantle; she simply isn’t a crier. Or she wasn’t, because sometime during the last eighteen months her tear ducts appear to have taken out a subscription and now barely a week goes by without them turning up for work.
Today they’ve chosen the car park outside her GP surgery.
She has been sitting there for fifteen minutes with the engine off, her handbag dumped in the passenger footwell and a prescription sitting on the seat beside her. She is trying to stop crying and becoming increasingly irritated by the fact that she can’t, which turns out to be an exceptionally ineffective method of stopping yourself crying. She has already wiped mascara onto the sleeve of a coat that cost far too much money to be used as a tissue and she knows that eventually she is going to have to drive home, walk through the front door and answer the inevitable question from her husband.
“How did you get on?”
Angela has absolutely no fucking idea.
At 43, she has spent almost half her life working as an accountant. She went into the industry after university, survived the junior years, climbed steadily through the ranks and is now approaching the point in her career where twenty years of experience has made her genuinely bloody good at what she does. She earns well, has a nice home, a husband she loves, a family she is proud of and the kind of life that, viewed from the outside, looks reassuringly sorted. If adulthood came with an annual performance review, Angela would be expecting at least an “exceeds expectations” and possibly a small bonus.
She has always looked after herself too, although she would never describe herself as a runner because that sounds like the sort of person who owns a hydration vest and talks about personal bests over dinner. She just runs three times a week. Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday have been running days for years, in much the same way that Monday is Monday and nobody needs to summon the motivation to make Wednesday happen.
Then, about two years ago, Angela started needing to summon the motivation.
At first she blamed work, then winter, then being tired, then her trainers. The trainers were a particularly convincing theory for approximately three weeks and resulted in the purchase of a very expensive new pair, which looked fantastic in the hallway while Angela sat on the sofa promising herself she would definitely run tomorrow. She changed her route, changed her playlist, tried mornings instead of evenings and eventually ran out of variables to change without having to consider the deeply irritating possibility that the problem might actually be her.
Work was becoming harder too, although Angela found that considerably more frightening than abandoning the occasional run because work had always been the part of herself she trusted without question. Twenty years in the same industry gives you an instinct for things, and Angela could look at a set of figures and know something wasn’t right before somebody with half her experience had worked out which spreadsheet they were supposed to be looking at. She had built a career on being quick, capable and dependable, and she was used to being heard when she spoke because usually she knew what she was talking about.
Lately, however, an email that should have taken five minutes could sit open on her screen for half an hour while she rewrote the first paragraph, checked something she already knew and then reread the whole thing because she couldn’t quite remember what point she had been making. Reports took longer. Decisions took longer. Sometimes she would be halfway through explaining something in a meeting when the thought simply disappeared, leaving her stranded somewhere between a sentence and the growing awareness that six people were waiting for her to finish it.
The particularly cruel part was that Angela still knew the answer. She could almost feel it sitting somewhere inside her head, presumably enjoying a coffee while she stood outside knocking on the door.
Nobody at work had accused her of becoming incompetent, but Angela had started doing it for them. She checked things she would once have trusted herself to know, hesitated before speaking and increasingly watched other people occupy space in meetings she would previously have taken without thinking. The woman who had spent twenty years becoming an authority in her field was quietly beginning to wonder whether everyone else had become considerably cleverer or she had somehow become less so.
By the time she got home, there wasn’t much Angela left.
Her husband noticed that, although the more obvious change from his perspective was probably that they weren’t having much sex anymore. Their marriage was good and she loved him, which somehow made the whole thing more confusing because she couldn’t point to an affair, a relationship breakdown or the fact that he had suddenly developed some revolting habit that rendered him sexually repellent. He was still the same man she had wanted before. She simply seemed to have misplaced the wanting.
There were plenty of explanations available, of course. She was tired. It was late. They’d had a big dinner. She had an early meeting. She needed a shower. She’d just had a shower. Her stomach felt funny. She had to run in the morning, despite the increasingly obvious fact that she probably wasn’t going to run in the morning. Individually, every excuse was entirely reasonable; collectively, they were beginning to resemble the work of a woman desperately trying not to acknowledge that she would quite happily never be asked whether she fancied an early night again.
Then there was the exhaustion, which was difficult to explain because Angela had always been busy. Her life hadn’t suddenly acquired another seven children and a smallholding. She was doing roughly the same amount she had been doing for years, yet increasingly she arrived home feeling as though somebody had pulled the plug out somewhere around lunchtime and she had spent the rest of the afternoon operating on whatever power remained in the emergency generator.
And then, of course, there was the crying.
The fucking crying.
An advert could do it. A difficult meeting could do it. Her husband asking if she was okay could do it, which was particularly inconvenient because then she had to reassure him she was fine while providing fairly compelling visual evidence that she absolutely was not. Sometimes there was no obvious reason at all; she would simply feel the tears coming and experience the bizarre sensation of crying while simultaneously observing herself crying and wondering what on earth everybody was making such a fuss about.
The first time Angela went to the doctor, she tried to explain all of this and discovered that two years of slowly becoming unfamiliar to yourself is surprisingly difficult to squeeze into an appointment. She talked about the exhaustion, struggling to concentrate and feeling anxious, although anxiety had never felt quite like the right word. She wasn’t lying awake terrified that something awful was going to happen and she wasn’t avoiding life because she was frightened of it. She was still getting up, going to work, running when she could persuade herself, making dinner, paying bills and doing all the things Angela had always done; they simply seemed to require twice as much Angela as they used to.
Blood tests were arranged and came back normal. Stress was mentioned, anxiety was discussed and antidepressants were prescribed, and Angela went home willing to entertain the possibility because she wasn't opposed to antidepressants and certainly didn't think depression only happened to people whose lives looked miserable from the outside.
She tried to make the explanation fit.
It didn't.
What Angela was struggling to describe wasn't that she hated her life. Quite the opposite, actually. She recognised her life perfectly well and had spent years deliberately building most of it. What she didn't recognise was the woman trying to live it.
So she went back.
This time the conversation ended with beta blockers for anxiety, and now Angela was sitting in the car crying into a coat that deserved better while wondering whether perhaps the doctors were right and she had simply become somebody who couldn't cope anymore.
That thought frightened her more than anything else had.
There is something particularly destabilising about losing faith in yourself when trusting yourself has been one of the foundations of your adult life. Angela wasn't arrogant enough to think twenty years in accountancy qualified her to practise medicine, but she did have one area of expertise that nobody seemed particularly interested in consulting her about.
Angela.
She had 43 years of data.
She knew Tuesday used to mean running rather than conducting a full internal feasibility study about whether putting trainers on was realistically achievable. She knew complicated problems at work had once energised her rather than making her want to close her laptop and hide in a stationery cupboard. She knew she had previously wanted sex with the man she still loved. She knew she could finish a working day without needing to spend the evening recovering from having survived it, and she knew with almost ridiculous precision that she hadn't cried since 2005 and was now crying often enough to consider adding tissues to the weekly shop.
The numbers might be normal, but Angela wasn't asking whether her numbers looked like everybody else's.
She was trying to say that this wasn't normal for Angela.
Eventually, after repairing what was left of her face in the rear-view mirror and accepting that the coat was probably going to need dry cleaning, Angela picked up her phone. She wasn't looking for a diagnosis and she certainly wasn't expecting Google to solve something two appointments hadn't managed to explain; she simply wanted to know whether anyone else had experienced this peculiar combination of being apparently fine while feeling increasingly unlike themselves.
Her first searches were reasonably dignified, but dignity doesn't tend to survive very long once you've been Googling symptoms in a parked car.
Exhausted all the time woman 43.
Can't concentrate at work 40s.
Suddenly crying all the time 43.
No sex drive tired can't think.
Then came the rabbit hole, and somewhere inside it Angela stumbled into a conversation between women who seemed to have been secretly taking notes on her life.
One woman was 42 and couldn't understand why she was suddenly struggling at a job she'd done for years. Another had tracked her periods for a decade and knew something had changed despite being told everything looked normal. Somebody couldn't sleep, somebody couldn't remember ordinary words, somebody had lost interest in sex, somebody had become inexplicably furious with the sound of her husband chewing, and several women had been told that stress, anxiety or depression might explain what they were experiencing.
Angela kept scrolling.
There were women of 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, all telling completely different stories that somehow contained familiar pieces of hers, and buried amongst the conversations was a word Angela knew perfectly well but had never seriously considered applying to herself.
Perimenopause.
Angela had imagined menopause as something that happened later. Somewhere around 50, perhaps, when your periods stopped and you became inexplicably interested in purchasing a handheld fan. She knew about hot flushes because everybody knows about hot flushes; popular culture had apparently decided that the entirety of menopause could be adequately represented by a middle-aged woman opening a window and looking annoyed.
Nobody had mentioned sitting in a car at 43 wondering why you'd become shit at your own life.
Nobody had mentioned losing confidence in a career you'd spent twenty years building, negotiating with yourself about going for a run, feeling exhausted by a life you had previously managed perfectly well, avoiding sex with somebody you still loved or suddenly crying often enough that 2005 had become a relevant piece of personal history.
Finding those women didn't give Angela an answer to everything, and it didn't mean that every strange thing happening in her life could suddenly be placed neatly into a box marked PERIMENOPAUSE. What it gave her was something much simpler and, at that particular moment, considerably more useful.
Recognition.
For two years Angela had been looking at herself and asking what she was doing wrong, while all over the place other women were quietly asking versions of exactly the same question.
Perhaps she wasn't failing at running.
Perhaps she wasn't suddenly bad at her job.
Perhaps her marriage wasn't quietly breaking.
Perhaps she hadn't inexplicably become weak, lazy, anxious, oversensitive, incapable or any of the other accusations she'd begun making against herself while trying to explain why everything felt different.
Perhaps Angela was going through the change.
At 43.
Right in the middle of the career, the marriage, the family, the running, the spreadsheets, the school runs, the dinners and all the other ordinary pieces of life that hadn't had the courtesy to pause while she worked out what was happening.
She was still going to have to work out what she needed, and there would be more conversations to have, but something had shifted in that car before she finally turned the key.
Angela had spent two years trying to get back to the woman she had been before all of this started.
Perhaps the next part wasn't about going backwards.
Perhaps it was about getting to know the woman she was becoming.
And, judging by the number of women already talking about it, at least she wouldn't have to do that bit alone.
Welcome to the change, Angela.
Turns out, it's fucking crowded.
Comments