Perimenopause Didn't Do This. The Last Twenty Years Did (Ep. 140)

By the time the fire alarm goes off, the house has been quietly filling with smoke for ten years.

You don't smell it at first. A little tiredness you blame on a busy week, a period that comes early or maybe late a night.

You wake up at three a m soaked and wide awake for no reason, a word that won't come to you in the middle of a sentence, one at a time.

They're easy to wave off, easy to promise yourself you'll deal with it later.

That's the cruel thing about smoke. It never arrives all at once. It comes so slowly that you learn to adjust to it. You get used to being tired.

You get used to a bad night's sleep. You start calling your symptoms normal. Hell, we brush it off with humor.

We're just getting old now. That's how we are.

This is what forty looks like. And the slower it comes, the easier it is to convince yourself there's nothing there at all.

And then one day, the alarm is screaming, and you're standing in a doctor's office in your forties, maybe in your fifties, with a lab sheet full of numbers that are suddenly not okay with you, wondering how it all happened so fast.

It didn't happen fast. It happened over the two decades. We're going to unpack those last two decades together on this episode.

Time Stamps:

(2:05) What Perimenopause Really Is