What No One Ever Explained to Me About Menopause — and the Second Half of Life

It was 3:27 a.m., and I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror with tears streaming down my face.

I could still feel the sweat along my hairline. My pajamas were damp. And all I could think about was the alarm that would go off in less than two hours.

I started cataloguing everything I had to do that day, including the big presentation at work that morning. I had no idea how I was going to get through it all.

I was exhausted.

But I couldn't sleep.

I stared at the woman in the mirror.

What is wrong with me?

I knew I was going through menopause. Of course I did. I'd heard about the hot flashes and sleepless nights and brain fog.

I just thought I'd handle it better.

That's what I did. I handled things.

And if something wasn't working, I figured out how to fix it.

But lately, no matter what I tried, I couldn't seem to fix me.

And for what felt like the tenth time that night, I found myself wondering:

Is this just who I am now?

I didn't know it then, but I was asking the wrong question.

In fact, I had been asking the wrong question about menopause for years.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I Did What I Always Did. I Tried to Fix It.

I left the bathroom that night and moved on with life, doing what I always did.

I tried to fix it.

I changed the way I ate. I bought the supplements. I forced myself to exercise on days when I barely had enough energy to make dinner. I listened to podcasts and read articles late at night when I couldn't sleep.

And some of it helped.

Just not enough.

And with every new thing I tried, I became more frustrated—and more convinced that maybe this was just the way life would be now.

I started to accept that maybe this was my new normal. Maybe I would always be tired. Maybe I just didn't have the same control over my emotions anymore. Or maybe, if I was lucky, all my symptoms would get better as I got older.

But what frustrated me most was how distant I was beginning to feel from the people I loved most in the world.

Why was I so mad at people I loved so dearly? Why did I snap so quickly?

And why did I feel nothing every time my husband touched me?

I felt lonely.

I felt isolated.

And I had no idea what to do—or even how to explain what was happening to the people I loved.

I started to worry that if I didn’t fix myself soon, they wouldn’t like me anymore. I didn’t know how much longer I could wait for things to improve, what if I ruin all the good things in my life?

I thought about getting help.

But every time I decided I should talk to someone, something stopped me.

I should be able to handle this.

Other women did.

My mother had.

Women had been going through this forever.

Why couldn't I just get it together?

A friend had mentioned hormone therapy.

But in my head, hormone therapy was treatment.

And things weren't that bad yet.

Treatment was for women whose symptoms were worse than mine. Women who had problems I didn't have. Women who couldn't handle it on their own.

That couldn't be me.

So I convinced myself I was exaggerating.

It was probably mostly in my head.

It probably wasn't really that bad.

I mean, I still had good days...

Or mostly good days.

Then I Had Lunch With My Friend

A few weeks later, I met my friend Sarah for lunch.

She was the same friend who had mentioned hormone therapy to me a few months earlier.

The minute she walked into the restaurant, I noticed something was different.

She looked good.

And I don’t mean she had lost weight or gotten her hair done or suddenly looked ten years younger.

She looked happy.

Relaxed.

Present.

Like she was actually there with me instead of using half her energy just trying to hold herself together.

I knew that look because I knew what the opposite felt like.

We ordered our food and talked for a while before I finally just blurted out…

“Okay, what is different about you?”

She laughed and asked,

“What do you mean?”

All I could say is,

“I don’t know. You just seem...different.”

She smiled and said,

“I feel different.”

And then she told me.

She had started hormone therapy.

I had so many questions I didn’t even know which one to ask first.

Was she worried about it? Did she have side effects? How did she know she needed it? What did her doctor say?

But instead, the question that came out of my mouth was:

“Were things really that bad?”

She looked at me for a second and said,

“Honestly? Probably not.”

That wasn’t the answer I expected.

“Then why did you do it?”

She leaned back in her chair and said something I will never forget…

“Because I realized I was waiting for things to get bad enough before I gave myself permission to do anything about them.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I kept telling myself I was fine,” she continued. “And I could have convinced myself I was fine. I was working. I was taking care of everyone. I was getting through my days.”

She paused and said,

“But getting through my life and enjoying my life aren’t the same thing.”

That one got me.

Because I knew exactly what she meant.

I was getting through my days too.

I was going to work. I was getting things done. I was showing up for the people I loved.

But how much of it was I actually enjoying?

How many dinners with my husband had I spent exhausted and irritated?

How many conversations had I only half listened to because my brain felt like it was somewhere else?

How many times had someone I loved reached for me and I just wanted to be left alone?

Then she said something I couldn’t stop thinking about.

“If I have one regret, it’s that I waited so long. I kept thinking I’d do something when it got worse. But now I look back and think...why did it have to get worse?”

She shook her head.

“Those years mattered.”

Those years mattered.

I thought about that sentence the entire drive home.

I had spent so much time asking whether my symptoms were bad enough to justify getting help that I had never stopped to ask a completely different question:

What was I missing while I waited for them to get worse?

I wish I could tell you I went home that afternoon, picked up the phone, and made an appointment.

I didn’t.

Because change is scary.

Even when your normal is miserable, at least it’s normal.

You know it. You understand it. You’ve figured out how to survive inside of it.

Trying something different meant stepping into something I didn’t understand.

And honestly, at first hormone therapy made me nervous.

I'd heard things over the years. Some good. Some not so good. And I wasn't sure what to believe.

But the more I looked into it, the more I realized that a lot of what I thought I knew about hormone therapy wasn't the whole story.

I still had questions, of course. But I was starting to feel a lot more comfortable asking them.

And underneath all of those questions was one I couldn't seem to get past:

Why should I need hormone therapy in the first place?

I wasn’t sick.

I didn’t have a disease.

There wasn’t anything wrong with me.

I was going through menopause.

Wasn’t this something my body was supposed to know how to do?

And that question is ultimately what changed everything for me.

Because the more I began to understand what was actually happening inside my body, the more I realized I had been looking at menopause completely backwards.

I had spent years asking:

What is wrong with me?

And then:

How do I fix it?

But I was starting to understand that maybe those had never been the right questions.

Because I wasn’t broken.

My body was changing.

And there is a world of difference between trying to fix something that’s broken...

...and learning how to support something that’s changing.

I think about that woman standing in the bathroom at 3:27 in the morning sometimes.

I wish I could sit beside her.

I wish I could tell her that she wasn't failing.

That she wasn't weak because she couldn't “handle” menopause better.

That she wasn't broken.

Her body was changing.

And she didn't have to wait until her life became unbearable before she was allowed to support it.

And if you've been asking yourself the same questions I was asking...

Is this bad enough?

Shouldn't I be able to handle this?

Do I really need help?

I can't tell you what your body needs.

But neither can the frightened voice in your head that's been telling you to just keep waiting.

That's something you deserve to explore with someone who understands this stage of a woman's life.