Hey all,
Something women don’t talk about, and something that is even more dismissed in the medical industrial complex is periomenopause. Periomenopause is a natural phase of the female body where estrogen levels drop and the body begins to reconstruct itself after the natural window for childbearing begins to close. Symptoms include, but are not limited to, irregular periods (including bleeding through super maxi pads and tampons within an hour), brain fog, random nights where you wake up in the middle of them and cannot fall back asleep, heightened irritability, mood swings, depression, anxiety, etc.
Going to the doctor, especially in places where gender affirming care is not a priority, can feel like the reliving of outdated models based on “hysteria” assumptions. Anything that the medical industrial complex cannot truly understand, or that it has been understudied, can be disregarded and shrugged off as “your problem” or not real. I even know someone who was told by the doctor, after expressing symptoms, to “get off of Tik Tok.”
Yeesh…
For those of you out there that have experienced this, know you are not crazy. Know it is not YOU. It is your body.
To me, it feels like my sugar-coating hormone is gone. I didn’t realize how much energy and effort it took to people please and make others feel comfortable and happy. All of a sudden, that reserve…whatever reserve allowed me to sugar coat my phrases…was depleted. Are people pleasing behaviors the product of high levels of estrogen?
In some sense, it makes me a better professor. I can give straight answers without the tug of empathy calling me to buffer every phrase so that hard truth claims can be palatable to others. It makes me a better communicator to my husband, even though his feelings are no longer spared at my expense. Kindness still matters, but I not longer feel like I have a reservoir of sugar next to me that I can dig from with my mouth shovel and feed to the public.
Is estrogen the sugar coating hormone? Someone, please do a study. Asking for a friend….