This article was updated in May 2026.
No One Told Me Perimenopause Would Feel Like This
The Day I Cried at My Desk for No Reason
I was sitting at my desk one ordinary day when I started crying. Not delicately. Not cinematically. Just leaking tears like a faulty tap while I tried to look normal in front of my monitor. There was no trigger. No sad email. No song playing softly in the background to make me reflect on my entire life. Just water, falling out of my face, with no permission slip.
That was the moment I stopped pretending. I had been blaming everything else for months. The grief of losing my dad. The breakup, even though he and I are besties now and probably the healthiest version of whatever we are. The general background hum of being a woman in her forties who is just, you know, getting on with it. I kept telling myself my body was reacting to circumstances. Stress. Heartbreak. Life.
But this wasn’t life. This was perimenopause arriving like an uninvited house guest who has decided to redecorate. And not one person in my orbit had thought to mention that the real plot twist isn’t the night sweats. It’s the slow, strange feeling that you are quietly becoming a stranger to yourself.
The Symptoms Nobody Bothered to Warn Me About
Everybody loves to list the obvious ones. Hot flushes. Irregular periods. Night sweats so dramatic you wake up convinced the ceiling has leaked. Brain fog. Sleep that decides to ghost you for sport. These are the symptoms that get headlines, brochures, and a knowing nod from your GP. They are real, they are rude, and they are absolutely the surface layer.
What nobody mentioned was the identity wobble. The way I would catch myself in the mirror and think, who is she. Not in a fun, dramatic, glow up way. In a quiet, slightly unsettled way. Like the woman I had always been was sitting just behind glass and I could see her but couldn’t quite reach her. Self doubt started turning up in places it had never lived before, like a pigeon that has decided your balcony is now its home.
And the world is not exactly subtle about helping. We live in a society that hands women a script written entirely in our twenties and thirties, then quietly closes the book the moment we hit our forties. Youth and fertility get the spotlight. Everything after gets a polite, awkward, oh well done you for ageing so gracefully. I refuse to keep clapping along to a soundtrack that wants me to fade out on cue.
The Worth Question Nobody Asked For
Here is the part that genuinely confused me. I cannot have children. Never could. Fertility has never been the centre of my identity or my life plan. So logically, perimenopause shouldn’t feel like a loss in that direction. There is no Pinterest board being dismantled in my head. No nursery being repainted. Nothing closing that was ever really open.
And yet. The worth question still landed. Quietly. Sneakily. Without consent. Some lifetime of conditioning I didn’t sign up for came in and whispered, babe, are you still relevant. Are you still wanted. Are you still allowed to take up space in rooms now that the world has decided you’ve moved out of your so called prime. It was unsettling because it didn’t match my actual values, but my nervous system had clearly been marinating in the cultural messaging for forty something years and decided to chime in anyway.
I had to sit with that for a while. I had to notice it without immediately trying to fix it or rationalise it away. Because pretending I was above it would have been a lie, and lying to myself is a habit I am actively trying to break. The doubt wasn’t truth. It was conditioning wearing a convincing wig. But you can’t dismantle something you refuse to admit is there.
What surprised me most was how physical the doubt felt. It wasn’t an intellectual debate. It sat in my chest. It made me second guess outfits I had worn for years. It made me wonder if my bestie, the one I’ll probably end up reconnecting with romantically one day, would still look at me the same way. None of that was rational. All of it was real. And the only way through it was to keep showing up as myself anyway, even on the days when myself felt like a costume I was borrowing.
Maiden, Mother, Crone, and the Bit Nobody Talks About
We all grow up with the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. Three tidy stages of womanhood, neatly archetyped, photogenic, easy to merchandise. The Maiden is fresh and full of promise. The Mother is nurturing and central. The Crone is wise but, suspiciously, almost invisible in the way our culture renders her. Nobody hands you a pamphlet about the bit in between, where you are mid transition and feel like you are buffering.
That gap is where perimenopause lives. You are not the Maiden anymore. You are not stepping neatly into Crone wisdom yet, partly because the Crone has been so badly marketed she sounds like a side character in a fairytale. So you are just here, in the bit nobody named, watching films where leading men in their fifties are paired with leading women in their twenties and being told, gently, that this is normal and you should not make a fuss about it.
Honey, I am making a fuss about it. Older women being sidelined in media. Beauty being framed as a youth tax we are all failing to pay. Ageing being treated like a personal hygiene issue we should have prevented with enough discipline. None of that is neutral. It’s the wallpaper of a house we didn’t choose to live in, and just because the wallpaper is old doesn’t mean it’s harmless. It has been quietly shaping how I feel about my own face, and I’m done pretending it hasn’t.
Emerging, Not Fading
Here is what I am working with now. Perimenopause is not a soft fade to grey. It is a transformation, and I would like to be allowed to be both honest about how strange it feels and excited about what it could mean. I’m grieving things I didn’t even know I valued. The ease of being noticed without effort. The way confidence used to come pre installed in certain rooms. The version of me who didn’t have to think about any of this yet.
But grief and growth can share a sofa. I am becoming someone who knows herself in a way the twenty something version of me would have found mildly threatening. My yes means yes. My no is not up for negotiation. I’m not auditioning for anyone’s approval, which, by the way, is the most freeing realisation of my whole adult life. Desire didn’t leave the building. It just stopped performing for an audience and started checking in with me first.
The wildest reframe for me has been this. Humans are basically the only mammals who experience menopause at all. Which means evolutionarily, we are meant to exist beyond our reproductive years. We are meant to be here, in this exact stage, doing exactly this. Our worth was never the brief window of fertility. That was a story sold to us. The real story is the woman who emerges on the other side, with receipts, instincts, and absolutely no time for nonsense.
So no, no one told me perimenopause would feel like this. Like crying at a desk over nothing. Like questioning my own worth despite knowing better. Like being told to step quietly aside while every fibre of me is saying, actually, I’m just getting started. Babe, we are not fading. We are not finished. We are the bit of the story that nobody bothered to write, which means we get to write it ourselves. And honestly, I think this chapter is going to be the best one yet.
P.S. Plot twist. Turns out it wasn’t perimenopause at all. You can read more about that whole unexpected detour here.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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