I Dreaded Menopause. But It Was So Much Worse in My Mind Than in Reality.
For about a decade, up until a year ago, every time I got my period, I’d look down and ask my body, “Really? Are we really doing this again?” It felt like one of those tedious, inane debates with your significant other about the direction the toilet paper roll should unfurl, or whether it’s worth the psychic cost to travel to a second store for slightly cheaper Coke Zero. It was a familiar, inevitable waste of energy.
You see, I’m 55, with two kids in college and a long-term boyfriend with a vasectomy, so getting pregnant wasn’t a concern. While I low-key dreaded menopause — let’s just say it didn’t sound like a super-fun ‘90s dance party — after some 468 periods, the thrill of being reminded of my theoretical fertility had long waned. So had paying for tampons and pads and yet rarely having what I needed when I needed it. For a few days every month for the last 10 years, my main feeling about menopause was, let’s get on with it already. The unknown made me anxious.
Where's the health ed teacher when you need him?
As a health writer, I knew the facts, of course. But my sense of what it was going to feel like to be “in menopause” was based on which depressing personal care products were being aggressively marketed to me. I didn’t see some big conspiracy of shame keeping women from discussing it — most of us simply don’t have a day-to-day relationship with anyone who could beacon us through. When I was 11, my mom was around to point out that breasts don’t always grow at the same rate (but that I shouldn’t worry because no one else would notice) and we had an ancient health ed teacher with a gym whistle to give a puberty play-by-play to our mortified, pimply class. As for friends, when I get to talk to them (not often enough!), we catch up on kid drama, our parents’ health and which streaming shows best relieve the stress of both. We wouldn't do a deep dive into menopause unless we're having a long weekend away.
That’s why for a lot of people, menopause remains an uncool, unpleasant abstraction having something to do with dry vaginas, a mandatory short haircut and sexual invisibility. How much of this thinking is internalized agism and misogyny and how much is simply that menopause is not a celebratory milestone such as getting married or having a baby, I’m not sure. I only know we treat menopause as we do so many life experiences involving not-young women: We let it become a punchline with symptoms. Hot flashes, facial hair, your butt fat somehow migrating to your belly… they lend themselves to wine-drenched hilarity that ends in a quiet dread.
And that’s not great. The most recent review of the literature found that in most studies, women with a negative attitude toward menopause tended to experience more symptoms. A 2018 study of Turkish women suggests that those who were bummed about the transition had worse body image and were more likely to be depressed that those who were okay with it. On the flip side, there’s some evidence that informing women about what the hell is going on can help them go into it with a better attitude — shocking, I know.
Drumroll, please!
And here’s the thing: Now that menopause is here it’s kind of a non-event. Like, it’s FINE. For me, anyway, it’s been just another wave of bodily weirdness that I must pay attention to, but nothing like all the miserable imaginings that flowed into my informational and conversational void. To be sure, it's noticeable (symptoms can range from mild to truly vexatious for some). But in my case, they’d become so amplified and so parodied that they took up way more space in my mind than they do in real life.
Here's what didn’t happen: All the flesh on my face did not loosen and fall off my cheekbones, leaving me looking instantly elderly. The hormonal shifts have not made me more volatile or less rational than I was before — in fact, I’m probably calmer because with the diminishment of my ovarian reserve, I also have fewer f*cks to give. My vagina and sex drive are fine, thank you, and if they weren’t, there are many treatments and products to help. My metabolism has not downshifted in any way I’ve noticed. Facial hair? Well, that’s been a lifelong journey starting when I bleached my lip hair at home in the ‘80s, because my sanity depended on believing that a blonde mustache (like mismatched boobs) was invisible. By now, I can handle the odd man-whisker. Things do have to be absolutely, perfectly temperature-controlled, dark and silent for me to sleep through the night, but this has been true since I had my kids 19 years ago.
In short, menopause feels much like every milestone birthday: After I got over the shock of, “Holy crap, how’d I get to be 30/40/50?” I realized I felt very much the same as I did the year before and the year before that, give or take a weird body thing or two.
A wide range of experiences
I am a sample set of one, of course. Your mileage may vary, etc. And there is no doubt that some women have far worse symptoms that the hot flashes I get when I’m stressed or hungry. Some 75% of people in menopause will have vasomotor symptoms, such as hot flashes, night sweats or migraines, 60% have changes in their libido or vagina and 45% may have mood issues like depression, anxiety or trouble sleeping, according to the National Library of Medicine. That’s a lot of people. But whether these symptoms are a minor annoyance or a major issue varies widely. The North American Menopause Society estimates that around a quarter of people who have hot flashes will be bothered enough to talk to a doctor, for instance.
I am in no way minimizing that menopause can truly suck, just as puberty can truly suck, and pregnancy can truly suck. Nor am I saying that you should just power through any symptoms because they’re just another part of being painfully female. In fact, a 2020 study found that people who had more than one moderate to severe menopause symptom were at a higher risk for cardiovascular disease than people who had one or fewer. Women's health risks in general change with both age and menopause, so you don't want to sleep on those.
But I’m here to tell you that menopause can also be okay, that it’s not always the hysterical plate-throwing baying-at-the moon stereotype that people joke about (or that you might imagine, given the dearth of information in the space). It’s not like, "Yay! I’m in menopause!" And if I were encouraged to “embrace” it, that would feel inauthentic and patronizing. But neither is it necessarily a radical, noticeable shift that screams “Ignore me because I’m at the end of my reproductive usefulness!” For me, it’s another thing that happened to my body over the course of what will hopefully be a long and healthy lifetime. It just, well, is.
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