Going Through Menopause Empowered Me to Embrace My Aging Body
We live in a society that values youth. Every ad in my social media feeds is about fighting the signs of aging, and we’re sold this myth that menopause is the end of vitality, that it means you’re an old lady, useless or invisible. That always felt wrong to me.
I own a gym and work as a trainer, and I try hard to help people think of their bodies in terms of how they feel and what they can do rather than what they look like. That self-acceptance gave me a good foundation before I hit menopause. Still, I wasn’t prepared for what it would do to me physically or emotionally.
I started noticing symptoms when I was about 49, a constellation of small things: It took longer to recover from workouts. My body composition changed. Then hot flashes kicked in, and whoa, when those hit, I knew. I remember, on my fiftieth birthday, my husband and I were sitting in a restaurant and I looked at him and said, “Honey, can I take off all my clothes right here, right now?” I was dripping in sweat. That was shocking. Now I understand the depictions of older women wearing cardigans. You need to be able to strip down at a moment’s notice!
I had never had dry skin, and now I’m dry everywhere. Things I didn’t even know could be dry are dry. And that has definitely impacted my sex life. I’m lucky to have a husband who I communicate with well; we went on an adventure to find the best lube for us. We couldn’t pretend that my body wasn’t changing, so we decided to have fun figuring out how to work with the changes.
In addition to physical shifts, menopause was really, really emotional, and in a confusing way.
It felt a bit like adolescence: I would cry for no reason or get inexplicably rage-y or rebellious. I wondered if I was depressed. I found myself unable to get excited about anything, and I felt stuck and down for no reason. I hadn’t really heard about the emotional side of menopause—all the messaging seemed to say that my job as a woman was to stay sexy to men, or basically, “Just don’t look old, OK?” When I realized my new emotions were tied to menopause (I had a hot flash while Googling “depression,” and it was like, eureka!), I felt really comforted—I could look back at so much of what I had been feeling and finally understand what was going on.
I’m on the other side now. The hot flashes are still with me, and I still hate them, but my other symptoms are more settled. And I’ve had time to firm up a perspective: People have to go into menopause openly and head-on. All those ads about staying young forever and fighting the signs of age feel like shame and fear to me. And there’s nothing to feel shameful or fearful about when it comes to your body and its natural processes.
Trying to hide who you are takes a lot of energy. And menopause made it clear to me that I can’t fight the signs of age. My hair is gray. My skin is dry. I have wrinkles now, and a softer belly and thighs that rub together.
Recently, I put on a bikini, despite absolutely not having a “bikini body” anymore. But I love the way the sun feels on my belly. And you know what happened? Absolutely nothing. No one freaked out, I didn’t lose anything—but I did get sun on my belly. There's freedom in realizing that the rules can be lies.
People told me going into menopause feels like falling off a cliff and into the depths of despair, where I’d wither away into invisibility until nobody remembered me. But in fact, it feels like I just walked into a meadow and it’s sweaty here, but beautiful.
Women talk about feeling invisible after a certain age, but to me, that feels like a superpower. If somebody pays attention to me now, it’s not because of the shape of my ass or the perkiness of my breasts. It’s because of the substance of who I am. And I earned that substance over the last 51 years. It is liberating, escaping from the shackles of all of those expectations that I have to look a certain way, act a certain way, represent sexuality in a certain way.
Now, I’m just me. And that is so much easier.
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