I’m writing this tonight, last night to you and me in the future. I hope you had a good night’s sleep. I hope I didn’t totally lose my mind.
This will be a short one. A little update note from me to you as opposed to a newslettery thing.
My brain, my head, my mind, is twisted in on itself. Perimenopause has finally caught up with me for real and sucked away my sleep and thermoregulation, trashed my capacity to think straight or make words come out of my mouth properly, and has now turned my daylight hours into low-grade depression and my nights into a 1 000 hours of tossing and turning. Hormones. What a trip, right?
I’ve only managed to ‘sleep’ for the last two nights thanks to Ativan but I can’t do more of that because it turns my days of sleep-deprived tears and energy pulp into days of drug-hangover tears and energy pulp with just a smattering of anxiety, an edge of murderous rage, and a shadowy feeling that a dementor has sucked away the last of what remained of my life force and sense of humour.
As you can imagine, I’m just a barrel o’ fun right now.
So tonight I’m just resigning myself to no sleep at all and I’ll start HRT tomorrow and hopefully that will sort things out. I could’ve started yesterday, but sadly the lab I was working with dropped the ball and made my life substantially worse for an extra 24 hours. Thanks for that everyone!
Luckily, in the sacred words of Tori Amos, I believe in peace, bitch.
Anyway. Consider this your PSA, fellow female-bodied people. If you’re moving into your late 30s even and into your 40s and your body is starting to do weird shit, consider brushing up on your knowledge of the perimenopause and menopause. You would do well to follow Dr Louise Newson and Dr Mary Claire on Insta. If you’re in Cape Town, Dr Moyra Stein is the kind of well woman doctor you pray to find.
I never asked to be a perimenopause influencer but here we are now.
See you on the other side of mental health, internet friends.
Yours, Donkey on the Edge
x
TANYA MEESON 