Just for Today...

Today I have hit a wall and am finding it so hard to even write this. I still can’t believe that this is hormonally triggered, it is just so extreme. Today after several days of waking with weird dreams – not really disturbing but just emotionally triggering, I have been left feeling disassociated from my body. I had a pelvic scan this morning which went well but to be honest I hardly even noticed that I went, I have been feeling so split off from myself and the world. I decided rather than going straight home I should go for a walk in a riverside park as I find nature usually sorts me out. Instead I found myself sitting by these beautiful rocks just as split off from my body as I had been at home. I found I couldn’t move or really cry – another thing that usually brings relief. I was massively bothered by people walking by and felt uneasy about going home as I partner was there and I just want to be alone. When I got up and pushed myself to walk more vigorously, I found my mood lifting a little but still no real relief.

I really don’t know what is wrong with me. I have so much to be grateful for and nothing major stressing me out, perhaps for the first time in my life. I wonder if now that things are quiet this is a delayed reaction to my past or if I feel like this because there is something ‘wrong’ that I am not seeing. I am normally a woman of dynamic action but I have absolutely no motivation to do anything and if I try to figure things out I find my head going round and around in circles which sends me deeper into despair as I just don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know whether to try to ‘push through’ this or to gently ‘sit with it’. If I could be sure what ‘it’ was, then perhaps I’d know what to do; if this is grief then I know I just need to make space for feeling it. If it is hormones or related chemical imbalance then perhaps I need to take a more pragmatic approach and take action… What really scares me is the worry that this is the ‘real me’; now all distractions and stresses have been removed maybe this is how I really feel about myself and about life.   

It feels like a really bad drug / addiction withdrawal and I wonder if this is what it is. I read on one website (I think it was A Vogel) that menopause is in fact a ‘drug’ withdrawal – the drug being oestrogen. We have been reliant on the chemical oestrogen our whole lives and now our bodies have to become accustomed to functioning without it. This makes perfect sense to me. I have also suffered from love addiction and wonder if my cutting ties from my abusive family has sent me into a different kind of withdrawal, especially as I have spent many years trying to resolve things with them.

OK – this writing is definitely helping. Strangely, writing for an audience helps the processing because if I write in my journal in this head space I just seem to spiral down. At least this way I have to be more precise and not allow myself to get sucked into my negativity because no one would want to read that! I said right at the beginning that I wanted this blog to be an anchor and even when I desperately want to isolate and avoid, as soon as I start typing the negativity starts to lose its grip.

My conclusion today is that I am experiencing withdrawal, possibly even from two things – oestrogen and also to unhealthy attachments that have dominated my life. It is no wonder that I am feeling wobbly, confused and split off – my mind, heart and my body have some major adjusting to do.

So, just for today, I am going to stop trying to ‘figure it out’. I will neither sit there staring into space nor pick up the axe and start trying to chop my way through the dead wood. I don’t have to be Super Woman but neither should I sit here and wallow in my negativity. I am going to write a list of simple things I can do when I feel like a trapped rabbit drowning in her burrow. This is a list of things I know have worked in the past all of which I can try and see which works in the moment:

1. Write my blog – that is what it is for!

2. Go for a walk in nature – get away from people and the city if I can

3. If my back feels up to it – walk up a big hill or try a bit of running

4. Do some mundane physical or administrative chores

5. Dance to loud music or listen to relaxing music to calm my mind

6. Sit by a bubbling stream, weir,  waterfall or waves – anywhere the water makes sound

7. Write a gratitude list (I may even start a gratitude diary again…)

8. Give my partner a hug and allow myself to cry if tears come

9. Call or meet up with a friend for coffee

10. Create some routine / structure / small achievable goals – I don’t have passion motivating me right now so I need to rely more on structure and routine to keep me moving forward, especially as I do not have a full time job at the moment.

I’d love to hear if anyone else has any other suggestions – please feel free to share what works for you…

Goddess Blessings ♥

An Anchor in a Choppy Sea

I feel I need something to anchor myself to, something that will remain a constant while I am going through this process. I am hoping this blog will become that anchor because writing has kept me sane through many other challenging periods in my life and it is something I can do regardless of how I am feeling in the moment that I start to write. This is what I am struggling with most at the moment – feeling I can’t hold a thought or make any solid decisions. My mind is floaty and confused, I have become absent minded, forgetful and at times totally incapable of dealing with any external stress. My feelings are extreme and seem to change every five minutes so it has become impossible to centre myself internally or ground into any sort of reality.

I have been feeling increasingly like this for a couple of months now and have been finding it incredibly frustrating and anxiety producing. Even as I write I am not completely sure this fog is part of my menopause – I have been racking my brains try to figure out ‘what is wrong with me’ while hoping that it would soon pass so that I could ‘get back to normal’.

But somehow it feels as though my life is slipping through my fingers and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. They say ‘if you can’t beat them join them’, so I have turned on some lovely floaty music with water and bird sounds in the background as I write my way along a gentle river. In this moment I have decided to go with the flow of my current experience and see where my thoughts and feelings lead me...

The only problem is, I know that surrendering to this floaty reality requires me to disengage with life ‘out there’, to relinquish all structure, routine and focus and this leaves me feeling very anxious, especially because I recently started working for myself. In January, after my 6 month employment contract came to an end, I planned the new business and started to get the ball rolling. By February I already had some paid freelance work - everything seemed to be unfolding perfectly and moving in the right direction. My partner was still abroad dealing with some family matters and I knew that after 7 months apart, it was going to be a big adjustment for us both when he got home. But what I was not banking on was this sudden and extremely unexpected twist in my menopausal process coinciding with everything else that is going on; the return of my partner, us BOTH setting up new businesses (he left his job to go and care for his dying mother last summer) and us planning our wedding.

At first I thought it was the adjustment process on my partner's return that was making me feel so strange, and I am sure that has played a big part in it, but somewhere along the line I feel I have lost my way and I can’t seem to find the way back. All the things I normally do to centre / ground myself seemed to have stopped working. I have tried to get into some routine but it feels impossible because the inner motivation, focus and determination just aren’t there for me to draw upon. At first I thought it was to do with suddenly being around my partner 24/7 but now he is getting his life together, I am just left sitting there feeling confused and incapable of making or keeping any decisions. How the hell am I supposed to run my own business feeling like this?

The option of getting another job is even less appealing. I feel overwhelmed, confused, anxious, absent minded and at times, extremely anti-social – hardly a good position to apply for or start a new job. The self-employment was supposed to involve working from home with minimal client contact but the work I have got so far involves going to my client’s offices. If I was already in a well-established job that I could just get on with I might feel a little less anxious, but the truth is, my life has never been like that and my usual ‘go getter’ resilience is no longer there carrying me through all the changes and uncertainty of my working life.

So, how do I navigate this conflict between what I need to be doing to ‘earn a living’ and what I feel capable of doing in this woozy-changeable-anxious menopausal state? Right now I mostly don’t feel capable of doing anything, and at times I feel like a mental patient on day release walking around in a daze. In some ways it feels like a blessing that so far I only have committed to 1 – 2 day’s work a week, but then I feel I should be working on drumming up more business on the other days. The guilt, anxiety and frustration soon kick in on my ‘days off’ but without some external commitment keeping me on track, and with lots of things currently distracting me, I just don’t ever seem to be able to get it together.

In addition to this extremely uncharacteristic procrastination, I have also started to feel overwhelmed by one of the freelance jobs which is much more pressured and stressful than I feel comfortable with, even under normal circumstances. Now, with my resistance to stress currently set at ZERO, especially during my recent 'phantom period', I find myself continually contemplating jacking it in.

Right now it feels impossible to find the balance between taking responsibility for meeting my financial and personal well-being needs - it seems I am being forced to choose one over the other. If I decide to focus on work, to try and ‘push through’ this mental fog, I know that I am going to get stressed and emotionally overwhelmed and will almost certainly have to give up at some point anyway. (And this will then make me feel like a failure as well as guilty for letting my client/s down.) If I decide to surrender to this process and only do what I feel capable of doing – which right now is to only deal with very low stress conditions – then I fear I will end up running out of money and / or looking ‘unprofessional’ by turning work down.

It seems to me that there is little room for emotional processes in the world of work and that we are also continually expected to be able to deal with high stress so that we can put food on the table and roofs over our heads. As a highly sensitive person, I have always struggled with this apparent ‘fact of life’ but now my sensitivity has become massively amplified through the menopause, I fear it has rendered me completely unemployable. What I really want is a way to make decent money that does not require me to abandon myself or to have to take medication to become able to tolerate unnecessary stress. I want to be able to work in a way that does not prevent me from taking care of my emotional, spiritual and physical well-being. I want to live my life in a state of balance that enables me to contribute to society without having to relinquish, bury or sacrifice my personal needs...

As a menopausal woman, it seems this deep inner desire has become something I can no longer over-ride or ignore.

Blessings ♥

The Beginning of the End?

Today, a second pregnancy test has confirmed that I am currently experiencing my first menopausal 'missed period'. I feel deeply shocked, partly by the disappearance of my monthly moon time but mostly by my reaction to it. And I am surprised that I am shocked, because I have been very obviously peri-menopausal for 5+ years and up until this past week have felt totally okay with it.

But suddenly I am really not okay with it.
Suddenly I have started to feel this overwhelming grief and deep confusion at the prospect of entering the 'crone' stage of my life at the tender age of 45.
Suddenly I find myself lamenting where the hell has my life, my youth and my health gone?!
Suddenly I find myself questioning my very existence and wondering what it has all been for...

It feels as though my life has come to a screeching, unexpected halt and I no longer have the energy or desire to figure things out or to get back on board whatever used to propel me forward in life. When the thought of doing something interesting comes to me, something that would have previously fired me up with passion and enthusiasm, I find that I immediately toss the thought aside while telling myself there really is NO POINT because whatever I start I am probably only going to abandon in a few hours, days or week's time.

Seeing as I am a writer and have loved keeping a journal for years I thought one project I am likely (hopefully!) to stick with is a blog about this process I am going through. Interestingly, when the idea came to me I didn't experience the usual treacly thick inner resistance. It came to me three days ago after I took the first pregnancy test (the day after my period was due) and found it was 'negative'. I reasoned that it maybe too early to tell for sure and decided to re-test in three days time, as suggested in the instructions. But the terrifying seed of doubt was already planted -  'you mean this might actually be it?' I felt compelled to start the blog straight away but decided it would only end up being yet another 'unfinished project' if in three days time I tested positive and I didn't want to do that to myself so I decided to wait.

But I really did go into some kind of shock that day. I had been wondering for a couple of weeks if my wild hormonal symptoms were due to pregnancy and for some reason it hadn't even occurred to me that it was menopause that was causing it. I knew the menopause messes with your periods - I'd only last month suffered an abnormally long bleed and have also been taking herbs to regulate my cycle for over three years. (I use Agnus Castus which has been highly effective at stopping my periods arriving massively early.) Of course I also knew menopause usually causes missed or delayed periods as the process tapers down to a halt, something I had even witnessed my older sister experiencing. But what I really and truly didn't expect was that a menopausal missed period could  feel like the 'phantom period' I'd experienced in early pregnancy, I just assumed nothing would happen! I also didn't expect that when this final menopausal stage kicked in for me it would be when I have finally met the right man after years of dodgy relationships and we were in the middle planning our wedding and new life together.

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As I write this I am beginning to see I have been in some sort of weird menopausal denial, probably caused by the fact that I don't have any children. I only ever got pregnant once 16 years ago and that ended in a 'missed miscarriage' (I had to have a D&C to remove the placenta) and a very messy break-up. I was constantly re-assured by everyone I still had plenty of time for children, I was after all only 29, but despite having unprotected sex with partners since then, I have never once had another positive pregnancy test. I did, however, have many 'phantom pregnancies' where I experienced the same symptoms I had when pregnant but then always ended up bleeding. To this day I do not know if I was miscarrying very early or was just in a weird emotional battle with my body because on some level I was pining to see a pregnancy through to birth.

To add to the menopausal confusion, I am not sure I even really want children. It's been very difficult to get my head around what I can only assume must be a severe case of biology vs common sense. I love kids but I can't imagine having the strength to deal with a baby feeling the way I do these days, physically or emotionally. I honestly don't know how I'd cope, with endless sleepless nights, picking up / carrying a child with a bad back ( two prolapsed discs), or the noise and constant demands on my time and energy, even with a loving partner I know would support and stand by me.

Despite this, I know in my heart if I'd discovered I was pregnant, I'd have been over the moon so it is with great sadness that I'd like to acknowledge this momentous day as the beginning of the end of my fertility...

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By writing my thoughts and feelings down today, I have already gained some much needed clarity and emotional relief. I hope writing this blog will continue to help me process the demanding emotional and spiritual challenges of this powerful life transition and that sharing it will offer other women some comfort and insight on their own menopausal journey.

Goddess Blessings ♥