A Menopausal Wake-Up Call

OMG. Yesterday was the day from hell. Are these ‘mood swings’ for real?! I have never been the most easy-going person in the world, nor the most able to handle stress, but yesterday was truly awful and my emotional reactions went right off the chart.

It all started with another day at the office. I have been feeling really stressed by this particular job and was so anxious about facing the onslaught again that I woke up 2 hours before my alarm and didn’t really manage to get back to sleep. Not a great start as of course lack of sleep makes me feel worse and I have to drink coffee to get my brain to work – something I don’t usually do. I settled down to an hour or so of work by myself and then suddenly found myself having to ‘rush to the loo’ just before my boss was due to arrive. Really not a good sign!

After several hours of feeling like I was causing her a major inconvenience just by being there, I considered doing the grown up thing and talking to her about what was going on. I decided against this as I knew if I opened my mouth I would end up turning into a gibbering, sobbing wreck and I really couldn’t face any more humiliation. I considered walking out several times but even that seemed to be beyond my capabilities so instead I surrendered to being buffered around in someone else’s chaos and reasoned with myself it is only for one day.

Then ‘The Phone Call’. I could write a TRILOGY on my Orange / EE broadband saga but I'm not going to bore you with the details. All I will say is this, I have been having an ongoing issue with my service for over a year and I have been making a concerted effort to try and resolve this since February. I started this particular call after work as I had an hour and a half to kill before meeting a friend for coffee. I ended up standing in the office hallway with my bags for an hour and then having to continue with the call while driving (hands-free) to meet my friend because if I didn’t get to the end of it there and then, I would end up being trapped in a new one year contract that I didn’t want. Then there was a road closure right in the middle of town at 5pm on a Friday night… Thankfully I was so engrossed in the conversation with EE that I hardly noticed the traffic jam I was stuck in.

After a lovely catch up with my friend, I went home and enjoyed a take away and DVD with my partner. Then I opened my emails… and there it was, an email from EE with my name, and therefore my new username spelled wrong. That was when I hit the roof. I could not understand how the man I had just spent an hour and a half speak to could have created a misspelt user name after we had gone over EVERYTHING to make sure we both had it right, including the spelling of my name. Not only did I not want to have to call them up yet AGAIN to try and get this corrected but having been stuck with an old name for years because Orange would not update it when I legally changed my name, I had visions of having to cancel yet another order and starting from scratch. I’d rather gouge my own eyes out than go through all that again!!! (If you are wondering why I have stuck with EE there have been technical complications too long to explain here.)

That was when ‘tired, anxious, harassed me’ turned into a raging banshee. I was so enraged I didn’t know what to do with myself. To protect my partner, I left the room and ended up kicking in the door of my bedside cabinet. When this did not abate the rage, I decided to go out for a brisk walk up a very long steep hill and this thankfully helped me calm down (highly recommended for any future outbursts!) We were about to watch another episode of Heros when I spotted some unopened envelopes on the table... Among them was a new council tax bill. WTF?!!!! Again, weeks of careful planning and phone calls to make sure the direct debit was all set up to 12 monthly payments starting in April. We had changed the bank account the direct debits were to come out of and without notice THEY STOPPED THE PAYMENTS! And here was the brand new bill of 10 higher payments starting in June…

Utterly defeated, I sat on the sofa staring out of the window because I was crying too much to watch T.V. My partner sat there silently holding me as he didn’t dare open his mouth for fear of setting me off again. I was overwhelmed by this terrible sense of futility; what is the point of me doing anything? What is the point of my miserable life if everything I try to do just turns to shit? What is the point of bothering to live in a world where everyone else is selfish, unreasonable or just plain incompetent? I have visions of slashing my wrists because I feel so utterly trapped on this ferris wheel of stress, I seem to be completely powerless to stop it going round in circles or to find a way to get off. 

   

Ok, I know I am 'hormonal' but there is definitely something else going on here. I am a firm believer that life shows us things through events and if something keeps happening, then there must be a reason for it. Yes, I am ‘hormonally challenged’ so my reactions and feelings are heightened, but if the process of menopause has a spiritual purpose beyond simple biology then what is it trying to teach me?  Everything that happened yesterday pushed my stress levels way beyond what I am currently able to deal with. Of course I would have got stressed and angry even without the help of my hormones, but last night felt more than that, it felt like a wake-up call that menopause is literally screaming in my face.

The feeling of futility comes from knowing I am being pushed to change something but I can't for the life of me work out what or how. I am scared that if I walk away from this job, instead of feeling relief and pleased that I have taken care of myself, I will end up feeling like a complete failure and doubtful that I can do any work. I am scared that if I don’t manage to sort out this God forsaken EE issue, then I will end up with no internet options left and that will make my life even more difficult. In other words, I can't deal with the way things are but I feel frozen by a fear that whatever I do to try and resolve it will only make matters worse.

Right now I do not know the answer but I do feel a lot better for having written it all down. I have the house to myself today and absolutely nothing planned so I think I will get lost in some painting (something I have recently taken up again) and maybe some dancing and maybe even a walk…

Today I am choosing to trust that clarity will come in time.

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 ♥