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 ♥

Joining The Dots...

My recent menopausal ‘eureka moment’ has led me to re-assessing what has been going on in my life over the last five years. In 20011 and 2012 I went through a huge emotional storm and up until now, I have never even considered that it was part of my menopausal process. While I was aware that I was perimenopausal because I was having physical symptoms, so much else was going on at the time, I didn’t recognise that perhaps some of the inner turmoil I was experiencing was also connected to the beginning stages of my transition.

2012 was without a doubt the darkest year of my life. I regularly found myself chanting to myself ‘I want to die, I want to die, I want to die’. I didn’t really want to die, I just wanted it to stop. - ‘it’ being a relentless 18 month hammering on every level of my being that I just couldn’t see a way out of. So much happened to me that the only way I could make sense of what I was experiencing was to attribute it to some kind of spiritual crisis – I knew in my heart the only way I was going to survive was to surrender to whatever process I was going through and let Spirit carry me through. I have been walking a challenging spiritual path my whole life and right before this happened I thought I was finally ‘on the way up’. Despite 20 years of conscious healing from severe childhood abuse, 2012 was the year I finally reached my rock bottom. I knew I couldn’t trust a single soul to truly help me and so I was forced to do the only other thing left to do; I retreated deep into my relationship with the Goddess and prayed that she would deliver me to the other side. 

It all started with a major wake-up call around my 40^th birthday regarding the relationship I was in. It was like someone pulled the plug out of the bath and all I could do was stand there helplessly looking on as the water slowly drained away. Five months down the line and all I was left with was the empty bath - and I couldn’t believe what I’d been doing to myself because of my desperation to be in a relationship. A couple of months after we broke up my step mother did something that was jaw-droppingly outrageous but also very typical of her, something which highlighted the appalling way she had treated me since I was a little girl. After 20 years of ‘working on our relationship’ suddenly I could tolerate her no longer – it was like someone flicked a switch in me; I just packed my things, drove away and never went back.

A month later I had a second prolapsed disc – this time it was so bad I was hospitalised and had to have an emergency operation. I was sent home to recover even though I lived on my own and had no one to look after me. Neither my mother nor my sister offered to look after me, at my house or theirs, - my mother picked me up from the hospital, stayed the night then drove went back to Birmingham in the morning leaving me to fend for myself. My sister didn’t come and visit until I was well enough to collect her from the station so she didn’t have to drive. I was so emotionally defeated, it took me a full six months to realise what had happened and start the process of ending those relationships too.

I had no partner, no job to return to and only a handful of new friends as I had only recently moved to the area (to be with my ex). After the operation I couldn’t drive or even really sit for four weeks. I felt so fragile and sensitive, I couldn’t even deal with the radio or watching T.V. so I just stared out of the window or read books. I was sent home from hospital on a cocktail of tramadol, amitriptyline and diazepam and was not offered any helpful guidance on how to come off them. I was no longer in excruciating pain so I came off them all over the space of two or three weeks and then I hit a wall. By the time I realised what was going on it was too late to go back on them and withdraw slowly. And all that was just 2011! Entering into 2012 was like stepping off a cliff into an abyss. My life was so dark I literally couldn’t see my hand in front of my face - I really couldn’t imagine how on earth I was ever going to get out the other side of whatever was happening to me and my life.

Up until now I have put all that previous inner turmoil down to the pharmaceutical drugs and the insane circumstances that unfolded in my life. While I fully understood everything that happened in 2011 – 2012 was part of a deep spiritual process, I could also directly link my feelings to tangible events and circumstances. When those feelings recently started to come flooding back I really couldn’t understand it, especially as I am happiest I have ever been. I started to fear that perhaps I was ‘on the wrong path’ and about to suffer another spiritual battering even though I know I couldn’t ever possibly ever go back to the way it was before. It just didn’t make any sense! The only thing I could possibly attribute my emotional state to to was an adverse reaction to St John’s Wort which I was taking for my libido – so I stopped just in case it was triggering a chemical reaction in me like the pharmaceuticals from before.

Now I have started to join the dots, I can see that it is extremely significant that I had my first night sweats and first rosacea outbreak around the time my relationship started to break down and that it is clearly no coincidence that the beginning of the biggest emotional and spiritual crisis I ever had coincided exactly with the beginning of my menopause. As I become increasingly conscious of the connection between the menopause and my spiritual journey, it makes perfect sense that I would be experiencing another ‘big wave’ because I am still perimenopausal!

After the intensity of the first stage lost its grip, I was slowly released back into the world and a semi-normal life. Since then I have been feeling like I have been living in a surreal, weird kind of limbo – it’s felt like my old life has definitively ended but my new life has not yet properly begun. At times this has bothered me as I am usually a dynamic ‘go getter’ kind of person, but one of the (hardest) lessons I learned during my Shamanic Death was that I need to learn to accept ‘not knowingness’. So I have been consciously choosing to ‘go with the flow’ and to trust one day it would all make sense... 

And now it finally does! I can see that the first big wave enabled me to break me free of the past, to let go of the people and emotional patterns I was still hopelessly attached to despite years of ‘working on myself’. It turns out the purpose of all that work was to prepare me for the enormous battle that was one day going to take place within my psyche – it never really fixed the problem, but it did give me all the inner tools I needed to face the menopausal 'trial of fire' and to live to tell the tale. 

Perhaps this second wave is about opening up to expand my understanding and to finally prepare me to transition into the future I never imagined was possible…    

Goddess Blessings ♥