My Journey Through Perimenopause and Menopause

And The Shocking Lack of Awareness about Menopausal Transition

Walking in snow.

For the last few years, whenever I’ve looked in the mirror, I saw this unfamiliar woman drenched in fatigue, and with tired droopy eyes looking back at me. And I asked myself: Where am I in this? Where did I lose myself?

Sadly, even as a woman in the 21st century and despite medical checks, I didn’t know that I was going through a key transition in life: the menopausal transition, (an early one) and suffered silently through it.

In the last four years, I woke up every other day with a pounding head. An inexplicable nausea surged inside of me, and I felt lightheaded. ‘Woke up’ is an inaccurate way to describe the action of getting up from bed when all I did was shuttle between sleepiness and sleeplessness. But that’s how I’ve been ‘sleeping’ for the last few years. And pounding headaches were my closest morning allies to survival through the day.

Survive. It’s a pretty laden word, I’d say. But that’s exactly how I felt: I survived. I merely survived. I could mask my superficial survival with an unobtrusive sense of normalcy. I became a pro at it.

These gnawing issues were so regular, they almost felt congenital. One day it was elbow pains that cannibalized all…