Menopause Has a Branding Problem
Seeking new language for midlife
Depending on your source, there are 34 symptoms of menopause.
And there are 9 “unusual” symptoms, all of which I found “usual.”
I am thankfully on the far side of the worst of it, but my peri/meno experience was a long and often brutal course in suffering. I had almost every one of those “symptoms.” The quotes are there to diminish the legitimacy of the term — it became harder to think of my experience as a collection of symptoms when it was my day-to-day reality. When there are 66 or more of them, for years, are we really still talking about symptoms? Aren’t we just talking about life? Not sleeping is a symptom? Itching? Rage? We are each a walking constellation of symptoms under this system, a pathologized caricature, and I object. What we really need is a new way to talk about this “change of life” (ugh) — not just a list that your dismissive doctor can use to dismiss you.
“Menopausal” is shorthand for the long-term reality of a vast, overheated swath of the population. It can mean nothing, or 66 things. Or a whole lot more.
A symptom is literally a sign of disease and menopause is not a disease. Is the growth of pubic hair a symptom of puberty? Is a boy’s deepening voice a symptom of adolescence? These are natural and expected experiences in changing bodies which, like it or not, we all possess. The body is never static.
Perhaps our “symptoms” are really just “aging”, another weighted word that we struggle with. Why, exactly? We are all, always, every minute of our precious lives, AGING. We age until we die. It’s really the only reliable thing, right? Aging and death, what else can you count on? It’s normal. It’s expected. Hoped for, even. Consider the alternative.
If we’re all doing it, ALL THE TIME, every minute of every day, then why can’t we talk about it without cringe? Why all the euphemisms and the attempts to hide or reverse our very natural aging? I know why, of course, it’s because we’re afraid of death. We age, we may go mad and roar at the heavens, and we will die. You and me, many of us overdrinking and making too much noise, pumping our bodies full of vitamins and smoothies, botox and silicon, airbrushing the evidence of our aging away — we’re going to die.
Sorry.
Back when I sought solace on menopause boards, it was life-altering to see the many ways that women experience peri/meno. Which, again, ugh — is “peri/meno” really the best way we can talk about it? Peri, as a prefix, means “around or about.” I find this hysterical. Perimenopause refers to the YEARS leading up to ONE BLOODLESS YEAR that we call menopause. It is, in truth, the long, shambling chapter of a woman’s life that will fall somewhere on the scale from nearly undetectable to barely survivable, with a heaving menu of “symptoms” that may rearrange us like an Etch-a-Sketch. And medicine waves us off FOR YEARS with “around and about?”
Around and about my ass.
After the decade-long, terrifying churn of my “change” (*vomit emoji*), I was deposited bottom-up on the beach of life, bedraggled and blinking in the sun.
It was extreme! I was told it was normal! Why aren’t we all talking about it and finding ways to make it better!
I know I’m a bit tetchy about the language, but “perimenopause” doesn’t say a thing about my midlife hellscape, and my barely navigable daily reality was not a list of “symptoms.” IT WAS MY STORY. I’m not alone. Millions of women face this chapter of life and we need ways to comfortably and confidently manage it, regardless of its shape. And we need language to fit it.
Sandra Tsing Loh gets close to describing what I went through in her brilliant essay, “The Bitch is Back”:
During menopause, a woman can feel like the only way she can continue to exist for 10 more seconds inside her crawling, burning skin is to walk screaming into the sea — grandly, epically, and terrifyingly, like a 15-foot-tall Greek tragic figure wearing a giant, pop-eyed wooden mask. Or she may remain in the kitchen and begin hurling objects at her family: telephones, coffee cups, plates. Or, as my mother did in the 1970s, she may just eerily disappear into her bedroom, like a tide washing out — curtains drawn, door locked, dead to the world, for days, weeks, months (some moms went silent for years). Oh, for a tribal cauldron to dive into, a harvest moon to howl at, or even an online service that provides — here’s an idea! — demon gypsy lovers.
I felt, often, vast and terrifying and would have marched into the sea like a tragic goddess afire if the sea had been nearby. I was rageful, but also terrified, certain of my imminent death or incarceration. All of those “symptoms” were in my bag of tricks and some of them are still here, in the relative calm after. I am better now, but I remember her. The pop-eyed mask is in my closet, she lives here and is part of my reality. She’s waiting for a new way to tell her story, with language that honors the experience. The story of a woman in the long, rough middle of a good enough life. We need a new name for a season characterized not by “symptoms,” but by an amorphous rearrangement of the self. A woman’s rational reaction to a mad world. Let’s build systems — rituals, language, demon gypsy lovers, whatever it takes — to support that.
Things to share:
My favorite newsletter these days is Anna Sproul-Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark. She’s a literary agent, ostensibly writing for writers and people interested in publishing, but her posts are so good for every single human. She’s a funny, smart polymath dishing advice and insight about, basically, How to be a Person. She is my therapist now (she doesn’t know this and may not like it).
Hang with me here — this is just surf and foghorns. Meditative and mournful, it’s the perfect backdrop to writing about a march into the sea. Or anything else, probably.
We’re choking on plastic and this essay illuminates the art, history, and crisis of the thing. Brilliant writing, disturbing subject.
Since we’re already depressed, and a little bit mad, read this, in which a “completely unprecedented” climate event has scientists “flabbergasted.”
Thanks for reading!
Lisa
Thank you for sharing your story, you are not alone!
Great essay! My husband says "you seem less tolerant than you used to" umm yeah. That's an understatement. Because inside I'm a seething wreckage of rage and overwhelm. I already walked into the ocean and now I'm just drowning. I never knew I could breathe underwater.