Let me just say it plainly because no one else seems to want to.
Something happened to my body in my late forties and it was not gradual and it was not gentle and it was not the dignified transition that the one pamphlet in the waiting room made it sound like, the pamphlet with the silver-haired woman in a linen shirt looking serenely out at a garden as though what was happening inside her was a seasonal adjustment rather than a full-scale reorganization of everything she had taken for granted about her own nervous system.
I woke up one night in January convinced the house was on fire.
It was not on fire. I was on fire. There is a difference but at two in the morning it is not as clear a difference as you would hope. I stood at the open window in my February garden in my t-shirt at two a.m. explaining to no one that I was fine, I was just warm, this was a normal thing that happened to women and I had known it was coming and I was prepared. I was not prepared. Nothing prepares you for the specific quality of your own body becoming a weather system you did not consent to inhabit.
And then there was the rest of it.
The way the anxiety arrived differently, not the familiar anxiety with its known shape and its known triggers but a free-floating version, untethered, a low hum of alarm with no source address, which I had to learn to recognize as biochemical rather than informational, had to learn to say to myself: this is your body in transition, not your life in crisis, they are different things and you are allowed to know the difference. The sleep. The fog on certain mornings where the thinking that had always been easy required effort, where I would reach for a word and the word would be elsewhere, unavailable, and I would stand in the kitchen holding the fact of the word’s absence and think: is this who I am now.
It was not who I am now.
It was a passage. Uncomfortable, lengthy, poorly documented in the literature available to women who are not interested in suffering quietly and calling it natural. I came through it. I want to say that to whoever is in the middle of it right now, awake at two in the morning at the open window, wondering if this is the new permanent. It is not the new permanent. It is the passage. You will come through it. You are not losing yourself. You are, improbably, becoming more yourself. The woman on the other side of it is harder to rattle. She has been through the fire, literally, and she is still here, and she knows things the silver-haired woman in the linen shirt in that waiting room pamphlet did not tell you.
She is not afraid of her own heat anymore.
