Perimenopause: A Darker Puberty

Early on in this perimenopause journey there was a very pivotal moment where it all felt quite like emotional deja vu. I thought to myself, “Why does this feel so familiar, but worse?” Then, the “a-ha,” moment presented itself. This is puberty 2.0...dark puberty.

Puberty but with kids, bills and schedules that don’t care one bit about what hormonal obstacle course you’re on each day. The part that wasn’t connecting for me at first was that these are in fact the same puberty hormones, only now they’re far more misunderstood, underrepresented, unpredictable and unexpected.

Hormones and emotions

During puberty, your body was introducing estrogen and progesterone. As estrogen increased, progesterone was attempting to balance it all out and keep you mostly level. In the meantime, the chemicals within your brain, serotonin and dopamine, were just sort of ebbing and flowing depending on what your hormones were doing that day.
This is why teenagers could cry over the smallest things and be just fine shortly thereafter.

So, here we are again, ladies! But this time, our estrogen isn’t rising at a steady pace, it’s all over the place. One day it’s high, the next it’s dropping. Progesterone seemingly has left us, unbalanced. So now we’ve got our fluctuating estrogen with far less back up. This means that our emotions don’t just knock politely anymore, they full on donkey kick the damn door down.

The moody ups and downs

You aren’t imagining it when one day you’re feeling completely together and concerningly fractured the next. This isn’t a personality issue, or a flaw. This is chemistry. Unfortunately, women are biologically assigned this suffering. It’s best to understand the chemistry at play so that we can move through this with the tools we need.

At least when we were younger people generally acknowledged puberty, anticipated it for us, with us. There were warnings, books and a general understanding that we’d go through some emotional shifts.

Our bodies stop feeling familiar

We are expected to just keep showing up, keep parenting, keep holding it together, and keep working no matter what is happening with our perimenopausal journeys! Even though our brains are overthinking everything while our bodies are so tired and sleep doesn’t even remedy that exhaustion. Just like puberty, we begin to question ourselves, and trust ourselves less, feeling like a foreigner within our own minds and bodies.

We begin that loop of trying to figure out why we are so sensitive, why do things bother us a disproportionate amount than before and the hardest part of the questioning is wondering who we have become and how to explain this to people we love that don’t have any knowledge of it. These shifts are so unpleasant.

We have survived a version of this before

We just didn’t have this much responsibility stacked on top of it. So, if you’re feeling like you’re reacting and thinking differently while having far less patience than before, this isn’t you breaking, this isn’t you falling apart, this is just another hormonal system shift within us. Only this time, you’re not becoming a young lady, you’re becoming a woman who finally is seeing things for exactly what they are, and this woman doesn’t have the hormones to pretend otherwise.

I am still learning to harness these feelings so that I can best navigate the hardest parts of this experience. So, I am not speaking from a place of KNOWING, but from walking through this alongside many others. We’ll figure this out together.