The Symptoms Nobody Warned Me About

Something strange is happening to your body, and you cannot explain it. Your doctor cannot explain it. Google is not helping. So I need you to stay with me for a minute and let me explain.

Around 43, I developed this maddening inner-ear itch I could not reach no matter what I tried. I went to the doctor, convinced something had to be wrong. They found nothing. No infection. No irritation. No explanation. Then one day, just as mysteriously as it arrived, it disappeared. I filed it away as one of those weird body things and kept moving.

Then came the exhaustion

Not the kind a good night’s sleep fixes. The bone-deep, nothing-is-helping kind. The kind where answering emails feels like cardio. Around the same time, the brain fog rolled in. I started losing words mid-sentence. Words just evaporated. I would walk into a room and forget why I was there. Mid-thought, gone. I remember laughing it off at first, but deep down, it was unsettling.

Then my knees started hurting

Then my hips. Then my back. Everything ached in a way that felt deeply unfair. My mother used to say, “Keep livin’.” I was starting to understand what she meant.

Then came eczema on my face, something I had never experienced in my life. At this point, I genuinely thought I was just getting old and falling apart. Symptom after symptom kept showing up, like a CVS receipt that just kept printing.

Then, at 46, my period lasted nine days

That was strange, but probably just a fluke. Twenty-three days later, it came back and lasted seven days. Twenty-five days after that, eight days. There was no more explaining it away. This was perimenopause. But even then, I thought, it’s fine. You can push through. This is annoying, but don’t be dramatic.

And then the symptoms stopped being subtle

What I assumed was a strength-training injury turned out to be frozen shoulder. I would work out and suddenly feel dizzy for no reason. Then my heart started doing something I had no language for. A vibrating, echoing flutter that radiated through my entire body. Random. Unprovoked. Deeply rude.

I also noticed I had absolutely zero interest in sex. Not a flicker. Nine months went by, and I genuinely did not think about it or care. Then I started feeling flat. Uninspired. Not even sad, just blah.

I had lost both of my parents, so naturally I assumed it was delayed grief finally catching up to me. Or burnout. Or depression. Or maybe I was just over everything. I started questioning my business, my goals, and my motivation. I was tired of building something where every dollar depends on someone buying what you are selling, whether it is your products, your skills, or yourself. I felt emotionally disconnected from my life.

Then, in a therapy session, mid-explanation, my therapist paused and said, “This is perimenopause. It is time to see a doctor.”

My flabber was ghasted.

The soft launch

Perimenopause is the “soft launch” of menopause where your body starts remixing your entire operating system and dares you to figure it out in real time. It’s the transitional phase before menopause (12 consecutive months without a period), when your hormones start fluctuating.

It had all happened so fast and snowballed so quietly that I had not seen it coming through the brain fog. And honestly, how were an itchy ear, a frozen shoulder, a fluttering heart, and not caring about sex all connected? They seemed completely unrelated.

Except many of them may have been connected.

The estrogen key

It turns out estrogen receptors exist throughout the entire body. They are in the brain, the bones, the skin, and the heart. So when estrogen starts fluctuating during perimenopause, your entire body can start acting like a chaotic group chat where nobody knows who sent the original message.

And because no one tells women this, we think we are falling apart. We think we are aging. We think we are stressed. We think we are depressed. We think we are dying.

We are not. We are in perimenopause.

Here is what perimenopause looked like in my body:

• Brain: brain fog, losing words, irritability, low mood, waking at 2 a.m., emotional flatness, and low libido.
• Bones and joints: hip pain, knee pain, back pain, frozen shoulder, dizziness, and tingling in my legs.
• Skin: an inner-ear itch that would not quit, eczema on my face, dry skin, and heightened sensitivities.
• Heart: random fluttering, vibrating palpitations that had no business showing up uninvited.

If any of this sounds familiar, write it down. Every single symptom, even the ones that seem too random or too minor to mention. Take that list to your doctor. You are not imagining things. You are not being dramatic. You are not just getting old.

As Dr. Mary Claire Haver so brilliantly explains, you are in the “zone of chaos.” That chaos has a proper name: Perimenopause.