Struggling with Body Trust in Perimenopause
If your relationship with your body has been anything like mine, you spent most of your teens and twenties fighting it; wishing it were different. Then your thirties was a time of reconciliation and learning to work as a team. And then comes the forties, with its dreaded perimenopause. And it's almost like you’re back to square one. Here’s the ways in which I am finding I need to work extra hard to cultivate trust and confidence in my body.
All the patterns of predictable body experience have gone out the window.
As I talk about in my book, You’re Meant to Move, I benefited greatly from spending a lot of time getting to know my body, learning how different kinds of movement felt in different situations, and becoming familiar with (and learning to accommodate) the daily patterns of physical experience. There was a natural rhythm to things like pain, stress and recovery that became predictable. I could anticipate my needs and proactively set myself up for feeling my best. I started to feel like I had a handle on things.
And then, as I entered my 40s, some seriously weird shit started happening: waking up in the middle of the night mid-panic attack, suddenly flushing bright red from neck to ears without warning, and weird shifts in my blood pressure that left me dizzy at the worst times. Even my body odour changed. (Tell me it’s not just me!) It was as if I had suddenly woken up in someone else’s body. Surely this can’t be mine! I thought we were friends; we were finally on good terms! But I am having to start all over again trying to figure out how to anticipate, and work around, my physical experience.
Pressure to fit a physical mould has ramped back up, both internally and externally.
If you’ve been hanging around this community for a while, you know that I have been on a very long journey of trying to dismantle a transactional, punitive relationship with food and exercise. The majority of the people I work with have been on similar journeys, and I know that many of you can relate to the stewardship that is required in rewiring this distorted and painful self-perception. Wishing my body was smaller started at such a young age, I cannot remember living without that feeling. But, with a lot of reading and a lot of help from trained intuitive eating and anti-diet specialists (reach out for referrals), I finally, in my late 30s, started to unravel the straightjacket that is diet culture-induced self-loathing.
But with the start of perimenopause, my body made a major shift. And another, and another. I was constantly buying new clothes because I couldn’t figure out what size I was. Despite my best efforts, I have fallen back into some very dark moments of contemplating a return to restrictive dieting. And it’s as if social media could sense what was happening to me. The advertising and suggested profiles sent my way are constantly pushing this narrative that as a 40-something woman with a body doing all kinds of weird shit, true joy lies behind attaining a slim figure and flat stomach. Vomit. Whenever I google, “is <weird symptom> perimenopause” I also end up being sent to some page with supplements and detoxes for sale that emphasise fat loss. When all I really want is to just feel comfortable inside this skin.
I am resenting the experience of being a woman.
I know. I cringe just writing that subheading. But since we are here and being honest, I have to come clean on this one. I have generally always loved being a woman. I am happy to have empathy, intuition, and community-building skills that arise in that uniquely feminine way that I think makes us great leaders, organisers and service-minded team members. In my twenties and thirties I spent a great deal of time sharing laughs with my friends over the dishevelled men I dated who seemed barely holding it together in adulthood. I felt superior in a way, and fortunate. I couldn’t help but appreciate the tremendous strength women have in bearing the emotional burdens of themselves and their families while also physically having the capacity to bring children into the world. Life! I mean is there anything better?!
Enter perimenopause. And suddenly the men with their salt-and-pepper hair and dad bods and infuriatingly reliable sex drives who experience middle age as nothing other than an extension of young adulthood…it. Brings. On. the. Rage. Looking over the fence I am filled with envy as I sweat through every shirt I own and want to nap three times a day and forget important words I was about to say mid-sentence. Being a woman lately feels like the short end of the stick. It’s got me watching those nature documentaries of birds that cement themselves inside of a tree trunk while waiting for eggs to hatch or monkeys that have to carry their babies through lands blanched by drought just minutes after giving birth in order to keep up with the troop…..and thinking that all of nature is just oriented around life being harder for the females. It’s a downer.
Don’t get me wrong, these emotional uprisings are intermittent. But, taken together they introduce a whole new wave of disconnection from my body as I feel like I am either unfamiliar with it or angry with it at any given time. This feels in so many ways like regression. Just like a teenager, I live with a sense of awkward self-consciousness that thwarts my own intuition and leaves me feeling confused most of the time. I had anticipated that this would be a season of coming into my own; of becoming one of those earth mother types who makes a whole range of homemade crafts and can predict the future. I was hoping for a rekindling of my sensuality and a confidence that only comes from decades of knowing my body and myself. Is that part coming later maybe? Is that just some romanticised version of ageing that I picked up from movies? Or is there really a version of me just waiting to be realised that encapsulates calm, strong and wise? (As opposed to frantic, tired and angry, who I am right now.)
What I would like to believe is that I will someday look back and see that having to start a new chapter, with all its uncertainties, was in fact a gift. A time of growth. I want that for myself, and I hope for it for you, too, if you are in this tumultuous stage with me as well. I feel like I am in a dense fog and waiting for it to be lifted. And in the meantime, I am feeling around in the dark. I share all of this in the hopes that someone out there who sees themselves in these sentiments can feel less alone; can know that the weird mind f*ck that is perimenopause is happening to so many of us. We just need to find each other and find joy in the camaraderie around the change.
Want to talk about perimenopause, or anything else that’s affecting your relationship with movement? Schedule a free call.
