27/08/2026
I thought perimenopause was taking me away from myself.
I’m beginning to think it was doing the opposite.
Nobody really prepares you for how strange perimenopause can feel.
You expect the obvious things.
Hot flushes.
Periods doing whatever the hell they like.
Maybe some weight gain.
You’ve heard about the sleep.
You know hormones are going to change.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how much I seemed to change.
My tolerance changed.
Things I had happily done for years suddenly irritated me beyond reason.
People I loved could ask me a perfectly innocent question and I’d feel this surge of:
Can everybody PLEASE stop needing something from me?
I could be fine one minute and furious the next.
Then crying.
Then wondering why I was crying.
I couldn’t recover from things the way I used to.
A difficult conversation could stay in my body for days.
Noise felt louder.
People felt needier.
Work felt heavier.
Sleep became unreliable.
Words disappeared halfway through sentences.
And somewhere amongst all of it was this unsettling feeling that I was losing access to the woman I had always been.
So I did what women do.
I tried to get her back.
I wanted my energy back.
My patience back.
My motivation back.
My ability to handle everything back.
I wanted to feel like myself again.
Except there was one question I hadn't thought to ask:
What if the woman I was trying so desperately to get back to was already exhausted?
Because she was.
She was incredibly capable.
She could carry a ridiculous amount.
She remembered everything.
Managed everything.
Anticipated what everyone needed.
She could push through exhaustion and call it a busy week.
She could swallow irritation and call it patience.
She could say yes when she meant no and barely even notice she'd done it.
She could take care of everyone else and convince herself she didn't need much.
And for years, her body somehow helped her pull it off.
Then came perimenopause.
And the rules changed.
I started learning about what actually happens during this transition.
Oestrogen and progesterone aren't only involved in reproduction.
They interact with systems involved in sleep, mood, cognition and our response to stress.
And during perimenopause, they don't simply glide gently downwards.
They can fluctuate.
Sometimes dramatically.
Which means a woman who has spent decades carrying an enormous physical and emotional load can suddenly discover that the way she has always operated doesn't work anymore.
I think of it like losing your shock absorbers.
The road didn't necessarily become rough overnight.
You can suddenly feel every bump.
And THAT made sense to me.
Maybe perimenopause wasn't creating an entirely different woman.
Maybe it was making it much harder to keep overriding the one who was already there.
The resentment I'd swallowed.
The exhaustion I'd normalised.
The boundaries I'd avoided.
The relationships I'd been managing.
The amount of responsibility I'd quietly accumulated.
The pressure I'd put on myself to be capable, useful, accommodating and okay.
Suddenly my body wasn't cooperating with the arrangement.
And I kept calling that a symptom.
What if some of it was information?
That question changed the way I saw perimenopause.
Because there are physical symptoms that deserve proper medical care.
There are hormonal changes that matter.
There are treatments that can make an enormous difference for women.
And alongside all of that, there can be something else happening.
A woman is changing.
Her body is changing.
Her nervous system is changing.
Her capacity is changing.
Her tolerance for abandoning herself may be changing too.
And perhaps we shouldn't be in such a hurry to silence every part of that.
Because think about what happens around this age.
The woman who spent twenty years keeping the peace suddenly doesn't want to keep it anymore.
The woman who did everything for everyone starts saying:
"You can do that yourself."
The woman who tolerated things for years suddenly thinks:
"Actually, this doesn't work for me."
The woman who built her identity around being needed starts wondering:
Who am I when I'm no longer willing to organise my entire life around everybody else?
We call her irritable.
Difficult.
Hormonal.
Having a midlife crisis.
Sometimes she wonders if she's losing her mind.
I wonder if we have misunderstood part of what is happening.
Because perimenopause isn't simply the beginning of the end of your reproductive years.
It is a major biological transition in a woman's life.
And transitions change us.
Adolescence did.
Motherhood did.
Why wouldn't this?
Perhaps the question isn't only:
How do I make these symptoms stop?
Perhaps there's another one sitting underneath it:
Who am I becoming through this?
Because maybe you aren't supposed to emerge from perimenopause exactly as you entered it.
Maybe the woman on the other side has clearer boundaries.
Different priorities.
Less tolerance for relationships that drain her.
More awareness of what her body is telling her.
Less interest in proving how much she can carry.
More willingness to take up space in her own life.
And maybe some of what feels like everything falling apart is actually the point where the old way of being becomes impossible to maintain.
That is the conversation I wanted to have when I created The Becoming Portal.
Not another list of foods to avoid.
Not another morning routine.
Not another woman telling you how to optimise your way through perimenopause.
A deeper understanding of why this transition can feel so profoundly personal.
Why your nervous system suddenly feels louder.
Why the patterns you've carried for decades can become harder to suppress.
Why the people around you may struggle when you begin changing.
Why choosing yourself can feel simultaneously necessary and terrifying.
And what might be waiting underneath all of it.
Because I don't think the only goal of perimenopause should be getting you back to who you were before it started.
I want to know who you're becoming.
The Becoming Portal is an invitation to find out.
Perimenopause as a portal, not a problem.
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