When I woke up

 Then…I woke up.

Turns out what I thought was a journal fail on my part was actually a hormone thing. Guys, this may be TMI, just warning you now.

Since 2020, I have been in a kind of funk. Not really depression, not anxiety, but a low level funk. Like being a hole and forgetting what the light feels like on your face. It happened gradually, I sank down into figurative quicksand and didn’t notice it. As I sank slowly and subtly, the changes were not obvious and it did not occur to me something was wrong.

I looked through my 2022 and 2023 journals with page after page of nothing and felt the loss of memory, but I didn’t really care much. It felt like too much work to pull out my books and play. I was losing something. In health care, we ask patients some screening questions for depression. One of these questions is … have you lost interest in things you once enjoyed. I definitely had.

The thing is, I went through a depression after my divorce 14 years ago. This didn’t feel like that.

(Here comes the TMI) I am a little over 50 years old and a woman. My periods have been erratic, painful, and have lasted from 4 days to 63 days (yes, you can feel bad for me, it sucked a lot) since 2019. I am in peri-menopause. This is the name for the transition between fertility and end of fertility for women. The time of transition. I hate change of most kinds. Working on that… a lot, but still stuck in the change averse place for now. For me, transitions suck. Plain and simple. I’m not alone, but I can only tell my story for now. 

Fortunately, there is Instagram and there are books and colleagues in the medical community who are working hard to educate and support us…through the change. I found some great resources and as I read and explored, the lightbulb went off in my head. I am in perimenopause, my hormones are all over the place. Could this be the reason for my funk?

Short answer: yes. I saw my primary care provider and requested hormones. I placed my first estrogen patch (at the tiniest dose possible) at 6 pm. By 8 pm, I woke up. 

More to come…

Books:

Estrogen Matters by Tavris and Bluming

The Menopause Manifesto by Gunter

IG 

Dr Mary Haver @drmaryclaire

Dr. Heather Hirsch @heatherhirschmd

Journaling fail

The pandemic changed a lot of things including how I use my journals. I have been journaling smaller since the COVID-19 pandemic.

By smaller, I mean the size of my journals, moving down to an A6 size or Weeks (wallet size similar to a traveler’s notebook size). And also the amount and depth of thought I record.

It’s not that I need less processing. It couldn’t be with all the stressors. As a mother worried about my adult son, a daughter worried about my older parents, a wife, a sister and, not least of all, a Nurse Practitioner. I had around 800 patients to be concerned about and it definitely added a lot of stress, and a great deal of crushing sadness when I lost so many of them. All of these roles came with concern for the health of those in my world, and the overwhelming lack of control that came with so many being sick and having no way to help.

I found myself focusing more on spiritual and emotional peace and much of it was so high stress that I did not find it “jounal-able.” During the three years of the high anxiety I felt, processing on paper was almost more than I could take, causing me to step back from as much paper journaling and holding more of it in my physical body. Ever since this change in journaling, I have gained 20 pounds, not recognizing this was a problem until this moment.

This is a pretty vulnerable place to be living. I would like the next step to be to get back to the paper processing and sharing what happens when I do it and maybe what works for me. 

If you have gone through something similar, please share what worked for you!