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
