Perimenopause: The Unexpected Journey from People-Pleasing to Purpose

A younger colleague mentions feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. Perimenopause. A friend talks about feeling unexpectedly emotional. Perimenopause. Someone else describes brain fog, anxiety, disrupted sleep or a sudden inability to tolerate behaviour they have accepted for years. Perimenopause. Perimenopause had become the lens through which I was interpreting so much of what women around me were experiencing, largely because nobody had prepared me for it. Nobody had explained how profoundly it could affect your body, your mind, your relationships, your work or your sense of self. And perhaps that is why I find myself talking about it so often now. I don’t particularly enjoy discussing hormones, or reminding people that I’m “past my prime” but I wish somebody had spoken openly with me. So now, I see it as my older sister’s duty to my younger counterparts.

I grew up surrounded by extraordinary women. Women who had lived through revolutions, migration, war, economic uncertainty, motherhood, grief and reinvention. Yet despite being surrounded by these remarkable role models, nobody ever sat me down and explained what would happen in my forties. There were conversations about periods, conversations about pregnancy, conversations about childbirth and raising children. There were endless warnings about traditional family values, not following my passion (art) and instead pursuing a stable career (law) that would provide financial security. 

As children of immigrants, we didn’t have the luxury of pursuing our passions. We didn’t have wealthy parents to sustain us while we figured things out. There was no safety net beyond our own ability to earn a living. But perimenopause seemed to exist in an intentionally unexplained silence. Many of the women who came before us were navigating a world that attached enormous value to youth and very little value to ageing. An older woman was often viewed as having somehow lost her relevance; less attractive, less desirable and less worthy of attention than her younger counterparts. 

The words menopause and perimenopause are still  accompanied by assumptions about decline and invisibility.

While we like to think society has moved on, I am not entirely convinced it has.  The words menopause and perimenopause are still  accompanied by assumptions about decline and invisibility.  Male friends respond confidently  that I am “far too young” for these to concern me .  On the surface it sounds flattering, but what sits underneath is  a struggle to reconcile the idea that a woman they consider attractive and vibrant  could also be perimenopausal. It is as though perimenopause belongs to a category of women who are expected to fade into the background just as they enter one of the most significant transitions of their lives.

That reaction, reflective of our cultural discomfort with  ageing, left me thinking about ageing as something that is happening uniquely to me, forgetting that it is an experience that is shared by generations of women before me. 

Perimenopause is a globally recognised biological transition experienced by millions of women. Yet many women are expected to endure these changes quietly, carry on and avoid drawing attention to anything that might be interpreted as weakness or decline. We  get  on with it because that is what women do. We  adapt, endure and survive. But because we do it quietly, many of us arrive at this stage of life completely unprepared for what it actually entails.

What nobody told me is that perimenopause is more than  a collection of physical symptoms. Of course, the disrupted sleep, the changing cycles, the weight that suddenly seems to settle in places it has never settled before, and the brain fog that has you walking into a room only to stand there wondering why you’re in it. But those things, frustrating as they can be, have not been  as hard as the shift in how I see myself, other people and the relationships I have spent decades nurturing.

A  growing awareness that my time, energy and attention are finite resources. For most of my life, I gave those things away quite freely. To work. To friendships. To my family. To causes I believed in. To people who needed support. What perimenopause has  done is force me to examine those investments more closely. Who am I giving my energy to? Is it reciprocated? Does this still serve me? Do these responsibilities genuinely belong to me, or have I simply carried them for so long that I stopped questioning their weight?

The most confronting question of all is whether I would continue doing these things if nobody expected me to.

The answers have not always been comfortable.

One of the most unexpected consequences of perimenopause has been the retirement of my bullshit filter.

One of the most unexpected consequences of perimenopause has been the retirement of my bullshit filter.  Complete retirement. The filter simply died after 47 years of loyal service and, despite repeated attempts at resuscitation, has shown no signs of recovery.

For years, I had an extraordinary ability to explain away other people’s behaviour. I could understand almost anything if I looked at it long enough. I could extend grace, patience and understanding in quantities that would surprise even me. I could convince myself that if I communicated more clearly, worked harder or showed a little more empathy, things would improve. I was forever searching for the silver lining, forever trying to understand where somebody was coming from, forever willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Somewhere along the line, I stopped doing the emotional admin for everybody else. I stopped translating behaviour into a language I could live with.I stopped making excuses. The tolerance I once had for one-sided relationships, poor behaviour, emotional labour and endless accommodation has diminished significantly. In its place is a clarity that feels both liberating and unsettling. Liberating because it allows you to see situations for what they are. Unsettling because it forces you to acknowledge things that may have been true for years. Friendships sustained largely by your effort. Relationships built on uneven foundations. Professional environments that benefit from your willingness to carry more than your fair share. Dynamics that survived because you were endlessly prepared to absorb the imbalance.

I don’t say any of this from a place of resentment. Quite the opposite. The overriding feeling has been one of gratitude because, much like liberation itself, perimenopause has arrived carrying uncertainty alongside freedom. The two have proved far less contradictory than I once imagined.

It is the freedom of no longer feeling responsible for everyone else’s comfort or mistaking self-abandonment for kindness. Perimenopause has prompted me to question beliefs I carried for years. Boundaries, I have realised, are not an act of aggression but of self-respect. Whether others welcome them is another matter entirely.

So many women are raised to be useful. To be polite. To be accommodating. To anticipate needs before they are expressed. To smooth over tension. To carry emotional burdens that do not belong to them. To make themselves smaller, quieter or more agreeable in service of keeping the peace. We become so proficient at looking after everyone else that we barely notice how little attention we are paying to ourselves.

Perimenopause has a remarkable way of interrupting that pattern. It asks questions that are difficult to ignore. Questions about reciprocity. Questions about fairness. Questions about self-worth. Questions about whether the life you have built still reflects the woman you have become.

As someone who spends much of her professional life thinking about leadership, power and influence, I cannot help but see parallels. Women are often taught that success lies in our ability to manage the comfort of others. We learn diplomacy. We learn emotional intelligence. We learn how to influence without appearing threatening and how to lead without being labelled difficult. We learn how to soften our opinions, moderate our ambitions and package our authority in ways that make it easier for others to accept. These are valuable skills, but they can also be exhausting.

What perimenopause has given me is not less ambition, but a different relationship with approval.

What perimenopause has given me is not less ambition, but a different relationship with approval. It has become harder to spend energy managing how I am perceived and easier to ask whether I am acting in alignment with my values. That shift has changed the way I think about leadership. Influence no longer feels like persuading everyone to be comfortable with my decisions. It feels more like having the conviction to make them, even when they are uncomfortable. I care less about being liked and more about being honest, less about proving my worth and more about recognising it, and less about performing a version of myself that others find easy to accept than living in one that feels true.

That shift has felt surprisingly powerful and occasionally terrifying.

I often wonder how different my experience might have been had more women spoken openly about this stage of life. 

But I also understand why those conversations didn’t happen. Many women carried shame that was never theirs to carry. Many were navigating workplaces where ageing felt like a liability. Many were operating in cultures that equated youth with value and saw little worth in acknowledging what came after. Many were simply too busy surviving to document the experience for the generations that followed.

I don’t judge their silence. If anything, I understand it. But understanding their silence has not lessened my desire to break it. It has strengthened it. Not because I have all the answers, and certainly not because every woman’s experience will look like mine. But because silence serves nobody. If sharing these reflections helps another woman feel less confused, less alone or less inclined to believe that she is somehow becoming difficult, irrational or unreasonable, then it is worth it.

The truth is that perimenopause is often framed as a story of loss. Loss of youth, loss of fertility, loss of certainty and loss of the body you once knew. We are told, both explicitly and implicitly, that this stage of life is defined by things being taken away from us. But that framing has never felt entirely true to me because it focuses so heavily on what is leaving that it ignores everything that is arriving in its place.

What I have experienced is not simply loss. It is discernment and clarity and most profoundly, the gradual shedding of obligations that I should never have been carrying. It is a deeper understanding of my own value, time, and sense of purpose. It is the growing confidence that comes from knowing who you are and no longer feeling compelled to apologise for it.

Most importantly, it is the realisation that becoming older does not mean becoming less as society so often tells us.

If anything, it has brought me closer to myself than I have been in years.