Perimenopause stole my brain and nobody warned me it would

One day I was a person who knew words. The next day I was standing in the kitchen holding a spatula, staring at the refrigerator, completely unable to remember why I walked in there or what a refrigerator was for.

Okay, slight exaggeration. But only slight.

Nobody told me this was coming. Not my doctor, not my mother, not the entire internet that has an opinion about everything. The bloggers who should have been talking about this — we were all in our late 30s blogging about our toddlers. Now we’re in our 40s and we need to talk about what’s actually happening to our bodies right now. So here we are.

What even is perimenopause, and why haven’t we been screaming about it?

Perimenopause is the years — sometimes up to a decade — before your period actually stops. Your estrogen is doing whatever it wants. Your progesterone is declining. Your body is in full renovation mode and did not consult you before pulling permits.

According to research published by the Menopause Society, perimenopause typically starts in a woman’s mid-to-late 40s but can begin as early as the late 30s. The average duration is four years. Some women get a full decade of it. Cool, cool.

And yet — somehow — this is not a thing we talk about at dinner. We’ll talk about literally anything else.

Why does perimenopause brain fog feel like losing your personality?

Brain fog is the symptom nobody adequately described to me. It’s not just forgetfulness. It’s reaching for a word you’ve used ten thousand times and finding nothing there. It’s starting a sentence and genuinely losing the thread mid-sentence, out loud, in front of people.

It’s wondering if you’re getting dumber or just getting older — and then googling it at 1am and finding out it’s actually hormonal and documented and has a name.

That part was both comforting and infuriating. Comforting because: not broken. Infuriating because: why did I have to find this out from a Reddit thread at 1am?

Is it just brain fog, or does perimenopause actually change your sleep?

Oh, it absolutely wrecks your sleep. Night sweats. Waking up at 3am with your heart going fast for no reason. Lying there completely awake, thinking extremely coherent thoughts about everything you’ve ever done wrong, until your alarm goes off and you have to go be a functional person.

The fun thing is that sleep deprivation makes the brain fog worse. Which makes the anxiety worse. Which disrupts the sleep. It’s a little carousel of misery and the ticket is just existing in a female body in your 40s.

But what do I know?

Why are doctors so weirdly unhelpful about this?

I’m going to say something that might be controversial and I stand by it: the medical system is genuinely bad at perimenopause. Not every doctor, not every experience — but broadly, as a system, we are failing women at this specific transition.

Women get their symptoms dismissed as anxiety. They get told to try yoga. They get a pamphlet. They get a referral to someone else. They get told their labs look normal even when they feel completely unrecognizable to themselves.

Research from the Journal of Women’s Health has found that menopause-related symptoms are significantly underreported and undertreated, in part because women have been socialized to just push through. We push through. We shouldn’t have to.

The strongest counterargument I’ve heard is that HRT has had a complicated history and doctors are being appropriately cautious. I get that. But there’s a massive gap between “approach HRT carefully” and “send her home with a shrug.”

What actually helps — and what’s just noise?

Honest answer, because I’m not going to waste your time: some things genuinely help and some things are just the wellness industry smelling blood in the water.

What has actual signal behind it — per the doctors worth listening to — is things like strength training (legitimately changes the hormonal picture), sleep hygiene that you actually commit to, and having an honest conversation with a doctor who specializes in menopause, not just your regular GP who sees you for ten minutes a year.

What is mostly noise: supplements with zero clinical backing, any product with the word “balance” in the name that costs $89 a bottle, and the general vibe that if you just meditate harder you’ll stop sweating through your sheets.

I’m not telling you what to do. I’m just saying: find the real information. It exists. You have to dig for it, which is insane, but it’s there.

Why aren’t more bloggers talking about this?

This is the thing that gets me. The women who built the internet — who were writing about their lives in the early 2000s, who pioneered personal blogging, who documented pregnancy and toddler years and middle school chaos — we all just hit our 40s at the same time. We are the exact right people to be talking about perimenopause right now.

And we’re not. Or we weren’t. I’ve been writing on this blog since 2006 and I haven’t talked about this nearly enough, which is its own kind of failure I’m reckoning with.

The silence isn’t because there’s nothing to say. It’s because this is the thing that finally makes us feel old, and we’ve been fighting that our whole careers. Talking about perimenopause feels like admitting something.

But you know what I think? Not talking about it is way worse. The women coming up behind us deserve better than to find out about brain fog from a 1am Reddit spiral.

What do you actually want to know that nobody’s telling you?

This is where I want to hear from you — genuinely. Because I’ve been collecting questions from women in my DMs for months and some of them are heartbreaking in the best way. Women who thought they were developing anxiety disorders. Women who gained weight doing everything right and couldn’t figure out why. Women who felt like strangers in their own heads.

They all had the same follow-up: “is this normal?”

Yes. Wildly, frustratingly, we-should-be-shouting-about-this yes.

I’m going to keep writing about this — probably in a whole series here on the blog. Not because I have all the answers. I very much do not. But because if I can save one woman from a 1am Google spiral feeling like she’s alone in this, then the post did its job.

Perimenopause is not a punchline. It’s not a whisper. It’s something that happens to half the population and we have collectively decided to underfund the research, underequip the doctors, and undertrain everyone around women to recognize it.

That’s a problem. And the fix starts with being annoyingly, loudly, unapologetically loud about it.

So. Here I am. Being loud. You’re welcome to be loud with me.

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