Right now, I’m terrified of my own body.
I don’t know when it’s going to hurt, when I’m going to boil inside my own skin, or freeze. My mood swings with savage intensity the likes of which I haven’t felt since adolescence.
My body is part of me, yet I feel like it’s fighting me.
In a way, my body has always fought me. I grew up with balance problems, making climbing over rocks, hillsides, or even jungle gyms terrifying. Directions, obvious to most people, are often enigmatic to me, seeing as I lack anything like a sense of direction.
Everything feels worse, since perimenopause started. Sometimes, I struggle to be civil, finding it impossible to be cheerful.
It’s a struggle to write far too often. Too often, I have to push myself.
I have a fertile source of inspiration, if I can force myself to seize it, try to express it, rather than curling up in a ball and hiding.
It’s humiliating. It’s personal. It’s reality. Too often I don’t want to talk about it, let alone write about it, yet I always feel better, when I do write about it.
I’m reading a book where the authors writes about perimenopause. What a relief to read about what I’m going through. How much less alone I feel, reading about the author’s experiences, and other people’s experiences (some of them nonbinary), who’ve gone through similar circimstances, or circumstances which amplify health issues they’ve wrestled with all their lives.
Perimenopause isn’t fun and it isn’t pretty, but I’m not alone in this. I feel less alone, because other writers were brave enough to write about it.
This is something to think about, when I’m frightened of my body.