24 Symptoms - Not one of them a hot flash. My Perimenopause Wake-Up Call.
It happened on a walk home after the school drop off.
One minute I was rambling into my phone, voice-messaging my friend Amie the way we always do. Long, winding, honest dispatches that run as long as podcast episodes. And the next minute it was like I was an ostrich who had just pulled her head out of the ground and seen daylight for the very first time.
Amie had asked me, in that thoughtful, reflective way she always does, what perimenopause had been like for me, given that I'm a few years older than her and she'd been noticing her own symptoms creeping in. A simple question. A fair one.
And I started my answer the way I genuinely believed it in that moment: "Honestly? I haven't really noticed much."
Then I kept talking.
Well maybe some rage. Irritability. Exhaustion so bone-deep that I couldn’t wait to crawl into bed by 7:30 each night. Sleep that has started to come and go on its own mysterious schedule. Nothing that had ever waved a flag at me and said "hey girl, this is something." These things had just become the texture of my life, the background hum I'd been living with and chalking up to motherhood, to stress, to just being a woman in the world.
I became a mother a decade ago, and when that happened, my world as I knew it crumbled completely. So honestly, was I in perimenopause, or was I just in motherhood? The lines felt too blurred to unpick.
And besides, I hadn't had a single hot flash. And hot flashes were the only symptom anyone had ever actually mentioned to me in relation to menopause in the past 46 years. So in my mind, there was nothing to see here, folks.
But by the time I finished that voice message and walked the rest of the way home, something had shifted. The floodgates had opened mid-ramble and all of these quiet, ignored, normalised little things started rushing in. I couldn't un-see it.
I sat down on my sofa, without crossing my legs because my knee joints are too painful for that now, and I made a list.
24 symptoms. Twenty. Four.
Ranging from extreme exhaustion and low mood, to white-hot-poker rage at my husband for the crime of simply existing in my vicinity, to an itchy scalp, to what I can only describe as tissue-paper-thin skin as my new neck, to sprouting more witchy hairs on my chin than I ever thought biologically possible. Questionable sleep. Joint pain. Strangeness in my cycle. Brain fog that makes me feel like I'm operating through frosted glass.
Not one of them said hot flash.
The one thing I thought I was waiting for, the supposed neon sign of perimenopause, had never been my symptom at all. And so I had been completely unaware of what was actually happening in my body. I'd been waiting at the wrong bus stop.
Sitting there with my list, something else crept in alongside the shock. Another feeling I wasn't expecting. I'm knocking on this new era of my life. An era that felt like it was forever away. An era that felt oooold. But at least by the time I got to that era, I would have felt accomplished in something. But….
I haven't actually done anything worthwhile yet.
I mean, I have kids, and they are brilliant, and I love them with my whole being. But this moment on the sofa felt like a door closing somewhere, and the panic underneath it wasn't really about perimenopause at all. It was about time. About the version of myself I thought I still had years to become. About the fact that I'd only just got back on my feet after becoming a mother had completely turned my entire identity inside out and then shaken it all about. And now here was the next tectonic shift, already rumbling the floor before I'd finished rebuilding myself.
I mean. I've not even caught my breath yet.
As it happened, I had an EFT session already booked that afternoon with my colleague Zoe. And it was not a moment too soon.
Zoe has been navigating her own perimenopause for several years and came with both wisdom and warmth. We tapped through the immediate spike of irritation I was carrying, the shock of what the morning had cracked open, and she left me with some grounding resources to explore. I finished the day feeling like I'd been through a battle. Amie's simple question had detonated something I absolutely had not been expecting.
EFT has been the most useful tool I've found for calming my nervous system in these moments, for sitting with feelings that are too big and too tangled to logic your way through. For me, it's the front door into processing anything overwhelming. And this? This is overwhelming.
Here's the thing, though.
When I became a new mother, I didn't know how to talk about any of it. I didn't have the tools or the language to name what was happening to me emotionally, physically, spiritually. I watched everyone else seemingly glide through new motherhood with a new pink lip gloss on and a perfect pedicure, looking like they had it handled. So I assumed the problem was me. So I crumbled quietly. In private. Convinced I was doing it wrong.
I am not doing that again.
I am in a completely different place in my life now. Six years of deliberate, sometimes painful, always worthwhile, deep, and then even deeper, work on myself. My skills, my knowledge, my capacity to sit with hard things and translate them into something useful. I have the language now. And I intend to use it.
What I'm learning, and what I want this space to be about, is that we are not a collection of separate problems to be solved one at a time. We are often referred to as a puzzle with pieces. Sometimes those pieces are missing. But that doesn't quite sit true for me.
I think we are more like a spherical web.
Every thread interconnected. Your emotional life is pulling on your physical body. Your physical body whispering to your spiritual self. Your beliefs shaping your biochemistry. Your nervous system holding the memories your mind has tried to move past. All of it, always, talking to each other.
Mind. Body. Spirit. Not three separate categories. One living, breathing, constantly communicating whole.
This matters because when you arrive at something like perimenopause, the conventional path is often a visit to a GP who, through absolutely no fault of their own, has been trained on a system that was not built around women's health. You might walk away with a referral for a thyroid test, or a prescription for antidepressants, and while I'm not dismissing any of that (if something genuinely helps, it genuinely helps), I'm not ready to jump to a blanket solution before I've explored what my whole web actually needs in this moment.
One of the first things I turned to was Davina McCall's documentary on Channel 4, Sex, Myths and the Menopause. If you haven't watched it yet, please stop everything and do that. It cracked open a conversation that has been criminally quiet for far too long. I've also started reading Dr. Mindy Pelz's The Menopause Reset, and the conversation it's opening up about hormones, nutrition, fasting, and how our bodies work as a system is exactly the kind of thinking I want to bring here.
I've been loosely interested in nutrition my whole life, and also, if we're being transparently honest, locked in a long-running situationship with sugar that I've never quite managed to fully resolve. Hi. My name is April. I am a work in progress.
But what I know, from everything I've studied, from Human Design to Gene Keys to epigenetics, from EFT to Joe Dispenza to Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, is that nourishment is never just about food. It is about what you feed every layer of yourself. And this chapter of life is asking me, loudly and clearly, to pay attention to all of it.
So here I am. Pulling my head out of the ground. Still blinking in the light.
I don't have all the answers. I'm not coming to you as an expert in perimenopause. I'm coming as someone who just found out she's probably been in it for a while, who has collected a handful of useful tools in the periphery of her life, and who refuses to go through this quietly. Because these enormous transitions in women's lives are not talked about enough. And just like becoming a new mother, you should not have to suck it up and get on with it alone.
I know that my purpose in this life, in this body, with this particular set of experiences, is to take my own pain and turn it into something that helps other people feel less alone. To translate my shit-sandwich into a story others can relate to and learn from.
Consider this the beginning of that story.
I'll share what I learn as I go. Come with me.
