I'm a raging hagolescent. What about you?

Cultivating an air of 'hagitude' is all well and good, but there's something far less grown-up about my perimenopause

Hi friends,

I hope you’re all doing as well as you can in these times.

New here? I’m absolutely delighted about that. Want the lowdown on what to expect before you read this week’s words? Head to this post:

A question first for the writers… Ever realised you say you write about something (really believe that you do, in fact) but actually you don’t? If you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you might have noticed, too.

I’m talking about perimenopause. It’s in the one-line description of my

Substack

but in honesty, I’ve not written about mine. Not really. Yes, there are the oblique references here and there: a bit on nutrition and exercise in midlife and some questioning of my relationship with alcohol… but really? My lived experience hasn’t yet made its way into a post until now, even though if ever there was a ‘What Now?’ topic, it’s this.

Perimenopause = ‘What. The. Fuck. Now?’

---

I’ve been in early perimenopause since my mid-30s. That’s half a decade. Initially it was a gradual creep: some of the symptoms so nebulous and non-specific I wouldn’t have been able to unpick them from my long-standing mental health challenges. Others, though, were definite red flags. The changes in skin texture and the arrival of stubborn patches of pigmentation. The swiftly-greying hair and never-had-before monthly night sweats. I have an IUD though still experience the physical and emotional impacts of hormonal fluctuations and could see that the pattern I’d been charting was changing.

I came to view all of this with a detached curiosity. It was mostly manageable, especially once I’d declared a truce with my body for the first time in forever having emerged from three years of intensive talking therapy in part to tackle health anxiety.

Except now, we’re warring again.

I want to talk about what it feels like to even begin to align ourselves with this life stage. Whether we’ll ever feel ready for it. What it means when you finally feel at home in your body only for that sense of safety and predictability to have been so fleeting.

I’m not old enough, I’m shouting. Not old enough for this! Not old enough for the brain fog and cluster headaches. For my sleep to be disrupted by sheet-drenching night sweats and/or burning hip pain and/or racing thoughts and/or the need to pee again. Not old enough for recurrent UTIs and the rigmarole of taking (probably inefficacious) cranberry supplements and another course of antibiotics I really don’t want, let alone the horror of the thrush that almost inevitably follows. Not old enough for the passion-crushing fear (and yes, it is fear) that having sex will bring on another bout of one of the other.

I could go on…

Superficially, I’m not old enough for the dark hairs sprouting out of my actual cheeks that – mercifully – my deteriorating eyes fail to spot. My daughters’ though? Their eyesight is razor sharp.

‘Ohmigod, Mum, like, that is so embarrassing. Aaaaand you’d look so much younger if you just dyed your hair dark again. I’m telling you this to help you!’

The elder one can’t help herself. But apparently I can.

A tongue-in-cheek photo sent to a dear pal upon unwrapping my 40th birthday present from her last year… Hags by Victoria Smith

---

At 27, I was the first of my friend group to become pregnant. Looking back, it was often a lonely time because it was a period of life I had entered underprepared. Now I seem to be the only one in my close group aware that I’m deep in perimenopause. I wonder, though, whether they’re just not talking to me about it? Or if they don’t recognise that they’re experiencing symptoms that signal it’s on its way?

Or maybe they’re just ‘normal’, whatever that is?

The average age for entering perimenopause is somewhere north of 40. Menopause itself (that one day event, a year to the day from the start of your final period) still takes place on average at 51 after five or so years in perimenopause. Recent stories on perimenopause in the media, including one I happened upon on Radio 2 (I don’t make a habit of it) between Jeremy Vine and Carol Vorderman, have played into the most common age-and-stage narrative around it. However, survivors of childhood trauma, it’s been studied, are more likely to experience an early perimenopause and there are many other reasons why it might happen to you earlier than you think, including medically-induced menopause brought on by cancer treatment or the need for surgery. Whatever the reason, if you’ve entered into this phase before you’re ‘ready’, maybe you’ll identify with how I’m feeling, and wonder where the voices are echoing your experience.

---

Last weekend, I was at Alnwick Story Fest in Northumberland. On Sunday afternoon, the wonderful

Dr Sharon Blackie

was talking about her book Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life.

Dr Sharon Blackie getting us some Hagitude at Alnwick Story Fest

Initially immersed in the myths and legends, I soon became distracted by the word ‘hagitude’, big and bold on the screen behind her.

Hagitude = Hag Attitude? I wondered.

Yes, it was confirmed later. It came to her in a moment between sleep and waking and she knew instantly this new word would be the title of her next book. Hagitude is, she says, ‘being at ease with the unique power women embody in the second half of their life.’ It is for the ‘woman who wishes to flourish without chasing eternal youth’ to enable a reclamation of ‘the mid years’ which can be seen ‘as an alchemical moment from which to shift into your chosen, authentic and fulfilling future’.

Me in Waterstones the other day

All well and good, Sharon. I support this message. Yet looking around the auditorium, which was mostly filled with women in their 50s and beyond, I saw a handful of women in their late 30s or early 40s. Women who looked like me. One spoke up. She talked about having younger children than I do. Their need for her body, still. The way her peri symptoms were interfering with her ability to do all the mothering. And later, I spoke to someone else who at 40 has been put on HRT (something that I wager would never have happened even a few years ago), but had only just stopped breastfeeding her toddler. It’s not uncommon, you see. This clash of life stages will be happening for many women. We just don’t seem to be talking about it.

And so, though the ‘reclaiming and retelling of the myths and stories’ of powerful women in their second act is so important, and though I may be biologically entering that ‘second act,’ I’m not there yet. I’m all stage-frighty, twitching the heavy velvet curtain before I go on, checking my side profile for jowls and wondering whether my Nike hi-tops look a bit desperate.

Perhaps what I need is to hang out in the equivalent of the rehearsal room a little longer. Make space to explore what early perimenopause looks like for me and other young(er) women. Take time also to acknowledge that a full-scale physical and mental metamorphosis is underway beneath and above the surface, much as in the pre-and post-partum months as described by Lucy Jones in her brilliant book, Matrescence?

photo: Lucy Jones

---

At the end of Sharon’s talk, another new word came to me much as it had to her in that delicious dream state she described.

Hagolescence

It felt right.

I was taken with the idea of reclaiming the much-maligned word ‘hag,’ but like a teenager who’s in rehearsal for being an adult, wondered if I’m in a state of transition rather than fully ‘in’ it. Another '-escence.’ Not adolescence, not matrescence, but… hagolescence, if you will.

I wanted not to forget this important word (my short-term memory another intermittent problem) and so I turned it over and over in my head immersed in its possibilities. As the audience applauded, I turned excitedly towards a new friend, fired up to tell her all about it. A new way to ‘be’ as a prematurely-peri-woman, I said. She humoured me, as new friends do.

But later still, on the long drive north along the east coast road, it wouldn’t leave me. I put on the album I listened to on repeat at aged 12, Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette (I know, I know), and heard the angsty lyrics in a new way, imagining it somehow bookending my fertile years. I reflected also on my recent peri-anger as well as what it’s been like living with a teenage girl roiling from the seismic shifts that adolescence also brings. The dissonance in making space in the bed in the middle of the night for that child, sore with cramps, while the peri-sweat lashes off me.

---

Back on the drive, I’d become distracted by the sky and – on a whim I’d have previously dismissed – turned off the main road towards St Abbs. I was determined to catch the last of the daylight and the waxing gibbous snow moon, feeling everything about that liminal time applied to me in that moment, too. Rushing to catch both sun and moon at the same time. Both day and night. Needing to get home to my girls in time to say goodnight, but pulled inextricably towards a slice of something just for me.

I stayed there for 20 minutes or so though I was hungry, needed a(nother) pee and was still a long way from home.

So, what am I after?

HRT, I think (though let’s get onto diagnostics, remedies and treatments another day). But also a deeper exploration of what it feels like to find you’re already in a stage of life you imagined would be far off. I want to explore what it’s felt like to have found fleeting peace in this body and this mind and what it might mean to face yet more unpredictable change.

I suppose I am most concerned about the threat of another breakdown, for though I’m well now, I never take it for granted. Will my newly-learned coping strategies withstand my passage into another life stage?

It feels like the start of something important. And perhaps it feels like a meaningful conversation for you to be having, too? You might happily class yourself as appropriately peri-menopausal or maybe you live with someone who does? You might have already passed through this life stage and have some wisdom to offer or experience to share, particularly if your relationship to your body and mind hasn’t always been easy,

I’d love to chat more in the comments, if you’re up for it?

---

Coming up…

Episode 13 of my memoir on intergenerational trauma, motherhood and faith – Held in Mind – lands on Wednesday morning at 6am GMT for my Membership community. This week, we’re back with Helen and Tom, sharing more on their plans for early married life. And in another therapy session, there’s more on the impacts – seen and unseen – of that health anxiety mentioned above in today’s post.

Still catching up? Head on over to the podcast tab to listen from the beginning, or click this link: