Famished: I am perimenopausal, and I am done being legible

On perimenopause, identity, grief, and creativity

I am hungry, famished, even. At first I thought it was long Covid from 2021, and maybe it was, but then it blurred into something else the subsequent years, and though I was exhausted, it was more than that, and though I was grieving, it also wasn't only that, either. I was starving for a reprieve while the seams of my clothing were also bulging of irritability, the despair, the murderous impatience, the heat rising, the isolating shame, the madness, and also the clarity, oh the clarity!

My body has been strange to me, each day traversing a portion of an unmapped wilderness. The sleep that no longer reconstitutes me the way it used to, namely because it was increasingly rare. An emotional intensity and perceptual sharpness that my usual restraint keeps lidded. Even now with the HRT, I am spiky in some places and softening in others. I am a practitioner of Chinese metaphysics. I read bodies and life trajectories through psychic mediumship, BaZi, the I Ching, the slower language of Daoist cosmology. I know how to sit with complexity without demanding resolution. And still, this transition has surprised me, its fed-up, pent-up, let's-fuck-it-up rage has made me question more times than I care to admit in writing, whether I am becoming the trope of the angry woman in midlife. Good lord, is this the archetype I am now becoming?

What surprised me more was how little I was offered, in the way of language, or willing company, for what was happening.

Perimenopause is not a symptom list or a meme. While it's true that sleep disruption, hot flashes, rotator cuff issues, bloating after salad have been my reality, the physical instability is mirroring something that goes considerably deeper, and that deeper territory is where I live. For me, early perimenopause arrived as a medical event and an identity crisis simultaneously, and the grief of it, and grief are not two separate conversations, it turns out, was as disorienting as anything physical. It is a rite of passage that invites questioning, reassessment, unsubscription, and negotiation in all aspects of my personhood and relations, and the terms seem to change often and with no warning. And underneath all of it, a kind of yearning I would not call nostalgia, because it points forward. Toward things that feel more consequential, more honest, more mine. I realized I was, am, starving for myself.

I want to ponder, create, and form bonds within that time and space. Perimenopause and creativity, it turns out, are not in opposition - the same rage that is dismantling the old logic is also, if you follow it far enough, generative. I want to be in conversation with others who are or were moving through a similar yet unique passage, people in female physiology in perimenopause and midlife with the same Aquarius Sun, Moon in Capricorn quality of attention I bring to everything I do. I am not interested in managing symptoms so I remain acceptable and legible. Never being a fan of performativity, I am now positively and anaphylactically allergic to horse shit. I am finding that I am no longer needing approval. Perimenopause has made me uncompliant and resistant to normativity. It is a queering of the whole prior logic of a life, if you let it.

I have a dear friend and creative director whose eye, sensibility, and conviction I trust completely, Reanna Evoy. She had a vision for something neither of us could stop talking about, and through hanging out, voice notes, texts, and IG DMs, that vision became Hot Flash Magazine.

We are building something for those who are tired of being addressed as a symptom. The Hot Flash interview series launching this May is a set of transcribed conversations with people in perimenopause and post-menopause, the kind of conversations where someone says the thing they have not said anywhere else. The digital issues to follow will hold photo essays, personal essays, and other forms of creative work in the frequencies this territory deserves, courageous examination of what has been carried too long, the primal and often messy reality of a body and identity in simultaneous flux, self-compassion as a practice in rigour instead of wellness performance. Hot Flash is after what is honest, inhabited, and unmanaged.

Please consider joining the Hot Flash movement on IG. The first interviews go live in early May.

I am writing this from Ceremonie because the impulse behind both is the same. I've been working with what is real and mostly unseen, refusing to dilute it, and building containers for people to come and say what they have to say. If you are finding yourself in this territory and want to go deeper, I have two writing series that have held people through similarly unfamiliar ground, Ugly Words Writing Series and Black Holes Birthing Stars. Both are self-paced and waiting for you.

Following the heat,
Mimi

Occultist and psychic medium, Ceremonie
Co-founder, Hot Flash Magazine