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

I am hungry, famished, even. At first I thought it was long Covid, and maybe it was, but then it blurred into something else, 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. An emotional intensity and perceptual sharpness that my usual restraint keeps lidded. I am spiky in some places and softening in others. I am a practitioner of Chinese metaphysics. I read bodies and life trajectories through 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 terrain of 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.