I have come to believe we are never truly prepared for midlife. We know in theory that we are aging. We expect some changes, perhaps a few wrinkles or a slower metabolism, but the reality is far more relentless.
For me it started with rage.
Not the righteous kind but the sudden, pointless kind. Anger over nothing, over little things. Things I knew did not matter but still set me off. What made it worse was feeling completely unable to control it. My self-regulation, once reliable, seemed to have packed its bags and left.
Then came the night sweats.
They were not just an inconvenience, they were an invasion. Like clockwork, three in the morning and sometimes five, I would wake drenched and shivering in damp clothes. I could not understand why it was always those hours. I would change, try to go back to sleep, and fail. Mornings became slow and heavy. My body was tired, my mind sluggish, my mood brittle. I carried the exhaustion into every part of my day.
And I thought: I cannot carry this weight forever.
So I started reading. I researched. And I realised I was not alone. Far from it. Millions of women experience this storm. Yet knowing I was not alone did not fix the symptoms. I needed a plan.
The truth I kept running into was this: it was about hormones. Specifically estrogen. Its loss had flipped a switch in my body, and no amount of willpower could turn it back off. My weight was creeping up. My mood was swinging. My sleep was fractured. My joy was slipping.
At a stage of life when I had hoped to feel light and free, I was instead dragged down by something I could not fully control. That was when I decided I could not simply endure this. I had to act. I had to find a way to rebalance, to reclaim some of the comfort and stability that had quietly disappeared.
Midlife has been a brutal teacher. It has shown me that aging is not just about looking older. It is about facing changes you never saw coming and deciding, every day, what you are going to do about them.
