Look at Your Eras, You’ve Done This Before

You don’t feel like yourself anymore. You look around your life and you don’t recognize it. You wonder, how on earth have you arrived here? If any of this sounds familiar, I want you to know you’re not alone. These are things I hear from women in perimenopause and menopause all the time, and I’ve felt them myself.

Both things can be true at once

What you’re experiencing is real. It isn’t in your head. Estrogen is a hormone with receptors in every organ of your body, including your brain. As it declines, your body genuinely changes. That impacts how you feel physically, mentally and emotionally. It impacts how you experience your life, and that can feel like a lifequake. The good news? You’ve made it through these personal earthquakes before.

Think about some of the major transitions you’ve navigated. From girlhood to adolescence. Leaving your parent’s home. Your first serious relationship. Possibly marriage. Maybe becoming a mother, if that’s your story. Your first big career step. Possibly divorce. Each one of these shifts likely felt disorienting while it was happening. Yet each time, you made it through. Stronger than you were before.

Each time you made it through. Stronger than you were before.

A tool for midlife transitions called Eras

I want to give you a concrete tool to use as you make this midlife transition. I call it Eras. It works just like it sounds. Every major life stage acts as its own era, with a distinctive theme, dominant hobby, or favored thread. Look back across your own eras. Actually write them down. Then answer a few questions.

What did you like best about yourself in each era? What were you doing to take care of yourself? What were you interested in? What were you spending the majority of your time focused on? What were you great at? This isn’t about waxing poetic or embracing nostalgia for its own sake. It’s about collecting evidence about who you’ve been, and reminding yourself that you’re still in there. You’re not walking into this menopausal transition with no track record. You have one, and it’s deeper than you’re giving yourself credit for.

You’re biologically positioned to stop being a yes woman

One of the great byproducts of this stage of life is that you really do lose the urge to please, placate, and pretend. You are biologically positioned right now, in a very real sense, to stop being a yes woman. In fact, there’s not enough hormone therapy in the world to ever make you one again. You can start putting things down. You can start asking for what you really need. You can look back over the eras you’ve lived, and let everything you’ve learned help you make choices about what you want the next part of your life to look and feel like.

The urge to blow things up right now is real, but I have an invitation for you. Before you make any big decisions, take a global look at your whole life. What’s working? What’s not? What do you want instead? Not what you’ve been told you should want, or what you’ve been defaulting to out of necessity. What do you actually want? Take the time to ask yourself the question and really listen to the answer. You’re in there, and the era ahead of you can be your best one yet. You just need to listen to your own voice.

It can feel pretty dark moving through this midlife transition. On the other side, you can feel more like yourself than you ever have before, not just empowered, but powerful.