The Question Perimenopause Forces You to Ask

Are you living your life as your true self — or as the person you think you should be? Or as the person your partner, your children, your colleagues, or your mother expects you to be?

Most of us have never really stopped to answer that question honestly. And then perimenopause arrives — and it forces the question whether we are ready or not.

Perimenopause is not just a hormonal event. It is an identity event. The women I work with describe it in remarkably similar ways: “something has shifted, not just physically, but in how I see myself“. 

The strategies and roles that once gave us life structure and meaning are starting to feel hollow. You feel like a dimmer version of yourself — or worse, like someone you do not quite recognise.

This is not a symptom to be managed. It is an invitation.

In Chinese medicine, the years of menopause are called the Second Spring — a time not of ending, but of beginning. A season in which a woman sheds what no longer belongs to her and steps into something truer, more powerful, and more herself than anything that came before.

But to get there, she first has to stop. To look inward. To ask the questions she has been too busy to ask. This preparation is a task of perimenopause.  

Here are five ways to begin.

1. Hold Space for Both the Difficult and the Good and rediscover the fullness of your nature 

Perimenopause brings a lot of difficult moments. Sleep that will not come. Moods that arrive without warning. A body that feels unfamiliar. It is tempting to focus entirely on managing and fixing — this being in constant problem-solving mode is a very masculine way of approaching perimenopause. 

Regardless of gender we have both masculine and feminine aspects to our psyche. Masculine aspect is about perfection and structure, it is organised. Feminine aspect is about completeness, about allowing all to be present, including chaos and unpredictability. Feminine is free- flowing and creative. If you are interested in this perspective read about how I discovered tantric practices and what benefits they offer to perimenopausal women

When we are too focused on what is going wrong with our bodies during perimenopause, we may miss the bigger picture of life — which is inevitably full of both: the good and the bad, the pleasurable and the painful, the beautiful and the ugly. As women we naturally feel more relaxed and “at home” just being, instead of doing. Although the fast pace culture in which we are currently living forces us to be in a constant doing mode, to be more in our masculine. 

Lack of support at home, and employers’ expectations that our output will be steady and structured like from male colleagues ignores the fact that in our nature we are not “linear” or predictable. We are naturally cyclical. During perimenopause our cyclical nature often becomes disrupted, and life that seemed to have a certain rhythm