Menopause Struggle Quotes

The object of facing up squarely to the fact of the climacteric is to acquire serenity and power. If women on the youthful side of the climacteric could glimpse what this state of peaceful potency might be, the difficulties of making the transition would be less. It is the nature of the case that life beyond the menopause is as invisible to the woman who has yet to struggle through the change as to the top of any mountain is invisible from the valley below. Calm and poise do not simply happen to the post menopausal woman, she has to fight for them.

According to recent statistics, over 60 percent of all perimenopausal and postmenopausal women struggle with brain fog. The experience is so marked that it can disturb one’s sense of efficiency, especially when memory lapses crop up. It’s important to realize that forgetfulness can spike during perimenopause, which can feed fears not only of going crazy but of experiencing early dementia. In other words, we are looking at millions of women in the prime of life who suddenly feel like the rug has been pulled out from under them—blindsided by their bodies, let down by their brains, and failed by their doctors, who also may not realize that those are symptoms of menopause.

It might be a sense of disorientation, where you find yourself doing increasingly absent-minded things, like entering a room only to wonder what made you go there in the first place. Belongings may be misplaced, with milk cartons finding their way into cabinets and cereal boxes ending up in the fridge. Communication can also become a challenge. Moments of sheer panic may arise as you struggle to come up with that word on the tip of your tongue or draw a blank on something you just said, losing your train of thought. Emotions, too, can be all over the place, as if a heavy darkness is causing you to weep for no clear reason—only to be replaced a moment later by waves of irritability or even anger. And just when you hoped a good night’s sleep might resolve these issues, sleep becomes elusive.

Numerous Tamils have had to embrace pitiful deaths due to the lack of even basic medical aids. From minor girls to women approaching menopause, numerous women were gang-raped, sexually assaulted and abused. The temples of Tamil Hindus and the churches of Tamil Christians were all razed to the ground, with innumerable Tamil priests being burned to death and many Christian priests being brutally tortured before being imprisoned and killed.

menopause is a call to autonomy: a response to the need, perhaps for the first time in our lives, to define ourselves and our own path. It’s a time to reclaim ourselves and tell our own story, in our own unique voice. For many women, then, menopause is a time when we pull back a little from our relationships and begin to evaluate who we imagine ourselves to be outside the frameworks set for us by others. Often, this leads to periods of intense longing for time alone. I loved my husband and valued our marriage, but throughout menopause I struggled with a serious yearning to live by myself. I couldn’t seem to reconcile the two desires: to live with him and to live without him. Because I’ve always understood that solitude is more than just a luxury: at certain times in life it’s a necessity. It’s a prerequisite for deep change, for freedom of thought and imagination.

With age comes a softer view. You learn to pick your battles or just walk away altogether. You learn that it’s okay to not always feel okay, and you learn to embrace the gray areas. It’s easier to stand in peace than struggle in winning every fight.

When you’re experiencing brain fog, it’s a struggle to remember words, names, stories, and appointments. You may have a hard time maintaining a train of thought amid distractions, and you probably spend a lot of time looking for things—your phone, your keys, your purse. Concentration becomes an Olympian feat, and switching between tasks feels like an acrobatic act. Here are some examples of brain fog: • Forgetting why you entered a room • Missing important appointments • Misplacing items • Taking longer than usual to complete a task (that used to be easy!) • Losing track of the task altogether • Stopping in the middle of a sentence and saying, “Wait… what was I saying?” • Not being able to recall words that you have known all along

The main brain changes that happen as estrogen declines are in working memory (the ultra-short-term memory where you store the information you need for the task at hand), attention, learning and remembering new words (including names), and retrieving information you’ve previously learned. Cumulatively, these changes can result in the loss of what experts call “verbal fluency,” which is a polite way of describing our sudden inability to string three words together without a struggle.