Menopause (231/365)
Aug. 19th, 2021 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartOver on Facebook, I have been asking people about their experiences of menopause, after reading this Guardian article about menopausal women being forced out of work, and also seeing something about a campaign to make menopause a protected characteristic under the Equality Act.
I have had a very easy menopause. My cycles became less and less predictable over a few years; some were very short, which was annoying, and while my periods were generally shorter than they used to be the first day or so was often heavy, but there were only a few occasions when I had real flooding. Hot flushes have been rather annoying (and I'm not sure how the constant cardigan-off-cardigan-on comes across to other people) but no more than that; the nighttime ones took more getting used to, but eventually I got to a stage where I'm only half waking up most of the time, and am able to manage OK with the interrupted sleep. I certainly don't have any more depression, anxiety or brain fog than I always did (and much less depression than when I was on Cerazette).
From the comments on my Facebook post, it's clear that I've been lucky in this, and friends have had a much worse time of it. I'm glad that there is more conversation, and more awareness; I hope that this will lead to GPs taking menopause symptoms more seriously, and employers offering more support. I also wonder, though, how I'd have felt if I'd read all of these things ten years ago. What if I'd gone into my forties expecting menopause to be horrendous, instead of just thinking that I'd be glad to be done with periods?
I have had a very easy menopause. My cycles became less and less predictable over a few years; some were very short, which was annoying, and while my periods were generally shorter than they used to be the first day or so was often heavy, but there were only a few occasions when I had real flooding. Hot flushes have been rather annoying (and I'm not sure how the constant cardigan-off-cardigan-on comes across to other people) but no more than that; the nighttime ones took more getting used to, but eventually I got to a stage where I'm only half waking up most of the time, and am able to manage OK with the interrupted sleep. I certainly don't have any more depression, anxiety or brain fog than I always did (and much less depression than when I was on Cerazette).
From the comments on my Facebook post, it's clear that I've been lucky in this, and friends have had a much worse time of it. I'm glad that there is more conversation, and more awareness; I hope that this will lead to GPs taking menopause symptoms more seriously, and employers offering more support. I also wonder, though, how I'd have felt if I'd read all of these things ten years ago. What if I'd gone into my forties expecting menopause to be horrendous, instead of just thinking that I'd be glad to be done with periods?
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Date: 2021-08-20 09:38 am (UTC)Yes and I was trying really hard to signal that I think this is completely individual both in terms of people's levels of sex drive and how they relate to it. I really really do not want to be normative about this. For me it is archetypal and identity-level, but I would hate to inadvertently sound as if I think it should be for anyone else. I know women who have been sexually passionate in earlier life and are now completely happy to leave it behind, and women for whom it's always been a problem and women for whom it's always been non-existent or unimportant and women for whom menopause has supercharged their sexuality and given them a new lease of life. I think it is vanishingly hard and also usually damaging to generalise about this stuff.