Daily Archives: April 9, 2024

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Encouragement for Writers in Perimenopause by Kitty Bucholtz

April 9, 2024 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz tagged as It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, Perimenopause

I am having the worst time going through perimenopause. Seriously. It seems I’m angry or stressed or anxious or angry-stressed-anxious almost all the time! A year ago, I finally saw a doctor and started HRT (hormone replacement therapy—bioidentical from plants, not the old stuff from pregnant horses). Things started getting better, and I even wrote in my journal one day that I felt almost 100%.

Then it started sliding downhill again. I’ve been trying to figure out what changed, in my body or my life, to make things feel worse. The best guess my husband and I could come up with was that my doctor changed my prescription around September or October, and that seemed to be around the time I got worse.

But today, minutes before I started typing this, I spoke to another friend going through this and she said since I had Covid in October, it was probably that. I had no idea Covid could compound my symptoms! My friend is a therapist (I can’t remember if she’s a psychologist or something else) and she said, “It’s true. It can make it worse.”

CRAP!

Why am I talking about this? Because around half the people reading this blog post have recently gone through or are going through perimenopause or know someone who is. (Maybe you’re married to someone like me. I’m so sorry. My husband might start a support group.) And if your hormonal changes haven’t been kind to you, you’re not getting much writing done. And if you’re anything like me…that really bothers you.

I don’t know what it is about my personality, but pretty much every really difficult thing I’ve gone through in my life, I process by writing about it in such a way as to help others through it. So that’s what I’m doing again.

I’ve just started outlining Encouragement for Writers in Perimenopause, one of the first books that will come out in my Encouragement for Writers series. Hopefully, it will release later this year. But…the other thing perimenopause seems to steal away, for a while at least, is confidence. This seems true in every field—my architect friend and my actress friend report the same. We’re afraid to get gigs or pursue clients because we’re afraid our brains will be in “brain fog” condition just at the time we need to use them in front of the people who’ve hired us!

Five years ago, just 2019, I couldn’t find very much helpful information online. Mostly I was reading articles by (here I go, being unfairly prejudicial to a group; sorry, but at least I recognize it!)—white, male, American doctors. And nearly everything I read then pretty much said, these are the symptoms and there’s not much you can do, but don’t worry, it’ll go away in five or ten years.

WHAT?!

Talk about making me angry!

Whew…okay…taking a breath now.

But in the last few years, a lot more helpful information has become more easily available (i.e., I found more of it when Googling), mostly written by women who were struggling themselves. I even found two white, male, American doctors on YouTube who were super helpful! (Haha!)

Unfortunately, just like when we were teenagers, everyone is different. There are things that will make a small positive difference for me that might make a huge positive difference for you, and vice versa. And there are SO. MANY. SYMPTOMS. Some of them are really weird—like itchy ears! (I’ve got that, too! Only recently read it’s something enough women have complained about to add it to the list of potential issues.)

If you’re going through this and want more answers, or if you were able to figure out some helpful answers for yourself, please leave a comment and/or email me at kitty @ kittybucholtz .com. Maybe you have some useful information that can go into the book!

I’m determined to help myself and others get through this easier. And I’m doubly determined to help women and men stop being embarrassed to talk about it. We all know that we all went through hormonal changes as teenagers, and everyone accepted it as a normal part of life. We need to look at perimenopause in the same way—it’s just a normal part of life, nothing for any of us to be embarrassed about, and the more we understand it, the easier it will be to deal with it.

Imagine not wondering if your friend, sister, wife, mother, or coworker was considering divorce…or had started to hate her job…or hated your guts for some unknown reason. It’d be a wonderful life if we understood each other a little more.