Perimenopause has exploded my skull organ

About a year ago, things were going pretty well for me in the grand scheme of things. See, I’d been writing a serial online for a few years, and against all odds and the resistance of men who kept insisting I should die, it picked up a bit of a fanbase. In a market where everyone with opposable thumbs and an internet connection is writing a book, strangers were liking what I did *and* I was even making some money from it. Not like JK Rowling money - not even really successful busker money - but enough that I was kind of validated.

It was the dream. I’d been dissociating into the written word since I was a kid, but making a living from it always seemed unlikely. Then something even more improbable happened: a real publisher wanted to see more. Instead of a form-letter rejection, they were asking for more chapters. It showed ‘promise’. They might even be able to shape them into something known as a “book.”

After being quite sure it was some kind of scam or Punk’d style scenario or that maybe I’d hit my head and it was all a dream, I finally accepted the possibility that maybe I was okay at the thing I’d been doing for 30 years. And why not jump at that? Why not get paid to do something I was doing anyway, something that came so naturally to me that I’ve rarely gone a day in my life without doing it. Compulsively. My escape, my processing, my coping mechanism. An addiction, some might say. For me, to be paid to write, it’s like getting paid to be an alcoholic, except instead of a ruined liver it’s your craw of hand that ends up withering away.

People would ask, “How do you deal with writer’s block, thought?”

Well. I didn’t. I never had it.I had the opposite problem. I couldn’t stop writing. Words were just always there, and they needed to come out.

Until I turned 41, and one day I sat down, wrote a sentence, and it was barely coherent. I deleted it, rewrote it, and it still didn’t make any sense. This went on and on. Fine, an off day. Bad days happen. Maybe I’d given myself the yips. Maybe it was self-sabotage mode because I was actually facing the possibility of being financially viable in a job I actually liked.

So I went to the place everyone gets their advice. “Hi, Reddit! What do do about writers block?”

Read more!

Study more!

Walk more!

Drink more water!

Just don’t write! (I was all over that one)

Get your energy “unblocked” by a masseuse who plays Enya and smells like patchouli! (this did nothing for my writing, it did help with my carpal tunnel for a week or so)

But really, nothing was working. I could sit at that keyboard for hours and produce nothing that was remotely workable. Not because I’d run out of ideas but because suddenly it was like English was a foreign language to me.

And then one day I found myself driving halfway to Adelaide because I literally could not figure out which direction I lived in.

“I think I’m developing early-onset dementia,” I told my husband, explaining why I’d almost run out of petrol on the way home, because my way home was 42 km more than usual. I also mused that I thought my writing had taken a hit and wasn’t anywhere near its previous quality.

Now, our usual marital dynamic is that I catastrophise and he steers me toward a less horrifying possibility. This has been going on for a couple of decades now, even before we were married and just friends. He talks me off the ledge I put myself on. His calm, rational redirection is probably the only reason I haven’t spontaneously combusted by now.

But that didn’t happen this time. To my horror, he - who is also a qualified editor who has been reading my writing for about as long as he’s known me - said he’d noticed issues with my memory and verbal fluency and thought medical intervention was a ‘good idea’.

Well, fuck. That confirmed it. It was all over. It was like when Mulder was always saying, “It’s aliens for sure!” and Scully was all, “Okay, let’s dial it back a bit, it’s just lights in the sky okay?”, but then seven seasons in even Scully’s like, “Yep, aliens, it’s definitely aliens” and you realise there’s no more denying aliens. Or in my case, not so much aliens as an imminent stay in a rose-cottage.

Inner turmoil activated. The tragic irony set in: I was on the verge of getting published if I could just pull off one more rewrite, and suddenly my brain had turned to mush. As if overnight.

Instead of producing 3000 words a day, I was watching Louis Theroux documentaries on early-onset dementia and trying to read studies about it (when I could concentrate, which was almost never). I worked myself up more on forums about the first signs, if there was any kind of medical intervention that could stop or slow it now. I lost sleep worrying about what would happen to my still young family if I really was losing my mind. Really, I was a mess.

I sought a doctor, who ran some tests, asked if I was vegan, and diagnosed me with needing more sun and exercise. Weird, considering I’ve been a pasty, lazy bitch my whole life and have never before driven halfway to a city I don’t live in because I forgot the way home. I’d also never been illiterate before.

“Get a second opinion” my husband said.

So I did. Accumulated sleep debt. Get more sleep. Get more magnesium. Take some melatonin. Stay off screens. Except none of that was working, because no matter what I did, I was waking up at 3 a.m every morning, fatigued in my body, but starkly awake in my brain. A doctor suggested the ADHD meds were the likely culprit. Weird, they’d actually helped me sleep for months, I was sleeping better than I ever had in my *life* on Ritalin - but fine, I started taking them earlier, ending them earlier.

But that didn’t work either.

My words were getting worse.

Box = fat square.

Dog = the one that isn’t the cat.

My 11 year old = the middle boy.

Jessica Lange = Jennifer Lange

And maybe it was the frustration, the disappointment, the fear that my brain was actually collapsing in on itself, but I was angry. Not my usual morning rant about the state of the world and all the injustice in it — I mean raging. The kind of rage where I was afraid I would actually hurt somebody. One morning, the dog wouldn’t stop barking, my kid wouldn’t turn his game off, Alexa kept sirening off because middle boy had hilariously set 18 alarms in a row, and suddenly I was hurling a dish across the kitchen. Which really isn’t like me. I’m no violent, really. Also, it’s unwise to break things when I’m the one who has to clean up and pay to replace them.

Then a few months ago, my son’s therapist was talking to me and I apologised: “Sorry, would you say that again, that slid off my brain like oil on water. I haven’t been getting much sleep.” She asked if that meant he wasn’t sleeping again. “Oh, I mean… on and off, but this is just me and my stupid brain.” She said, “Oh, you poor thing. Perimenopause wreaks havoc on women, but it’s so much worse when you have ADHD. When I went through it, I thought I was getting early-onset dementia.”

Wait, what?

So I started asking around.

“I think I’m getting a tumour,” one friend said.

“I forgot my husband’s birthday. Usually he does that, but me?”

“I forgot how to do the job I’ve been doing for twenty years,” another said.

“I can’t find words anymore — they’re there, but I can’t get them,” said another.

“I had to take leave from work. Everything suddenly became too much.”

I went back to my forums, but this time I had a new question. Perimenopause, verbal fluency and memory. And what I found out was that up to sixty percent of women were dealing with the same thing during perimenopause. *Sixty*. And yet not a single doctor in a year had clicked with the possibility.

I mean I don’t know why I was so surprised. It had always been this way. I’d been going to the doctor and being told I just wanted trying hard enough at being a person for half of my life - about my pain, my weight, my emotional stability. Why not my cognitive function?

And then the advice came. But not useless advice like “Yoga” or “Cheer up!”

“You need the patch.”

“Get the patch, trust me.”

“The gel is better, but definitely get it, it’s a lifesaver”.

“I’d starve without HRT — I literally couldn’t do my job without it.”

HRT. But what about the breast cancer? My Nan did HRT and she got breast cancer and she and my Mum both told me it was definitely the HRT that did it to her. She also worked in a bar back in the days where everyone smoked indoors, smoked herself, drank alcohol, was on a variety of other prescription medications and inhaled a can of Mr Sheen every week while living in a house made of asbestos. But everyone told me it was the HRT that did it to her for sure.

“Well, there’s a one-percent risk,” my middle-aged female therapist said. “But considering drinking a glass of wine every night carries a fifteen-percent risk, I think we’ve overreacted to hormone therapy. I’ve noticed a little brain fog in you lately, and it would be a shame for you to go backwards when you’ve made so much progress.”

Of course, there’s almost no literature on ADHD and peri/menopause, because women are already less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, and anything related to women’s health is always treated like a mystery (translation: not interesting to the men who fund studies).

And given the current climate — where the weather is a conspiracy and autism comes from sitting too close to a microwave, and women are drifting back into ornamental baby-factory status — I’m not expecting a wave of research on how hormonal fluctuations affect ADHD anytime soon.

So I’m going to what women have been doing for centuries. I’m going to share my experiences with it all. How the hormone therapy goes. How the symptoms shift. Whether my brain goes back to normal or at least something functional.

Because if we don’t talk about it, nobody learns about it. And then one day you’re 40 and you find yourself driving down a highway, looking out the window thinking, “Hey! Cows!”

…followed immediately by, “Wait.... this isn’t my house.”