Its 2024 and I thought I went through enough and it was just starting. As women we get used to Multi tasking and I feel it’s like Maa Durga, Maa Kali with several arms, while the Shakti, the Devi Ma always showed women what we are truly meant to be, we women took it to another level and not in a good way. Really, not at all in a good way.

In every part of the world I travelled and visited, I always observed women working physically and mentally harder. In Uttarakhand, Himachal, North east where I trekked, I saw women bearing heaviest bundles of wood, leaves worth kilos and straddling a baby along and going up and down the terrain spanning kilometres.

In South East Asia, from Malaysia to Singapore to Thailand to Cambodia I saw women managing shops, managing homes and holding their babies/ toddlers. In Europe, I saw women Multi tasking from driving to dropping children to working to everything else.

I was no exception, from the outside anyone would think oh what a life she leads. Out of corporate world, out of running a cafe or business, out of everything. Yes I was out of the mainstream world, the rat race, the competitive edge.

Yet I was working non stop, a constant need of doing, serving, handling, caring, hindsight when I look back I related my self esteem in a big way to how people treated me, if I put my needs aside and kept them in mind, maybe, just maybe I will get some attention and care my way.

You see, I was trying to hopelessly fill a void inside me and failing spectacularly.

80% of how I felt depended on how people around me felt, and their mood their symptoms, their happiness or anger was all I took in. And I take full responsibility for the way I addressed my life.

On the exterior I was a carefree care a damn woman, independent had her own mind yet all through that veneer was that woman who was alone, is alone, was lonely and kept caregiving.

I would come back from cycling 100 kms on a Sunday and still ask the person at home if he had breakfast, not once wondering if the person never asked if I wanted a glass of water? It goes to show it’s just not that person, it’s ME too, how available I made myself to be.

Let me say it was building up, facing reality upfront festering inside me. Like a deep wound with the sword still inside and I kept ignoring it.

Finally I decided to get away from everyone on my birthday, the trauma and the crushing of my self esteem of 2023 birthday still lingered bitterly in my heart. So I decided every year I would get away.

Because one big truth faced me. Do not wait for anyone and I mean anyone who are close to you to make you feel special. I didn’t feel respected and my heart was broken, so what was left? ME.

I wanted solitude, silence. Forget birthday greetings I didn’t want to be treated the way I was treated last year and never again will I let it happen. Ever.

With the little money I had and saved I went off to Thailand for a 4 day silence within self. Those 4 days was only silence. No one to speak to except when I ordered food or wanted to buy things in a market.

And then it happened. My late 40s ‘perimenopause’ If you ask what is it? Or even if you know its meaning. Believe me, you cannot even fathom what it’s actually about until you are a woman my age. And if you are a Man, then I can only say you will never get it, no way can you understand it. it’s how it is.

I was walking near the beach and suddenly I felt my face was melting away, I started sweating profusely, the heat permeating my body like I was on fire and panicking like the world was caving in.

I don’t even remember how I walked a kilometre back to my hotel room without screaming hysterically. I was screaming loud inside, ‘ HELP ME, SAVE ME PLEASE’ but I couldn’t, I reached the room that was so cool yet I cranked it low to 15 degrees cold, stripped all my clothes and yet I felt I was dying. Yes dying. I was still sweating in the now ice cold room. What was this??!

I wished I could jump naked into the pool to cool my body. That’s how desperate I felt.

These are just ONE of the 40 odd symptoms of perimenopause and menopause. Nothing can prepare you for it. Because the world and system never even considered this!

Half of the worlds population goes through this post 45 and in Indian women as early as late 30s and no one says, talks nor the medical system addresses it wholly, hell in any way! It simply looks in the other direction or if it rarely does, it says it’s ‘normal’ bear it!

So I started researching on my symptoms, if there is one thing I am good at is this, when I dive in and commit it’s 100%.

All signs showed I was in perimenopause. I thought, what a birthday gift!! And when I tell you, this phase, this stage that happens to every woman in her life, it also changed my life, my thinking, my whole existence as such.

If there are 3 significant incidents of 2024, where the trajectory of my life moved. It is Perimenopause, my horrific cycling accident and of course an ultimatum given by a close person where I not only shifted. I ceased to be the person I was all these years.

To be continued..