Grief isn’t just about death - What will be left of me?

What will be left of me?

Grief isn’t just about death. No one taught us that. No one taught girls how to grieve the things we lose long before anyone dies.

We should be taught grief in school — grief for the period we didn’t know was coming, grief for the hormones that rise and fall and change who we are without warning, grief for the decisions we made, and the ones we never got to make.

Then perimenopause arrives and we grieve again — grieve the hormones that leave us, grieve the function that doesn’t return, grieve the version of ourselves we thought would come back.

I’m “just menopausal,” they say, but who am I now? One day I’m ten people, the next day I’m none. Full, then empty. Clear, then cloud. All there, then barely functioning.

And I grieve my brain — the one that fired on all cylinders before the hormones shifted the ground beneath it. I used to imagine my brain being studied one day, cut in half to show everything I was, everything un-diagnosed, everything that made sense in its own wiring.

But now I realise I have to grieve the fact that hormones have changed the pathways, the firing, the misfiring, the ND patterns that once felt sharp and whole.

Will anyone ever see what I was? Or will the pathways shrink with time? Either way, I grieve it — because it’s not coming back. This is the version of me I have now. And I will learn her. But grief should be taught in schools, because hormones deserve their own grief

— what we had, what we lost, and what will never return.

So self love is more important than ever.