Not sure when this happened - it was a voice note dairy entry.
This is the year my body, my brain, and my life all dropped at once. I didn’t plan to write a memoir, but menopause has a way of forcing you to narrate your own collapse just to make sense of it. This is Chapter One — the beginning of the fall, and the beginning of finally telling the truth about what it’s like to be a neurodiverse woman going through menopause while holding everyone else’s storms.
Be ND means time lines are hard - time is hard ?
MEMOIR — CHAPTER ONE
The Year Everything Dropped
I used to be able to hold everything. All the plates, all the spinning, all the emotional weather systems of the people I loved. I could anticipate needs before they were spoken, keep the house running, keep myself running, keep the world around me stitched together with invisible thread only I seemed to know how to use.
Then menopause arrived — not as a gentle shift, not as a soft turning of a season — but as a drop. A sudden, violent drop. Like someone had cut the ropes I’d been hanging from. My hormones fell through the floor, and I fell with them.
My daughter was battling PMDD so severe it stole whole weeks from her. My grandson had a rare condition that meant hospitals, specialists, fear. My husband was in a midlife crisis that made him a stranger in his own skin. And I was trying to hold everyone while my own body was unraveling.
I didn’t recognise myself. I couldn’t remember words. I cried without warning. My joints hurt. My hair changed. My sense of womanhood — the one I had built over decades — felt like it was slipping out of my hands. I went to doctors who told me it was “just hormones,” or “just stress,” They didn’t understand that metaphor is my first language. That when I said “I feel like I’m disappearing,” I wasn’t being dramatic — I was reporting a symptom.
Women like me fall through the cracks because we speak in images. We say “I feel hollow,” “I feel like my bones are humming,” “I feel like I’m made of smoke,” and the medical system hears poetry instead of pain.
Perimenopause to menopause. Peri to Meno. The crossing.
This was the year everything dropped — and the year I learned that sometimes the only way to survive is to stop holding everything and let some of it fall.
Women who use too many words. Women who know something is wrong long before the tests catch up. So I stopped asking them to fix me and started learning how to understand myself.
Some days I felt incredible — like the day I wore my green puffball dress and felt the world tilt back into place. And then, without warning, the cloud would drop. I’d step off a train in London and feel the mist fall over my brain. Not depression, though that’s the only word doctors ever reach for. More like a sudden loss of bounce, spark, energy — the part of me that kept everything moving simply… stopped.
Burnout, they might call it. But how do you burn out when you never had a high‑powered job? When your burnout comes from your brain trying to run on the wrong fuel? That’s menopause. Especially when you’re neurodiverse. Especially when you’ve spent your whole life juggling for everyone else.
And if anything in this chapter helps another woman feel less alone, then at least something good came out of the fact that nobody helped me.
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