The Fool’s Blog
First-draft thoughts on the road of empowerment.
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![A Perimeno[PAUSE].](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63d1d198f751613733f585e5/1777042088038-IWI8N9N1L4VIAVO3HO4N/20260424_073023.jpg)
A Perimeno[PAUSE].
Start by dipping your toes into the cool pool underneath the waterfall and soon your entire body will be immersed in the healing waters. Pure joy can be soaked up like a sponge when it manifests in this form
Open Palm.
It’s a marvel, this perimenopause experience. I’ve made the intentional choice to see it as a rich and wondrous journey and keep that palm open. I can smile more. I can find gratitude more. I can enjoy more happiness moment to moment.
Struggle. Ease. Grace.
Yes, it’s real. No one needs that confirmation. The form of it all might change, but that reality remains.
I had another morning that makes it impossible to ignore that mornings like these are my new normal. Wake up too early, hours before the alarm, have hot flash spread throughout my body, feel incredibly tired but also strangely alert, lay there pulling out all my tricks to just get back to sleep, refuse to check the clock again because seeing that an hour has passed in this limbo would be too disappointing. The next moment (it seems) the alarm is waking me out of a deep, dream-filled sleep. I think, I should have moved the alarm to later just in case this happened, that way I could get more solid sleep! I re-set the alarm, get nestled in the covers again. That’s where the actual struggle begins.
POWER.
Underneath the rocky terrain I’ve been traversing, there’s a bubble of what? I mean, could it be? Nooooo. How in the heck… I can’t deny it any longer, I have to name it for what it is. Swimming steadily and strongly beneath the turbulence is what only can be described as “WOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOO!”.
love, love, love, love
What helped with accepting I was in perimenopause? Bouncing on my toes in front of the mirror naked and delighting in my new heaving bosom.
Bring it.
Waking up has never been easy for me. There are stories of how I had to be held when waking up from a nap as a toddler until I was ready to face the world again. I didn’t like the transition back to awake. I still have this challenge. Perimenopause has only exacerbated something that was already there.
I’m aware now that it was 5 years ago that my symptoms first started.
That feeling before a leap.
Driving away from the post office, I felt a fire in me. I had dropped off my passport application and I was heading home. Driving the same car on the same highways and it all felt monumental and new. My passport expired in 2015. I hadn’t used it since…2005? I forgot to check what my last trip was before the post office employee put it in an envelope and sent it off. That was a lifetime ago. I was living in NYC and traveled for work and for play to Hong Kong and Japan. Epic trips made by someone else. I live in a different city on a different coast, have different people in my life. And though I feel like I’m traveling the same internal roads that catch me like tires in a rut, I know that I’m actually on a spiral staircase moving forward and onward. I’m worlds away from who I was before. I know I have grown. I feel it in my belly.
When doing means not doing.
All I want to do is pretty much everything. I want to work on my book, I want to work on my website, I want to do a watercolor sketch, I want to do that linoleum block print I have had on my mind for about a month. I can barely move with all the things that want to come out of me—it’s clogging up the works here. Desire. It can really ramp up the pressure and make it so nothing actually gets done. And then I get frustrated because I can’t find the outlet for my creativity which now has the power of a tidal wave and is destroying my sense of peace.
