Creating My Dream Life
And Understanding the Power of the RPG Framework in Perimenopause.
I used to think manifesting my dream life would involve a lot of incense, meditative early mornings and quiet, moon-lit midnights (when I thought I’d get all my sleep, I don’t know), and ritual stacked upon ritual until each minute of the day I felt completely enveloped by grace and absolutely suffocating in a sparkling joy that I practically floated through my work day.
If I had a work day.
Which I didn’t in this daydream.
Why would I need to work when I had manifested my best life and could sleep as much as I want (still having all of those meditative early mornings and quiet, moon-lit midnights, mind you) and enjoy coffee in cafés and travel whenever I wanted and eat whatever I wanted?
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You can start to see the fantasy in my fantasy here. I’ve always been this way, a little too over the top in my imagining, a little too overzealous and intense. I need to commit to something with my whole heart, soul, and body to feel any type of joy or forward movement in my life. I also needed to seek validation of my efforts to feel worthy in my choices and give me that extra oomph to keep on keeping on.
I remember keenly sitting at my childhood dining table with my family and with any lull that came in conversation, I would be wracking my brain to come up with something I had accomplished that day that I could tell them about. What had I produced in school? Did I get a good grade? Did someone give me a compliment on a project?
On those slim-picking evenings, I would mine my depths to no avail and feel this overwhelming sense of loss. I hadn’t done anything of note that day. There was nothing we could celebrate. I wouldn’t get to hear how proud they were of me. I would gingerly scrape away the dam of mashed potatoes holding in the pool of brown gravy and swim along with my green beans in the devasting wash of destruction. (I was also a bit…much…in those days.)
Many years and multiple therapy sessions later, I learned more about this need for external validation (as well as my empathic-sponge nature sopping up the dissatisfaction from everyone around the table and the subsequent attempts to cut through the ennui with my curated moments of delight. More on that later.) and began learning about how sparking more moments of internal validation would help fill up my own cup and to greater levels of fulfillment to boot.
This all came to a head when six years in to perimenopause I was fed up with trying to get the support I wanted out of the experts I was seeing. I wanted to be SEEN. I wanted to be ACKNOWLEDGED for all that I was going through. I wanted to be LAUDED for doing such an amazing job.
Instead, I was told how common this all was. I would launch into long stories of hot flashes and all the anxiety and panic that would come with it and see them start to fidget in their rolling stools as I waxed a little too poetic for their tastes, or made a long story even longer with my, gulp, emotions, and feel the weight of their apprehension that I was making them late for their next appointment. (My appointment started late through no fault of my own, but that’s apparently par for the course and a-ok.)
I wasn’t getting satisfaction. I felt common. I felt shunted aside into a ready-made column based on a structure that I had nothing to do with setting up. And that structure, the basis against which I was being measured, felt outdated and overly constrictive for my tastes.
I had no science to back this up, just my intuition that was singing at me so loudly, I could ignore it only at my own peril. My intuition sits in my gut, and there’s LOADS of signals I’ve deciphered over the years. I knew this weight of knowing underneath a jumble and rumble of gas and, well, crap was telling me that this feeling was the feeling. And I needed to do something about it.
That’s when I decided I would make perimenopause fun.
The kind of fun I had when I played World of Warcraft years ago (I played for a week before shutting it down entirely when I looked at the clock, saw it was somehow 3am AGAIN and I knew I would never emerge from my bedroom again if I didn’t stop immediately.) and when playing Stardew Valley now.
Why Perimenopause as a Real-life RPG Game Makes Sense
If you know Stardew Valley, you know that it’s a world filled with farming, homesteading, meeting your neighbors, animals, pets, and quests.
You get gold, you get boosts to your health and energy, you get a structure to your Stardew days that feels manageable and exciting. You know what you want to create and you do it, step by step. You don’t get too hung up on how long it’s taking you to get to perfection, you enjoy every moment along the way. And you celebrate each little new thing you achieve with childlike glee.
I wanted that contented, flowing, validating advancement in my real life. I began approaching my days differently and gave myself smaller quests with fewer parameters attached.
For instance, instead of having to wake up at a certain time each morning before work and ticking off each box on a checklist that included yoga, meditation app, morning pages, and hopefully if I got to it, novel drafting, I took the pressure off.
Whenever I woke up, no matter what time I woke up, I would write down three things I was grateful for. I would sip my coffee and feel how grateful I was for these things. And I would tell myself, you did it! Job well done. And I would give myself a pat on the back and give myself my imaginary XP: +10 Health and Wellness, +15 Sovereign Power.
And I felt amazing. I was giving myself the validation I needed to keep going each day. I would take this idea and apply it to my perimenopause symptoms. Give myself rituals to apply and each time I successfully did them, that was a completed quest on my adventure. More +XP earned.
I did this as a way to get through each day. I didn’t realize how it would begin to transform my whole life.
I was beginning to feel POWERFUL.
I was LEVELING UP: +50 Higher Frequency
I began seeing magic in my everyday life.
I use the word magic to mean it in its truest sense. The notion that something is created out of nothing. The luck that seems to be conjured out of thin air. The phone call that comes right when you need it to, the job that makes itself known when you most desire it, the net appearing out of the fog to catch you when you make that faith-filled fool’s leap.
I was living the life I had yearned for when reading books like Eat, Pray, Love. I was finally experiencing the transformation I was so desperately trying to draw to me with all my ritualistic machinations and close-fisted, scrunched-up eye willing-into-being begging of the universe I was doing for so long: +100 Quantum Consciousness.
I call my perimenopause RPG portal Crone Quest©. I’m transforming my life and having FUN, all while managing what can only be described as bat-shit-crazy symptoms that come with this time of my life.
This isn’t our mother’s journey to menopause! We are in the age of the new Crone. Watch out world. We’re coming. And we are warriors. With tattoos, dyed hair, and piercings.
