My Personal Reset

Falling Off The Wagon Can Be A Good Thing!

Menopause is such a funny time. I think of it as life resituating itself on completely different terms. For some, it may look like someone powerlifting at age 70. That might be inspiring to younger people, but don’t count on that having to be you. Some women start businesses after menopause. I have memories of my Great Grandma Schaefer gardening until she was 100.

But for other people, it looks like a sort of madness, or a possessed passion. Think of the lady that gets a bunch of cats or starts collecting dolls. I remember my dad’s mom getting a crap ton of birds. Like, she turned her entire backyard in sunny southern California into a gigantic aviary. It was pretty fancy, but still strange. If you’ve ever been to a zoo or something, you might have seen where they have these gigantic lorikeet cages, and you can walk in and get mobbed by hungry birds hoping you’ll feed them. So, my grandma, probably just after her menopause got these massive bird cages all over her back yard. I remember as a small child finding it disturbing. I was polite and said nice things, of course. My parents were so excited for her, and expected me to be enchanted. But I remember thinking, Grandma Barbara has lost her mind.

Now, I am starting to understand the back story behind what appears to be the madness of menopause, the possession with hobbies or personal interests.

For me, I have spent my whole life unconsciously swimming in a sea of guilt. It is at this time in my menopause journey that I am bumping into my guilt, becoming aware of it.

I think for most of my life, my guilt played a background track that I mostly blocked out. Imagine having a song playing in the rafters while you are shopping, driving your car or having dinner. If it’s not a significant song for you that you like particularly, you really have tuned it out and focused on your job or meal or whatever thing you are there to do. You have allowed your more conscious thoughts to take the stage of your mind. However, you may not notice that the way this music makes you feel, sits with you like a stranger that makes you uneasy, uncomfortable or exhausted. Your conscious thoughts will take inspiration from this song and harmonize with this tune. When you acknowledge some kind of unity between your thoughts and the yucky feelings, you might start to feel slightly better from the harmony of it. However, the root of the feeling is still deep and permeating, and the only relief one may get, is by dragging your thoughts to the low level of your feelings, looking for excuses in your present experiences for why you feel this way.

Another part of this is trying to think more positive thoughts to bring the feelings up. However, if the initial issues aren’t addressed, what happens is like trying to roll a boulder up a hill. You might feel better for a while, but it’s sustained by a gung-ho sort of persistence that can never be relented. If you stop to even think about why this is so hard, that ball gets away from you and starts rolling the wrong way again. It’s funny, I think of those really young motivational speakers. They have to convince others and try to profit from preaching the gung-ho message to get enough out of it to have the justification to keep pushing. Maybe, I’m that person. I definitely have experienced trying to share the load as an escape.

But the funny thing about menopause, in my experience is dropping the ball, or the boulder, for the sake of congruity. Talk about falling off the wagon. It’s like being on this gung-ho bandwagon which takes a turn towards a place where there is NOTHING, NO ONE. Then, you don’t just “fall off.” No! The younger passengers beat the shit out of you and try to leave you out there for dead. But you are still fighting, using all those muscles from pushing boulders uphill your whole life. You aren’t going to fall off this wagon. You are clawing with everything you have to stay on that wagon, “no, you don’t!” You say, “That seat on that hay bale is mine. I worked my ass off for that seat, mother fucker!” But, you lose that battle eventually and are left alone with your feelings. Ack!

So, the first part of menopause is called “perimenopause.” It’s kind of like the denial stage of grief. That’s when you are sure another wagon is coming. You see wagons, far off in the distance and you run to catch it and it’s gone. You jogged two miles, you are more exhausted than ever, hungry, thirsty, and that wagon is 100 miles away and going the other direction. “Ok, that’s alright. I’m catching that next one whenever it comes. I’m going to do some weight bearing exercises, some cardio and follow all the self-help gurus to heal this crap!”

Then you get an idea. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll stay up all night so I don’t miss any other wagons going to maiden town.” If you’ve been through perimenopause, you will know this stage well.

You, young ladies that are laughing now incredulously with your “just get up an hour earlier, run faster, lift more weights, eat healthier and you’ll be on this happy wagon with me… (pushing this boulder up hill all day.)” Ha, I see you! Just wait.

Yeah, men, you’re guilty, too! “I’m a professional fitness coach, and I can help you get back on that wagon. I helped my 30 year old wife lose weight after the baby.” OK… you cut out beer and fries and lost 200 pounds, and you are comparing menopause to the metabolism of a woman in her early 30’s. You can totally relate.

Menopause is somewhat similar to that first part of motherhood. It’s the advice, that without live-in nannies, all new mothers heard but failed at. “Sleep when the baby sleeps.”

Every new mom is like, “yeah, right. Who is going to clean the cloth diapers? Who will do the dishes? Who will clean the diaper blow-out off my favorite shirt? When is all that gonna happen?” Right?

But in menopause, you are the baby and the mother. You are the one who needs to sleep and take care of yourself. I think it has to do with all that boulder pushing. So, you just drop. And when you do, that song that you have been ignoring in the background, is turned up to 11. It’s so loud, you can not sleep. So many reasons during perimenopause not to sleep. You can’t figure out a reason in your life today why this song is so loud right now. You are praying for a wagon to come get you and take you back to sanity.

After ten years of this, hopefully you come to realize, your period stopped and that wagon, even if it comes is not for you.

Welcome to menopause.

That’s when you go, “hey, what is the lyric that she keeps singing? It sounds like ‘I don’t deserve to sleep, I don’t deserve to eat, I don’t deserve to stop what I am doing to use the bathroom, I don’t have time for fun, I need to be deserving by working harder and longer and smarter. My worth is determined by my work. However hard I am working isn’t hard enough.’ Is that what that song says? When did I start believing that?” You think back, because you are on your third all-expenses-paid vacation in three months feeling like a poor, broke, sad person and apologizing for having fun with your kids, asking yourself what other people will think if they find out you are living the life of your dreams right now. She’s not getting her work done. She doesn’t deserve that. Who does she think she is?

Let that boulder go, honey. The best way to rid yourself of an earworm is to play the damned song. Turn up that song. Sing along with it. Sing it so loud and learn it so well that you might eventually get fed up with it. Sing it right out of your system. Eventually you’ll hear yourself thinking, Oh my god, this song is so pathetic! Why did I fight this for so long? This song isn’t true! It’s ridiculous! No one deserves to sing this song for 50 years. Just keep singing it until you laugh at it!

But whatever you do, let it be in the foreground so that you can address it rather than try to roll a stone uphill to dismiss it again.

All this is to say that I had, in the end, a good meeting with myself while on vacation. I learned that I need to go easier on myself, see myself as deserving, let go of that boulder of guilt and hang on to what really matters at this point in my life: my husband, my kids, getting one outdoor cat, no birds (they aren’t real anyway) and the career stuff will remedy itself. If I don’t kill it in business (and I certainly have a habit of making things harder than they ought to be), at least I’ll make it in life, with the things that truly matter elevated.

I am trusting my intuition more. I no longer feel the desire to rectify my feelings of guilt with something going on in my life presently. I just feel them intensely and ask myself, where in my body does this feeling reside? What size is it? What shape is it? What color is it? What message does it have for me? Do I believe the message is true? If not, may I release this feeling?

One of the nights before we left for vacation to Idaho, part of me was feeling really awful. I couldn’t sleep. I had aches all over my body. I thought, I am really fucking myself up here. So, as I lay in bed, I asked those questions. The answer I got was that the feeling was all over me and squeezing, particularly my rib cage, around my lungs. It was so tight I could scarcely breathe. As I noticed it, the feelings actually got worse and more intensified.

The shape of the feeling was that of a seal or sea lion, huge, blubbery, heavy and it was encasing me like a full body, whale blubber seal suit about to make me implode. I asked if it had a name. Of course, the name was “guilt.” I asked myself if I deserved it. I knew I didn’t deserve to be physically crippled with guilt. Then, I thought, how can I let this seal suit go? It came to me that like any suit, I might just try to unzip it and see if it’s so heavy, that the weight of it might just fall off me if there’s nothing fastening it over me. So, mentally, I envisioned this process of unzipping the seal suit and feeling the weight fall off me. All my aches went away within the next ten minutes. I had to do this exercise a couple more times while on vacation. It wasn’t a one and done for me.

My guilt hasn’t gone away completely, but I know it now. I know it is not who I am, but rather a sad story I picked up along the way that I started to believe about myself. I disidentify consciously with the story whenever I notice it. I know when it’s tiring me out or interfering in what I need to accomplish. I recognize it when it is present. I journal through it or talk through it and address it immediately without trying to compensate or just push myself to get over it harder. None of that. I just slow down. It’s counter intuitive when you are rushing your whole life toward a self-imposed deadline to meet. I can’t really rush anymore. I have to evenly pace. I need to protect and regulate my nervous system. I have to listen to those feelings to release them or just to make them more obvious when they surface.

This is a graceful stage for me. I’m no longer playing catch up. My only “obligation” is to enjoy each moment as best I can.

And in the end, I’m better for dropping the ball and letting the wagon leave me behind.