No one told me it was going to be like this

No one told me that one day the strategies that had carried me through life would simply stop working.

No one told me that pushing through, staying productive, being capable and high achieving would eventually become exhausting.

And no one told me that what I would initially interpret as something being wrong with me might actually be asking something of me.

Menopause as a rite of passage and what your body may be trying to tell you

If I'm honest, I never really thought about menopause. My mother didn't speak to me about these things and I literally thought my menstruation would stop and that would be that.

Turns out nobody gave me the rest of the memo.

I had no idea it would be such a significant biological event. An identity shift. That my body would change. That I would change.

The messaging from mainstream culture and health is pretty simple. Manage it. Medicate it. Get through it.

I'm just not there.

The more I experience this season of life and the more I reflect on years of studying Qigong, Yang Sheng Fa and many complementary health philosophies, the more I keep coming back to the same thought. I think we've underestimated the body.

We've been conditioned to ask, "What's wrong with me?"

I wonder whether we've been asking the wrong question all along. What if my body isn't working against me?

What if it's trying to preserve me?

The body is trying to preserve us

I think the body spends decades adapting to the life we're living. It adapts to stress, poor sleep, emotional pain, responsibility, overwork and all the ways we ignore what we know to be true. Some experiences move through us. Others don't. Some are processed. Others are quietly carried for years.

Still, the body keeps finding a way. That's what it does. I think we've become very good at overriding ourselves.

We override tiredness.

We override intuition.

We override emotion.

We override the quiet voice that says, "This isn't working anymore."

Then we congratulate ourselves for being resilient.

Maybe we're not resilient. Maybe we're just good at overriding.

Astoundingly, the body keeps trying to preserve us anyway. It keeps adapting to the life we're asking it to live. It compensates. It adjusts. It absorbs. It finds another way.

Until one day it can't. Or perhaps more accurately, the biology simply won't support it anymore.

That idea has stayed with me because it changes everything. Instead of seeing the body as something that has failed us, what if it has simply reached the point where it can no longer compensate for the life we've been living?

I also wonder whether that's why so many of the behaviours we later criticise ourselves for once made perfect sense. People pleasing may have protected us. Being fiercely independent may have protected us. Achievement may have protected us. Staying busy may have protected us because if we never stopped moving, we never had to feel what was waiting for us.

These aren't character flaws. They're adaptations.

The body is trying to preserve us.

What if the very strategies that helped us survive the first half of life are the ones preventing us from fully living the second?

To me, that's why midlife feels like a life review.

Not because life is ending. Because there is still enough life ahead to choose differently.

The questions begin to change. Not, How much more can I achieve? But, How do I actually want to live? Not, How much more can I fit into my day? But, What is draining my energy? Not, How do I keep everyone else happy? But, Where have I abandoned myself?

The life review

Menopause seems like time to balance the scales. A reckoning. Not punishment. Just honest accounting.

Life quietly asking, Is this really how you want to spend the next chapter?

We've lost rites of passage. We know how to celebrate birth, marriage and retirement, yet nobody tells women that menopause might be one of the biggest transitions of their lives.

Instead we're encouraged to suppress it, override it or get through it as quickly as possible.

To me, something is being missed. What if the body isn't simply producing symptoms? What if it's revealing the ways we've been living that the biology simply won't support anymore?

I'm not suggesting every symptom has a simple explanation. I'm also not suggesting we should romanticise suffering. But I do think we've normalised overriding ourselves to such an extent that we barely notice we're doing it.

Eventually it's like the body simply says, I can't keep preserving you this way anymore.

For me, that changes everything. It stops being about fixing the body and becomes about learning how to listen to it.

This is why I practice. Not to fix myself. Not because I believe my body is broken.

But because practice interrupts the habit of overriding myself. It creates the space to listen before my body has no choice but to speak louder.

Practice is a way of returning to myself. A way of listening, reading myself in a way I was never taught to do.

If this resonates with you, perhaps it's time to establish a practice that gives you the space to listen.