Merry Menopause Awareness Month

What an excellent opportunity to share your menopause epiphany story with us

Image source freepik

If you’re a mother, you have one day a year dedicated to you — in Austria, that is the second Sunday in May.

A day my mother hates for unclear reasons. She refuses to be wined and dined. In her opinion, this is the day solicitous children drag their mothers to fancy food places to “air them out.”

So we don’t, but we still call her and wish her a happy Mother's Day. My elder brother likes to send her flowers, but since I know she doesn’t like those either, I send her chocolate—very specific chocolate by Zotter, an organic, fair trade, artisan, Austrian chocolate manufacturer.

So that’s what you get for being a mother: a day of being aired out by your kids and/or chocolate. Doesn’t feel adequate for the amount of work it was raising your children.

Imagine my surprise that there’s an entire month to celebrate losing your reproductive capacities.

Since 2009, the International Menopause Society (IMS) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have designated October as World Menopause Awareness Month. October 18th is celebrated as World Menopause Awareness Day.

The theme of this year's World Menopause Day 2024 is Menopause Hormone Therapy.

Did you know this? I only learned about it a couple of months ago.

But then I learned so much about Menopause in the last 12 months. It feels like a brand new world has opened up to me.

Can I say it feels so on point to celebrate Menopause in autumn? You know autumn — leaves falling, things dying, but so beautiful — as we approach the autumn of our lives. Poetic really.

Many things that feel hard or sad are poetic if you look at them from a fresh angle. Aging is one of them. It’s hard if you focus on how your body changes in ways society tells you are undesirable and try to force it to stop the process. Wrinkles, grey hairs, saggy skin — old.

Or it can feel liberating when you hold space for the new person you’re becoming. Wiser, more confident, and less easily moved by the desires of others — strong and free.

Before I realized that I was suffering from menopause-related symptoms, I was convinced that I had developed mental health issues. Everything felt wrong and very hard.

Understanding that estrogen influences how your brain works and your mood was an epiphany. It paved the way out of the dark hole to an HRT regimen that helped me out of my anxiety and depression and my feeling like a functional human once more.

I still have so many epiphanies nearly every day reading the stories about menopause submitted to my publication here and on Medium. Just last week, I learned about menopause acne from Victoria Corindi 🌻 and finally stopped wondering why my complexion has gone down the drain.

From Debra G. Harman, MEd. I learned that the average age for women to get uterine cancer is sixty.

Sharmila Voorakkara reminded me that menopause, like all of life, is a journey. One that is very individual and isn’t over until we reach the end. And that every journey is equally valid. Be kind to your fellow travelers.

From all the fantastic writers who submitted their stories to My Menopause Brain during this first month in the Boost Program, I learned that we must advocate strongly for what we want and need.

For this month, dedicated to our transition journey, I’d love to hear what you learned when you went into menopause. What epiphany did you have?

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My Menopause Brain is looking for writers. Details on how to apply here.