Moving to Mexico and Quitting My Job Didn't Fix My Menopause Madness
The strategies I embraced to improve my mood and achieve lasting wellness
I love reading other women’s stories about how they navigate the madness that is menopause. Why? Because I keep learning new things about the world and myself. In this piece
talks about how “Shadow Work” helped her address mental health issues. This is a new concept to me, and I can’t wait to read the books she recommends. Let me know if you’re familiar with it and how it helped you in the comments.A gap year in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, sounded like a great idea to everyone I told. I was 49, turning 50, and I desperately wanted the work break to be a cure-all.
Publicly, I didn’t frame it that way, of course. The years leading up to my late 40s featured a psychological deterioration that was difficult to explain, much less garner sympathy for, especially since our life in Dubai seemed sparkling.
For a decade, I’d unsuccessfully powered through a laundry list of symptoms that I could not shake, and that threatened to consume me.
Apathy and numbness.
All-consuming anxiety.
Relentless dread.
Unbridled rage.
A sense of collapse.
Unquenchable exhaustion.
There were other clues like weight gain, chronic insomnia, and hair loss, but if my symptoms were a competition, the dread, numbness, and rage tied for worst.
Though the emotional blunting froze everything, buffering the bad parts meant joy was inaccessible, too.
Dread had slowly encroached, then quickened, blanketing life with an inexplicable feeling of doom.
Rage erupted at the slightest provocation and, once triggered, could not be tamed or retracted.
As an example, one sunny afternoon, I had a meltdown at a busy intersection. Within seconds, I went from peacefully crossing the road to screaming venom at a man for whistling at me. Left to my own devices, I’d have extracted that man’s beating heart with a butter knife and stuffed it down his throat.
An oversized reaction, to say the least.
My onyx moods, though frightening, presented a sliver of opportunity. The darkness and rage were so pervasive that I’d try anything to dial down the intensity.
That’s how I found myself quitting my job and moving to Mexico in 2024.
Depression, Dread, and Dark Nights of the Soul
I arrived in Mexico, hoping the change in scenery would help. There was a degree of relief, yes, but the old feelings festered.
When you are intimate with them, you learn that dread and depression are very different beasts.
If depression is a match, dread is the ash washed over the forest after it burns. It’s post-apocalyptic. Once you meet dread, you bow down, kneel, and beg for your life.
Read (2009) defines dread as an “extreme aversive emotion…far stronger than fear or sadness or grief and stranger even than ‘merely neurotic’ anxiety of depression.”
Though I spoke to a few close friends about what was happening, I kept it mostly private. Honestly, I did not want people to know how unhinged I was.
Peripherally, I was functioning, but inside, I was in a state of paralysis. It felt like someone else was inhabiting my body, and I could no longer trust what I might say or do.
I suspected my dread might be connected to a dark night of the soul or what Buddhism calls “falling into the pit of the void.”
Eckhart Tolle states:
“The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self…Often, it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.”
Was it a dark night of the soul, a mid-life crisis, or was I going stark-raving mad?
Perfectionist and achievement-driven, I couldn’t bear the rage-filled, dread-filled, meaner me. My usual tactics — powering through, compartmentalizing, fixing — were failing.
Though I wanted to drown those snarling, unyielding parts in the murky waters of my subconscious, they wouldn’t relent.
In desperation, I reached out to a therapist.
Shadow Work: Facing the Parts We’d Rather Ignore
My therapist suggested shadow work, and I was initially miffed and suspicious.
Shadow work involves exploring and integrating your shadow self, including repressed emotions, fears, and desires, to foster personal growth and healing. By addressing these aspects, you connect with your unconscious mind to uncover insights and embrace self-acceptance.
Then, two books transformed my perspective:
Meeting the Madwoman (Leonard, 1994) showed me how suppression of dark energies leads to self-destruction. The author, trained as a Jungian analyst, identifies eight ‘madwoman’ energies and explains how to transform their destructive patterns into creative forces.
Another book, Opening to Darkness: Eight Gateways for Being with the Absence of Light in Unsettling Times (Manuel, 2023), offers a Zen Buddhist perspective on darkness, exploring it as a sacred doorway to awakening rather than something to run from.
Through journaling and reflection, I began to engage with my repressed parts. My mind became a town council, and everyone got their turn to speak. Each voice had a distinctive tone and age that I could relate to.
The snarky, sarcastic one was me at 15.
The scared one, me at five, needed assurance.
The furious parts were irate for being muzzled all those years. So many words had been stuffed down to play nice when a boundary should have been expressed. This was the version of me who’d nearly caused a blood bath at that sunny intersection.
By listening, I came to appreciate that they were me, and I was them. Acknowledging them quieted them down, and the soundtrack of conflicting thoughts dissipated.
The Critical Link Between Hormones and Mental Health
Though shadow work helped a lot, something still felt off-kilter. I wondered if hormones might be to blame.
Research confirms the link between perimenopause and depression. A meta-analysis spanning 55 studies and nearly 77,000 participants found global depression rates among perimenopausal women at 33.9%, rising to 35.6% during menopause.
A year before, I’d started synthetic hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which, like shadow work, helped, but the doom would not relent.
Was this new depressed baseline the best I could expect, even with HRT?
After seeing a functional medicine doctor in Mexico, I learned the missing link might be my thyroid. Years earlier, I had been diagnosed with subclinical hypothyroidism and prescribed Levothyroxine (T4 support). Three years ago, I weaned myself off, thinking I didn’t need it.
Big mistake.
Thyroid disturbances can worsen during perimenopause due to declining estrogen. Symptoms overlap with menopause — fatigue, mood swings, and brain fog — making diagnosis tricky.
My doctor suggested desiccated thyroid hormone, which supports both T3 and T4. Within days, I felt like myself again. I later learned that many people respond better to this type of thyroid hormone.
A Tailored Approach to Hormone Therapy
Encouraged by the mood improvement, I decided to switch from synthetic HRT to bio-identical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT). While research is mixed on which is more effective, I like the flexibility of BHRT.
Though I don’t use compounded BHRT, my functional doctor can tweak my dosage based on symptoms and regular lab work, a level of customization that synthetic HRT didn’t provide.
The tailored approach is working. My mood is better, my energy is returning, but best of all, the dread has lifted.
Finding Balance Is a Continuous Effort
Mexico didn’t fix me, and neither did quitting my job.
However, having more time and space allowed me to address my symptoms. I was able to work through my shadows and balance my hormones. The work was painful, messy, and non-linear — but worth the effort.
These days, I’m more at ease. I’m no longer at war with myself.
I’m also giving myself grace for the long road and detours. Perimenopause is complicated. Symptoms wax and wane, and the interconnection between hormones, thyroid, and mood is difficult to tease out, even by medical experts.
The only way to find what works is to attune closely to your experience. Finding supportive health practitioners who will listen and have experience working with women going through the menopause transition is also essential.
Mid-life is a dark night of the soul. But through darkness, there is a chance to find a deeper, more authentic version of yourself. By embracing both our light and dark aspects, we emerge stronger.
No trees it is said can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.
My Menopause Brain is looking for writers and collaborators who want to share their experiences and create more menopause awareness. If you’re interested, leave a comment, send me a message or apply here.
My Menopause Brain is an entirely reader-supported publication that wants to spread Menopause Awareness to as many women as possible. If you read our blog regularly and value the information you get here, please consider sharing this article or becoming a paid subscriber!
You can also buy us a coffee instead.
 | A guest post by
|
Loved reading about your journey. It's very relatable. I found that IFS therapy really helped me address my parts and balance me out. And of course reducing the doing (easier said than done) and focus on the being and becoming.