How the menopause is helping make me a dumber, better person
Brad Blanton — author of Radical Honesty — has a joke he loves to tell. I can’t remember the first time I heard him tell it, but I feel as if I’ve heard it hundreds of times over the years:
At this point he closes his eyes, makes his face go completely slack and opens his mouth slightly before emitting a long low-pitched completely flat tone. It sounds a lot like the noise Homer Simpson makes when he’s cursing his own stupidity, only slowed down about ten times for maximum effect. Normally he starts to laugh at himself about ten seconds in.
I love all Brad’s dumb jokes, and I love Brad. I will be forever grateful for meeting him, for every bit of encouragement, every heartfelt word of praise and every ounce of tough love that he’s given me.
Most of all though, I am grateful for him teaching me that my mind — whilst being the most wonderful tool and plaything imaginable — can also, if I allow it, be the worst kind of prison.
I am pretty attached to being smart, and I figured out why.
I grew up in a family where ‘cleverness’ was a revered trait. I got praise and admiration for my good grades as a child, and for impressing teachers, parents, even complete strangers with my thoughtful grown-up-sounding insights. As a result, my self-worth became inextricably linked to my intellect, and being considered ‘the smartest person in the room’ became incredibly (if not entirely consciously) important to me.
For the last decade though, I’ve been picking all of that stuff apart; the crippling Imposter Syndrome, the anxiety and depression, the unstable self-worth, and experimenting with being honest about what’s really going on for me.
Thanks to my core programming though, admitting that I didn’t know something, didn’t understand or felt confused seemed to be the hardest of all admissions.
So imagine my horror when earlier this year, as a side-effect of entering perimenopause, I started to experience increasingly severe symptoms of brain fog.
When I try to explain what brain fog feels like to others, and how it impacts my ability to do my job, I find it impossible to ignore the sensations of fear in my body. I get shaky and tearful, my heart-rate speeds up and my brain struggles — not at all ironically — to find the right words:
“Try to imagine a familiar bookshelf, full of reference books that you know and love, that you use every day. And you go to the place where the book you want is kept, and there’s nothing there. There’s just an empty space on the shelf where you know the book once was.
And you’re staring at the book-shaped space and trying to remember anything about it; what the title was or what the spine looked like, and you can’t. The book is missing and everything inside you needed to know is gone.”
The first time this happened with a client, I felt physically sick.
I felt as if I was reaching around inside my handbag for my keys, realising with dawning horror that I was locked out. Shocked at my sudden inability to verbalise my thoughts, I went silent, then attempted to cover my silence, said something I judged utterly nonsensical and felt heat immediately rush to my cheeks.
In retrospect, I don’t believe my client noticed any of this, but for me it was the start of a increasingly worrying pattern. I would have a thought, start to speak, realise I couldn’t remember the word that I wanted, fumble for a less than ideal replacement, fail to make my point and then lapse into anxious, shame-filled silence. And as the weeks went by, I began to dread going in to work every day for fear it would happen.
It was only after a heartfelt conversation with one of my fellow RH trainers — in which I lamented how incredibly *dumb* I had been feeling — that I realised how strongly I had been resisting the experience of perimenopause. A completely natural, normal stage of my life had become something I was fighting tooth and nail, and so — as I’d learned is the nature of anything I resist — it was persisting. I had to stop resisting.
“So this is it,” I told myself, “This is how I am right now.”
“This is how I am, and I might be this way for quite a while. I can’t make connections and use words as well as I did, and I can’t come up with metaphors or remember really useful things I’ve been taught. So what can I do?”
And just like that, I answered myself.
- I can get slower.
- I can get simpler.
- I can model how to describe my sensations in really basic clear language.
- I can talk about my story that I need to be ‘smart and useful’, and about my fear of what will happen if I’m ‘discovered’ not to be.
- I can reveal what’s really going on, instead of pretending everything’s fine.
And best of all, I can remind myself — and by extension my clients — that I am so much more than my smart brain, and my ability to make clever observations and connections. That I don’t need to listen to that scared internal voice that tells so many of us “you’re not enough”.
Instead, I can offer myself the patience and kindness and unconditional acceptance that I try and give every one of my clients, and quietly and silently reassure myself:
“You are enough. You were enough. And you will always be enough. No matter what”.
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Join me for my next Radical Honesty Weekend Workshop on Dec 2–4, in Bristol
Law Turley is a BACP Registered Integrative Therapist and Certified Radical Honesty Trainer living and working in the south west of the UK.
