A Menopausal Grief That Can Be Managed
- May 22
- 2 min read
Today sees the end of my week talking about menopausal grief and I hope that it has resonated with some of you. It is ok to say goodbye to your old self and be excited about the new you emerging.
You have been managing your grief like it's an inconvenience.
Folding it up. Putting it away. Functioning through it. Telling yourself you'll deal with it properly when things settle down — as if things are going to settle down, as if that's how any of this works, as if grief runs on your schedule and not its own.
It doesn't.
And here's the brutal bit.
The grief you keep managing instead of feeling? It's not going anywhere. It is sitting in your body. In your shoulders and your jaw and the place behind your eyes where the headache lives. In the rage that arrives at 7am without a specific cause. In the crying in the car on a Tuesday for no reason you can name.
That's not you being dramatic.
That's grief doing what grief does when it doesn't get a proper room to live in.
It finds one anyway.
So let's stop pretending, shall we?
You are grieving. Not a person necessarily — though maybe that too. You are grieving a version of yourself that was mid-way through becoming when menopause arrived and blew the whole bloody thing up. You are grieving a life that was supposed to look different by now. A woman who had plans. Real ones. Hers.
And you are not your story.
I mean that in the most Missy Moo way possible which is — the story you've been telling yourself about what you've missed and what's too late and who you were supposed to be by now is just that. A story. Not the truth. A story you've been lugging around like it's fact when actually you are the one underneath it — the one who notices the story, the one who was always there, the one who is still bloody here.
Which means the grief isn't the ending.
It never was.
It's the clearing. It's burning off everything that was never really yours — the expectations, the timeline, the version of yourself you were performing before the reckoning arrived and made performing impossible.
What's left after the clearing is you.
The actual you.
But you have to feel the grief first. All the way through. Not around the edges. Not managed and scheduled and done tastefully. Through it. Ugly and inconvenient and without a single good reason that would satisfy anyone at a dinner party.
Feel it in the car. Feel it in the supermarket. Feel it at 3am when it comes for you and there's nothing left to distract yourself with.
Feel it.
Because on the other side of the grief you've been avoiding is the woman you've been becoming the whole bloody time.
She has been waiting.
She is not impressed that it took this long.
But she is ready when you are.
Women who refuse to suffer politely live here.
Missy Moo x
Comments