The Body Week
- Jun 1
- 6 min read
This week at Moolife we are going all in on the body.
The actual version. The one that sounds like someone who has lived it, not someone who attended a conference about it.
Monday is this. The full honest body blog.
Tuesday is the midlife body truth. Short, sharp, and definitely sweary.
Wednesday, I have a loud question about your body that I want you to actually sit with instead of scrolling past.
Thursday is a whisper — the one you need to hear about the body you've been at war with.
Friday is the brutal realisation. The one about what you've been tolerating and what you're going to do about it.
WHAT MENOPAUSE ACTUALLY DOES TO YOUR BODY
The honest, sweary, slightly furious version.
Not the NHS leaflet.
Not the pastel-coloured wellness infographic with a woman laughing while holding a salad.
Not the “you may notice a few changes” version written by someone who has clearly never stood in Tesco crying because the self-checkout spoke to them too aggressively.
The real version.
The one women whisper to each other in car parks and voice notes and half-drunk glasses of Sauvignon Blanc after saying:
“Can I tell you something weird?”
Right.
Let’s begin.
Apparently, menopause was supposed to be:
a few hot flushes, the occasional sweaty night, your periods quietly packing a suitcase and leaving without drama, and perhaps — if you were particularly unlucky — becoming mildly irritable once every six weeks.
Like a hormonal weather forecast.
Bit cloudy.
Chance of perspiration.
Absolute bollocks.
Because what actually happens is your body suddenly decides to conduct a full systems audit while you are:
running a household
answering emails
looking after everyone else
trying not to lose your shit in the Sainsbury’s car park
And nobody properly warns you.
First — OESTROGEN.
Because nobody explains what the bloody stuff actually does.
I thought oestrogen was mainly there for:
periods
fertility
making babies
occasionally ruining white bedsheets
Turns out?
It runs HALF YOUR BODY.
Mood.
Memory.
Sleep.
Temperature regulation.
Skin.
Hair.
Libido.
Bones.
Bladder.
Concentration.
Joint lubrication.
Cardiovascular health.
Basically all the things currently going tits up simultaneously.
And then during perimenopause it starts fluctuating like a drunk DJ playing hormonal roulette.
Up.
Down.
Gone.
Back.
Sideways.
Who fucking knows.
One week you’re fine.
The next week you’re crying because somebody asked what you want for dinner and honestly Brenda if I knew what I wanted for dinner don’t you think I’d have solved that myself?
And because oestrogen was quietly running everything behind the scenes for thirty years, when it starts dropping your body reacts like:
“Right then. Every system panic immediately.”
That’s why it feels like your entire life is falling apart at once.
Because biologically?
It kind of is.
THE BRAIN FOG.
Jesus Christ.
I forgot the word for chair.
Chair.
Not “photosynthesis.”
Not “existentialism.”
Not the actor from that thing.
Chair.
I stood in my kitchen pointing at it like an exhausted Victorian ghost trying to communicate through a séance.
“That… that fucking… SIT DOWN THING.”
And the terrifying part is this:
it doesn’t feel like normal forgetfulness.
It feels like your brain has unplugged itself and wandered off without notice.
You walk into rooms with absolutely no clue why you’re there.
You reread emails seventeen times.
You lose words halfway through sentences.
You forget names, appointments, passwords, entire conversations.
At one point I genuinely thought:
“Well this is it then. The cognitive decline has arrived.”
No.
It’s hormones.
Or more specifically:
your brain trying to function without the hormonal support system it’s relied on for decades.
And honestly?
I would like compensation for the amount of fear caused by nobody bloody explaining this properly.
Because if someone had just sat me down and said:
“By the way, there may be a phase where your brain behaves like an overloaded laptop with forty tabs open.”
I’d have coped significantly better.
THE RAGE.
Ah yes.
The absolutely disproportionate, volcanic, dishwasher-related rage.
Nobody warns you about this either.
One minute you’re making tea.
The next minute you’re fantasising about living alone in a remote cottage because somebody breathed too loudly near you while asking where the batteries are.
And before anyone says:
“Maybe you’re just stressed.”
No Patricia.
I am hormonally unsupported and one passive-aggressive WhatsApp away from becoming a local legend.
The rage is real.
And here’s the worst part:
while it’s happening, a tiny part of your brain is watching in horror going:
“This does seem… excessive.”
But you cannot stop it.
Because menopause messes with the brain’s emotional regulation systems.
Your internal alarm system becomes trigger-happy while the sensible manager in your brain quietly clocks out for lunch.
And underneath that rage?
There is usually something very real.
The rage about the dishwasher is rarely about the dishwasher.
It’s about:
carrying too much
tolerating too much
explaining too much
coping too much
being everyone’s emotional support animal since 1997
Menopause didn’t create the resentment.
It just removed your ability to politely swallow it.
SLEEP.
Or as I now call it:
that thing I used to have.
Menopause sleep is genuinely unhinged.
You wake up at 3:14am:
sweating
freezing
needing a wee
anxious for no reason
suddenly remembering something embarrassing you said in 2008
Meanwhile your partner is asleep beside you like a tranquil woodland creature in a fucking herbal tea advert.
And the exhaustion that follows is not normal tiredness.
This isn’t:
“ooh I need an early night.”
This is:
“I could lie down in the pasta aisle and simply become part of the infrastructure.”
It’s bone-deep exhaustion.
The kind where replying to one email feels like an Olympic event.
THE LIBIDO.
Right.
We’re talking about it.
Because the silence around this is ridiculous.
Your libido has not necessarily disappeared.
It’s just no longer available for:
rushed foreplay
emotional immaturity
being groped while unloading the dishwasher
men saying “you alright?” instead of developing emotional intelligence
Hormones change.
Your body changes.
Your nervous system changes.
And suddenly your body requires:
safety
connection
time
actual effort
someone touching you like a human being instead of trying to start a lawnmower
Quite reasonable, honestly.
And yes:
Sometimes sex becomes painful.
My fanny is like a bag of out-of-date Doritos wrapped in sandpaper.
Sometimes desire changes completely.
Sometimes you grieve that.
That grief is real.
But different is not dead.
Different just requires a new conversation.
THE BODY BETRAYALS NOBODY PUTS IN THE LEAFLET.
The joints.
The skin.
The hair.
The bladder.
Honestly menopause feels like your body updating software without consent.
The joints suddenly ache.
You make noises standing up that sound medically concerning.
Your knees negotiate stairs like union reps.
Your skin dries out overnight like someone replaced your moisturiser with printer paper.
Your hair starts disappearing in quantities that feel deeply personal.
And the bladder?
The bladder develops opinions.
You sneeze and suddenly it’s a team-building exercise between you and your pelvic floor.
Nobody warned us because apparently society decided midlife women’s bodies become too embarrassing to discuss openly.
Well tough.
We’re discussing them now.
THE WEIGHT.
Let’s do this properly.
Menopause changes fat distribution and metabolism.
That is biology.
Not moral failure.
Your body starts storing more fat around the abdomen because hormones are changing the instructions.
Which means:
the same diet
the same exercise
the same routines
suddenly stop working the same way.
And women blame themselves for this constantly.
As though their body has betrayed them personally instead of responding exactly as bodies do when hormones shift dramatically.
Listen to me carefully:
Your body is not failing.
It is adapting.
You are not lazy.
You are not disgusting.
You are not “letting yourself go.”
You are existing inside a body running a completely different hormonal programme than it was ten years ago.
That deserves understanding.
Not shame.
HERE IS THE PART I NEED YOU TO HEAR MOST.
You are not imagining this.
You are not weak.
You are not dramatic.
You are not “just stressed.”
You are in the middle of one of the biggest physiological transitions of your life with catastrophically inadequate preparation and a society that still expects women to endure it quietly while continuing to organise birthday presents and reply to emails with warmth.
No wonder you’re furious.
And yes — HRT can help.
For many women it helps enormously.
But you cannot HRT your way through:
burnout
resentment
emotional exhaustion
decades of self-abandonment
a life that no longer fits
That work is different work.
That’s the reckoning part.
And honestly?
Maybe it’s about bloody time.
So if you recognised yourself in this:
the rage
the fog
the shattered sleep
the aching joints
the missing libido
the emotional exhaustion
the feeling that your body has become a stranger
please hear me.
You are not broken.
You are waking up.
And women who refuse to suffer politely live here.
Love Missy Moo x
Follow along all week on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok so you don't miss a thing. Because this week we are saying the quiet part out loud about our bodies. And it is about bloody time.
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