The Great Rage Awakening

Perimenopause will land us all in prison

I like to think I’m not having any perimenopause symptoms. Sure, my periods have changed a little, but only in the sense that they’ve gotten shorter and you sure as hell won’t find me complaining about that. Much of the reading you do around this life shift is all about the physical symptoms and the mental side of it is often overlooked. But probably the biggest change I’ve noticed over the last year within myself is the rage. The unmitigated rage.

What were once minor annoyances, are now things I want to wage war over. My latest one is spacial awareness. I’ve gone my whole life thinking it’s an unwritten rule in large, bustling urban cities that you have eyes in the back of your head, you keep your head on a swivel and understand how pavements work. It turns out, the people of Toronto, (who, as Canadians, I believe are generally a calm and reasonable people) when it comes to pavement etiquette, they said, ‘we prefer chaos’.

I have an eight minute walk to work where it feels like I’m in a human game of Tetris; dodging and weaving around people who are moseying, walking four-abreast, scrolling on their phones. During that eight minutes, I mentally punch at least seven people. Because truly, if you’re walking four abreast on a busy downtown sidewalk, I can only assume you want hand-to-hand combat.

Do you see what I mean about the rage?

If you see on the news one day ‘middle aged woman completely loses her shit at people minding their business walking on a Toronto sidewalk’, get the bail money ready, ‘cause it was me.

Some of the rage is over ridiculous things like that where sure, once I’ve found a quiet place to take a few deep breaths, I can laugh about them. But a lot of the rage seems to run deeper.

As women, we are socialised to be people pleasers. Perimenopause puts a moratorium on that and in it’s wake, you finally have to deal with what has simmered under the people pleasing surface for years, which is the rage.

I now feel furious for the younger version of me who let her boundaries be stomped on, who got walked over, dismissed and ignored. I feel a fiery anger for any man who has ever talked over me, not let me finish a sentence or undervalued my ideas. I am burning with resentment towards the version of me who stayed quiet or made herself smaller for the sake of others’ comfort.

I’m coming to realise what perimenopause really is, is a shedding of your past self. It strips everything away; all the filters, the rose tinted glasses, the social niceties and leaves you with the truth. You see clearly. And it’s enraging. I feel the rage we feel now is actually part grief for the people pleaser in us that’s dying.

I don’t know if there’s enough deep breathing, meditation or chakra alignment in the world that can calm the firestorm within, once its awakened. I am grateful that I am finally finding, owning and revelling in my power, but I do hope it doesn’t always come with this spicy anger on the side.

I’m choosing to look at this perimenopause journey as an awakening, a rebirth of sorts. And I have a feeling the version of me that will emerge will be unstoppably badass.