I have been so constrained lately, for years really, both scared of truthful self expression online and too fatigued to complete thought processes or see things through. I have something like 8 drafts begun here on Substack. I never know where my energy is going to be from day to day, or when symptoms will flare.

Except that this is the second month now where I am laid low with a banger of a headache on day 11 of my cycle, when estrogen starts rising in preparation for the Great Egg Release that is only a few days away. Last month the headache lasted four days (until ovulation) and I’m sure I can expect the same this month. My liver/gall bladder area hurts (I have confirmed gallstones- and a 5k hospital bill to prove it!- and undoubtedly a sluggish liver so the estrogen doesn’t get detoxed as it should and causes all manner of symptoms) and I barely slept last night. The headache pain is beyond. Sitting on my computer never helps when I am in this state but since nothing helps actually and I have some faint hope that writing out my thoughts and feelings might move things along, here I am.

Everyone talks about perimenopause but few realize that minerals underlie hormonal processes. Minerals, in fact, lie under everything the body does. The literal building blocks; it does not get any more elemental.

My situation is typical for a metabolically unwell woman in her 40s- estrogen dominance (meaning the ratio of estrogen to progesterone is off), the aforementioned clogged detox pathways, low minerals (though my magnesium is up and I am out of the Four Lows pattern my calcium, sodium, and potassium are still low), blood sugar imbalance, low thyroid & adrenal function. My situation is textbook at this point, yet so many women are stumbling looking for answers and help.

Also did you know that 88% of Americans are metabolically unwell? I would bet that it’s skewed higher for women, and especially for older women. So rather my situation is typical for a woman in her 40s (no need for the “metabolically unwell” qualifier), in the states at least.

I want to help them all, especially as I foresee a tsunami of women seeking help over the next few decades. Perimenopause wasn’t a thing for the boomers of my mom’s generation. I mean I’m sure it was for some individuals (if they were lucky enough to have found the help to understand what was happening to them), but it was not the cultural phenomenon it is for my generation. And each generation is metabolically worse, so unless we make some quick changes culture wide (and, I mean, ha) this tsunami is coming (is already here, really).

I have shared about the slow approach I am taking to healing, and the faith it takes. Today is one of the many days where that faith is severely tested. I have healed some big things in the last year and a half, but so much remains.

I am experiencing deep, lasting envy for the first time in my life. Not just a flash, not just a moment of jealousy that inspires me to reach for a goal, but extended and painful yearning for what other people have.

In my lowest moments I hate (certain) people who are metabolically well. I see people living their summer lives on social media, and I want to scream. Why do their lives get to be normal? They can just eat any old food any old where and not react? They can sleep in a strange place? They can sleep at home? They can be at a fireworks display surrounded by thousands of strangers and not feel overwhelmingly… overwhelmed?

I see women in their 20s and 30s who have no idea that their health and beauty aren’t products of their superior lifestyles and good genes, but of their youth. Or maybe that is me projecting onto my own youth and how I had no idea what was coming. Those poor frumpy women in their 40s, they should eat a better diet.

I have a friend who is 15 years younger than me, in her late 20s. Last summer we were in a clothing shop together. I was too fat for the few pieces I tried on, an experience I’ve gotten used to ever since my weight ballooned in a matter of months at 41 as my body de-energized and all systems went haywire.

She looked amazing in everything she tried on. I felt like her mom, telling her “You HAVE to buy those jeans. I will literally lend you the money. No one has ever looked so good in a pair of pants.” (She did buy them). As I’m showering her with truthful praise, I’m thinking that she has no idea that her robust health and its attendant beauty are a product of youth, which will fade. I didn’t know it either at her age. She’s the one friend who does not really understand what I’m going through, though her care for me is real, because she still has abundant energy and wellbeing.

I see these young women in real life and online and think “Just wait little babe! Just you wait.” And it’s not that I want them to suffer, it’s that there’s an 88% chance they will and I am envious that they are still at the stage in life where they don’t know that yet, where they haven’t felt that in their cells yet.

me at the beach in my home town of South Lake Tahoe, age 25

And I think about how I ignored the menopause conversation for decades of blogging/podcasting because I wasn’t in that stage of life yet (still am not, as menopause is defined as the day you haven’t bled for 365 days and I am still cycling regularly), but how perimenopause is actually what women are talking about when they are seeking help and resources for this stage of life.

What I’m really wanting to express is- I’m depressed. My energy is depressed. Depression isn’t a purely emotional phenomenon, it isn’t just long term sadness.

Depression is a low energy state.

When I got the results of my first Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis from Niecia Nelson a year and a half ago, and she asked if I was depressed, I was amazed that she knew. I hadn’t told anyone, hadn’t even really fully admitted it to myself. But she saw it in the mineral status of my body. Because (to put a complex matter very simply) low minerals = low energy and low energy = depression.

I miss newness, excitement, novelty. I miss possibility and magic and the unknown. I miss socializing, people. My health has made my world small, has collapsed possibility after possibility. I am almost always at home, too unwell to be out. I am lucky enough to work from home and to have a husband/business co-owner who oversees operations and our two godsend employees.

Our family recently started sharing our location with one another indefinitely on our phones, and the joke is that its kind of pointless for me to have mine on because I am always home.

I want to acknowledge here that so many people have it so much worse than I do. I’ve been listening to those with chronic illness for long enough now that I just can’t not acknowledge this fact, even though I’m also aware that we all have the right to share our stories even when others’ are worse. They occupy the farthest reaches of hell on the spectrum of metabolic unwellness and, while an eventual turnaround/significant healing still seem in the realm of possibility for me, there are many who know that that isn’t likely for them.

On top of all this, my mom still hasn’t called. She’s still not here. It must be real. Almost nine years later and I still can’t believe it’s real. The more psychological work I do in this healing process the more I see what role loss has played in my declining health. And aging is loss. My Grandma Inie used to say that the thing about getting older is you lose so many people.

Put another way- “time is grief”, a brief sentence that I read last night in the beautiful book As Long As You Need: Permission to Grieve by J.S. Park.

Another quote from that book- “None of my trauma, really, made me tough. Only tired.”

I miss myself almost as much as I miss her. Both of the people I knew are gone. She popped out of existence. I unraveled. I meant those as two separate things but they are related, A led to B. She popped out of physical existence in an unexpected instant, and I was never, will never be, the same.

I grieve for us both, for the loss of her entire being and for the loss of who I was. Two people who I will never get back.

But I am still here, so there is hope. She cannot be recalled, but perhaps some of my vitality and essence can.

This is why I sit down to type even when it might exacerbate my flaring symptoms. Previously unconscious connections get made, and I end up offering myself insights and comfort that I didn’t know I needed or that I had in me.

It bolsters the faith I need to get through.