Je LOVE Changes

Do I?

This is me…but it doesn’t look like me at all and it looks like me a lot. I don’t know my face in the mirror or my heart in the mirror or my body for that matter. I cut off my nose off to spite my face but really cut it because I broke it half a dozen times and the second to the last one was a doozy when a poodle broke my nose but that’s another story for when I’m feeling like I love poodles again. Anyway, I didn’t cut it. Michael Kim cut it. He’s a plastic surgeon back in the states who shamed me about my old nose and promised this one looks better even though I look like an elf or a snub nosed cheerleader-the kind of nose I’ve always hated. I wish I could have the nose I was born with. It was funny, but long and slender and it was like my grandma’s nose and my dad’s nose and because of that I liked it. I knew just how to turn my face to make my nose look nice in photographs and I knew how to draw my face quickly and easily with a long, exaggerated j shape and brows that cut straight from my bridge but now I don’t know how to draw myself at all. My nostrils show and there are new curves and a new bump from a seventh break after it was snipped and molded. My mouth is much farther away and I don’t even recognise my smile with all that space above my lip. So, even though this may look a lot or a little like me, it is me and I’m learning to be grateful about all of it.

This post wasn’t even supposed to be about my nose. It’s really about changes in midlife/menopause and being grateful—even for difficult things but I got to drawing myself and had to explain the face thing before starting. And when I saw me in the drawing I really don’t look sure of myself-like the drawing is telling me she’s very unsure of how she turned out.

Menopause has made me very unsure of myself. Social media tells us that we’ll be “stronger than ever!” but my head yells, “Stronger? Never!!” I don’t know what I’m going to say or feel or do. My emotions are stuck in a premenstrual purgatory that never yields a result, rhyme or reason. Daydreams hurl new life journeys at me hourly. I play with plans to hike the world’s highest mountains, to buy a farm in Sweden, or to move back into my childhood bedroom. I’m a clinging snuggle bunny one moment and a prickly beast demanding solitude the next. My patience is eternally tipping in the wrong direction. I get angry at the weirdest things.

I won’t list all 34 “normal symptoms” of my menopausal experience, but physically it’s the hot flashes that are the toughest, dipping me in and out of roiling lava. They come a little bit all through the day but at night they pingpong me against the walls and floors. I haven’t been sleeping. They’re worse after wine and there’s a lot of rosé in Provence so I toss more than I should. It’s all in vogue to write about now with Naomi Watts and Oprah and so many others being all cool about it and craftily packaging up vitamins and minerals in a promising pill to help every fellow menopausal person. I haven’t tried many pills myself but I have found one thing that works immediately.

It’s a cold plunge. I know. Everyone’s doing that, too. It’s so 2020. I didn’t try it to Wim Hof myself. I just tried it because my husband double dared me to jump in our small pool one particularly chilly night and the relief and joy I felt were significant—pure pleasure and a long sought answer to my broken, internal thermometer. The relief is immediate and coupled with the endorphins from the shock, it could substitute that last glass of wine. So, even if you’re not suffering, jump in. I am finally feeling sure of something. I enjoy it and am grateful (sort of) for this new time of my life that sent me plunging.