There isn’t anything particularly wrong with my life.

I have my family. I have people I love, a home, the everyday things that make up a life. I’m grateful for all of it, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

And yet, somewhere along the way, I’ve started to feel a little lost.

Not lost in the sense of not knowing what to do next or needing to change everything. It’s something harder to explain than that. A feeling that I’m living a life I’m happy with, but somewhere inside it, I’ve lost sight of myself.

The strange thing is, I don’t remember losing her.

When I turned 40, I felt a sense of freedom I hadn’t expected.

There was something liberating about entering that decade. I felt good about myself. More comfortable in my own skin. Less concerned with things that had once taken up so much space in my head. I remember that feeling of liberation, of being in my 40s and feeling, in many ways, more myself than ever, caring less what people thought.

I didn’t know then that my relationship with myself might change again.

Now, approaching my late 40s, I find myself questioning things. Not my family or the life I’ve built, but something more personal.

Who I am.

What I’m doing with my life.

Whether I’m in the right place.

What it is I’m looking for when I can’t quite put my finger on what’s missing.

It’s a strange feeling, to have experienced that sense of freedom and then find yourself back in a place of uncertainty.

When the life you’ve built isn’t the problem

I think there’s something particularly difficult about feeling this way when your life is, in so many respects, good.

What do you do when you’re happy with your family, grateful for the life you have and still feel that something within you is missing?

It’s difficult to explain, even to yourself.

You can love your life and still feel disconnected from the person you’re becoming. You can be grateful for everything you have and still wonder where your own sense of direction has gone.

And perhaps because there’s no obvious problem to point to, there’s a temptation to dismiss the feeling. To tell yourself you’re overthinking things, that you have nothing to complain about, that you should simply be content.

But gratitude and uncertainty can exist alongside one another. One doesn’t cancel out the other.

I’m beginning to think that what I’ve been struggling with isn’t a desire for a different life. It’s a desire to feel more connected to myself within the life I already have.

And I don’t think those are the same thing.

The question of who we are

We spend so much of our lives becoming someone.

We grow up, form relationships, build families, take on responsibilities and adapt to the people and circumstances around us. Our identities are shaped by all of these things, often so gradually that we don’t stop to question them.

And somewhere along the way, we become used to knowing who we are.

Then perimenopause arrives and sometimes the certainty begins to shift alongside all the physical symptoms.

For some women, perimenopause brings changes in mood, sleep, energy, concentration and how they feel within themselves. The hormonal transition can be one part of a much bigger picture, arriving with the natural changes in roles, priorities and expectations that midlife can bring.

When I trained as a Menopause Wellness Coach, one of the things that struck me most was how much space the curriculum gave to identity. Not as a side note, but as a central part of the experience. The psychological impact of perimenopause, the questioning, the uncertainty, the sense of not quite recognising yourself, is documented, studied and real. It has a name. It isn’t a personal failing or a sign that something has gone wrong with you specifically. It’s part of what this transition can do.

I wish someone had told me that earlier.

That might be part of what makes this stage so difficult to articulate. We might be looking for a clear reason why we feel different, when the experience itself is much less straightforward.

I know that, for me, the question keeps coming back to identity.

Not in the sense that I don’t know who I am on paper. I know my roles. I know the people I love and the responsibilities I have.

It’s something underneath all of that.

Who am I, beyond the things I do for other people? What do I want for myself now? Where do I want my life to go? And why do these questions feel harder to answer than they once did?

There’s a part of me that wants to work it all out. To understand why I feel this way, identify what’s changed and find a way back to that feeling of being comfortable and certain in myself.

I’m used to looking for answers. I want to understand what’s happening and what I can do about it. But I’m starting to wonder whether the pressure to figure everything out might be making this harder.

Maybe I don’t need to decide who I’m supposed to be in the next chapter of my life just yet. Maybe I can acknowledge that something feels different without immediately needing to fix it.

What I do know is that I miss that feeling of being at ease with myself. Of feeling a sense of freedom and possibility without having to question so much about who I am and where I’m going.

I’m not trying to become the woman I was at 40 again. I can’t and perhaps I wouldn’t want to. I’ve lived more, learned more and changed in ways I probably don’t fully recognise yet.

But I’d like to feel connected to myself again.

Maybe that’s where I need to begin. Not with a grand plan or a reinvention, but with a little more curiosity about the woman I am now.

I don’t know exactly where that will lead.

Go gently,

Dani

If this resonated, you might also want to read the articles below:

I spent a weekend recently with a group of gorgeous smart women around my age, some I knew well others not so much. It was the kind of day where the conversation goes on longer than you planned and nobody really wants to leave.

At some point we started talking about how everyone was actually doing and one by one, things came up. Trouble sleeping, feeling irritable, tiredness in a way that felt unfamiliar. Joints that had started aching. Anxiety that had appeared from nowhere. Feeling like a version of themselves they didn’t quite recognise.

Each thing was mentioned as its own separate problem. Something to manage or get checked out, or just push through.

It wasn’t a room full of women who had never thought about perimenopause. Some of us had. We talked about it, compared notes, asked each other questions. That part of the conversation felt easy and familiar.

It was the other conversations that stayed with me afterwards.

I’m not a medical professional and I would never tell someone what’s happening in their body. But I’ve spent a long time reading, researching and living with perimenopause. But listening that afternoon, I kept thinking the same thing: nobody was joining the dots.

My mother didn’t either.

She went through what I now understand was perimenopause without anyone ever naming it. She saw different specialists for different things. One for the sleep. One for the joint pain. One for the brain fog and anxiety. None of them were talking to each other and none of them connected what she was experiencing to one underlying change happening in her body. Some of her symptoms were never properly explained. They just eased with time. She got through it eventually, but she suffered far more than she needed to because nobody ever said: these things belong together.

That was a different generation. But I don’t think things have changed as much as we’d like to believe.

Women are still arriving at their symptoms one at a time. Still treating each thing as its own separate problem. Still waiting for the one symptom they’ve been told to look for before they allow themselves to consider that this might be perimenopause.

And if that symptom doesn’t come or hasn’t come yet, they rule it out entirely.

“I’m not there yet.”

I hear some version of that a lot and I understand it, because I also know what can sit underneath it.

There’s a worry about claiming something that isn’t yours. About jumping on a bandwagon. About deciding everything is perimenopause when actually you’re just tired or stressed or getting older in the ordinary way. That self-doubt is real and it’s worth saying out loud, because it keeps a lot of women from asking questions they deserve to ask.

But there’s something else too. Something that’s harder to admit.

Naming perimenopause means acknowledging that your body is entering a new stage. And for a lot of women, that feels like admitting something about their age. There’s a fear of being seen differently. Of being past something. Of leaving behind a version of yourself you weren’t ready to leave.

I understand that too. I’ve felt it myself and it’s difficult to admit.

They list symptoms. They share statistics. They tell women what to look for. All of that matters but the women who most need to hear about perimenopause are often the ones who have already decided it doesn’t apply to them yet. Because they’re looking for one specific thing and not finding it. Because they’re treating each symptom separately and nobody has ever suggested they might be connected. Because they don’t want to be that woman.

The barrier isn’t always a lack of information. Sometimes it’s the way we’ve been taught to look.

If any of this is making sense for you, if you’re treating your sleep and your mood, your brain fog and your aches as completely separate, unrelated things, it might be worth sitting with the possibility that they’re not. Not as a diagnosis but just as a question worth taking to your doctor.

You don’t have to be certain. You just have to be curious.

And you don’t have to wait for the hot flush.

I’m not a medical professional and this isn’t medical advice. If you think perimenopause could be part of what you’re experiencing, please do speak to your doctor. You deserve to be taken seriously.

Be kind to yourself,

Dani

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Before I start, I am not a medical professional. This is my personal experience only. If you’re experiencing symptoms, please speak to your doctor.

For a while, I genuinely thought I’d got there.

After years of adjusting, reviewing, trying different formulations and doses, I’d finally landed on the right combination. Estradot patches, progesterone, testosterone, vaginal oestrogen. Everything I needed. Everything I’d fought to get.

And it was working. Really working. My energy was back. My sleep had improved. The joint pain that had plagued me for so long had eased. I was enjoying my walks again. I felt more like myself than I had in years.

I let myself relax into it. I stopped bracing for the next difficult patch. I thought — this is it. I’ve figured it out.

Then this summer, my patch became unavailable.

An HRT shortage here in the UK meant my pharmacy couldn’t source Estradot. I was switched first to Estraderm, which caused a significant skin reaction. Then to Evorel, which I’d been on before and tolerated reasonably well.

I told myself it would be fine. Same dose. Different brand. It would be fine.

It hasn’t been fine.

For the past few weeks I’ve been in pain.

Not dramatic, just relentless, grinding, daily pain. My left forearm, elbow and wrist are the worst. Lifting a kettle hurts. Getting plates from a cupboard hurts. Lifting a cup of tea hurts.

Sometimes my upper back, shoulders, hips, knees and ankles have all joined in at various points. I wake up during the night because I’m uncomfortable and need to change position. I wake up in the morning feeling worse than when I went to bed.

I feel like I’m in my 70s.

And the hardest part isn’t even the physical pain. It’s everything the pain takes with it.

I look after myself. I try to keep stress low. I take my supplements, like magnesium, vitamin D, omega-3s. I walk regularly because it genuinely helps my body and my mind. I do everything I can to support myself alongside my HRT, not instead of it.

And still, the walks I rely on as my daily reset, my thinking space, my ritual — I don’t enjoy them as much anymore. I run out of steam quickly and my body doesn’t feel like my own.

My mood has changed. I’m more irritable than I want to be. Less patient. Less calm. Everything takes more effort than it should.

Here’s the thing that struck me most about the past few weeks.

I stopped writing things down a long time ago.

When I was struggling, before HRT and during the months of adjusting it, I kept a tracker. I noted my symptoms, my sleep, how I felt when I woke up, what had been hard that day. I used it to spot patterns. To take something concrete to my doctor and to make sense of what my body was doing.

And then gradually, without really noticing, I stopped.

I didn’t need to anymore. I wasn’t searching for patterns because nothing felt urgent enough to track. The hard days were fewer. The good days became the norm.

It’s only now, with everything flaring again, that I’ve gone back to writing things down. Trying to see a pattern. Trying to understand what’s changed and why.

And I realised — that’s actually one of the clearest signs of how well I’d been doing. You don’t track what isn’t troubling you. The fact that I’d stopped for over a year was a testament to how far I’d come.

Which makes coming back to it feel like more of a setback than it perhaps needs to.

I’ve been here before.

This is almost exactly how I felt before I started HRT three years ago. That creeping adaptation to feeling unwell. The point where you stop noticing how bad it’s got because you’ve just adjusted to it.

The difference now is that I know what feeling well feels like and that makes this harder, not easier.

Because I know what I’m missing.

I have a doctor’s appointment next week. I’ll ask about whether the switch in patches could be contributing, whether my levels need checking, whether there’s another option now that Estradot is unavailable. I’m trying not to change anything before I’ve spoken to someone.

But I want to be honest with you about where I am. Because I think there’s something important in this that doesn’t get said enough.

You can do everything right. You can research, advocate for yourself, find the right doctor, get the right prescription, finally land on the combination that works. And then something completely outside your control - a supply shortage, a formulation change, a brand switch, can send you several steps back.

That’s the reality of managing this long term.

What I want you to take from this is not the setback. It’s the lesson underneath it.

Know your body. Stay educated. Keep tracking, even when things feel fine or at least don’t be surprised when you have to go back to it. The women who navigate perimenopause best are not the ones who never struggle. They’re the ones who notice quickly when something has shifted, who don’t wait too long before going back to their doctor, and who trust their own instincts even when the system tells them everything looks normal.

HRT is not a destination. It’s an ongoing conversation with your body. Some seasons of that conversation are harder than others.

I thought I’d finally figured it out.

Maybe the lesson is that there isn’t a final figured out. There’s just paying attention, staying honest and going back to the doctor when you need to.

Which is what I’m doing.

Be kind to yourself,

Dani x

If you’re going through something similar, symptoms returning after a period of feeling well, I hope this helps you feel less alone in it. Drop a comment or send me a message. I read everything.

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If you’d like to go deeper, HerStillSpace Circle is a smaller, quieter space for women who want more. You can find out more here.

The moment that stays with me most isn’t looking in the mirror, it’s catching myself behaving in a way that doesn’t feel like me.

Being more irritable than I want to be, having less patience. Feeling strangely flat about things that would normally light something up. Sitting somewhere quiet and realising I don’t particularly want to do anything and not because I’m sad, exactly, but because the version of me who used to want things feels temporarily out of reach.

And then there’s the guilt.

Because I know who I am supposed to be.

I’m the person who thinks deeply. Who cares about people, who notices things and who has always had ideas, projects, books to read, things to make. I’ve spent years building an identity around being creative, capable and emotionally present.

So when I don’t recognise my own reactions, it feels unsettling in a way that’s hard to explain.

But there’s another part of identity grief that I don’t think we talk about enough.

The physical part.

Perimenopause has changed how I feel inside my body. But it has also changed what I see when I look at it.

Over the past few years it has sometimes felt as though my face changed almost overnight. More lines and less elasticity and the changes that seem disproportionate to the amount of time that has actually passed.

I look in the mirror and I can still see myself, but I can also see a version of myself I don’t feel ready for yet.

I don’t want to pretend this is purely about hormones and not about getting older. Of course it’s also about ageing. I’m 47, my body has lived 47 years and there is something confronting about seeing those years suddenly become more visible.

But knowing that intellectually doesn’t make it emotionally simple.

There have been many times when I’ve found myself trying to fix it. Looking at products, thinking about treatments, trying to get back some of the firmness or smoothness I remember having.

And I’ve caught myself wondering what exactly I’m trying to get back.

Is it the skin?

Or is it the feeling of being the woman who had that skin?

Because I think that’s where the grief lives sometimes.

It’s not that I want to look 25 again. I want to look like me. The me I recognise. The me whose reflection doesn’t make me pause and think, when did that happen?

Your face is one of the places where your identity is reflected back at you every single day. You can’t really escape it.

Then there are the internal changes.

The irritability, the tiredness, the disrupted sleep, the brain fog, that feeling that my emotional responses aren’t always as predictable or manageable as they once were.

It’s unsettling when your mind and your body both seem to be changing at the same time and because you’re old enough to have known yourself for decades, you notice the difference.

That’s what makes it grief.

You’re not mourning a person who has disappeared.

You’re mourning the familiarity of being her.

The woman whose face you knew, whose energy you could rely on, who knew what she liked, what she wanted, how she felt, and generally recognised herself when she looked in the mirror.

There is a strange pressure, especially for women, to turn every difficult transition into an empowering lesson. To say that ageing is beautiful, that change is inevitable, that we should embrace our new selves with open arms.

But sometimes I don’t want to embrace it.

Sometimes I just want to acknowledge that something has been lost.

The ease of recognising myself. The confidence of knowing what my body was going to do. The version of myself who felt more familiar.

That is grief and I think it’s allowed.

But grief doesn’t mean the story ends there.

Maybe some parts of me are leaving and maybe some parts are simply tired. Maybe some parts have been buried under years of being what everyone else needed me to be.

What I’ve come to understand is that there probably isn’t a final version of me waiting at the end of all this. I don’t think I’ll arrive somewhere and think - there she is, that’s who I am now. I think I’ll keep changing, keep growing, keep finding out what I’m made of.

So maybe identity grief in perimenopause isn’t about losing yourself completely.

Maybe it’s about standing between two versions of yourself, grieving the woman you recognise, while slowly, imperfectly, learning to make room for whoever comes next.

I haven’t finished becoming her yet.

And I’m not sure I ever will.

If this put words to something you’ve been carrying, a restack helps more women find it.

Go gently,
Dani x

If you’re trying to work out where you are in all of this, I created a free Perimenopause Profile Assessment that might help. It takes 2 minutes and it’s a place to start. You can find it here:

Understand the woman you're becoming, and have a companion for her every week.
You can find out more here.

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Every woman who finds HerStillSpace arrives carrying something different. The symptoms might overlap - the exhaustion, the brain fog, the feeling of not quite recognising yourself. But underneath all of that, the emotional experience is different for everyone.

Some women are grieving the loss of the capable, high-functioning version of themselves they built their whole identity around. Some feel completely alone in this, even surrounded by people who love them. Some have been dismissed so many times, by doctors, by themselves — that they’ve stopped trusting their own instincts entirely. Some are navigating perimenopause while everything else has also fallen apart at the same time. And some have just gradually lost track of who they actually are.

These aren’t the same experience. They need different things.

That’s why I created this.

The HerStillSpace Perimenopause Profile Assessment is a free, 6 question quiz that takes about 2 minutes. At the end, you’ll find out which of 5 profiles fits where you are right now.

Not where you should be. Not where you’ll get to. Where you actually are.

The profiles came from listening to this community over time. From the comments, the replies, the messages women send when they feel safe enough to say the real thing. I wanted to create something that made a woman feel immediately recognised. Not just informed.

Because there’s a difference between reading about perimenopause and reading something that sounds exactly like you.

The 5 profiles are:

• The Exhausted Achiever

• The Lonely Woman in a Full House

• The Woman Who Stopped Asking

• The Woman After Everything Changed

• The Woman Who Got Lost

You'll know which one sounds most like you when you see it. And if you see yourself in more than one, that's completely normal. These aren't rigid boxes. They're just a way of naming what's often hard to put into words.

The short result is free. If you want to go deeper — the full report for your profile, what it means, what's happening hormonally, what to notice this month and what to say to your doctor — that's available as a standalone guide to buy here. Yours to download, print and keep.

But first start with the FREE quiz. 2 minutes. No email required to see your result.

Take the assessment here

I’d love to know which profile you get. Drop it in the comments, I’ll be reading every single one.

Go gently,
Dani x

I’ve written before about emotional contagion, the way someone else’s stress can settle into your body without a word being spoken. This is the other side of that.

I didn’t have a dramatic moment of realisation.

There was no single conversation, no argument, no breaking point I can point to and say, that’s when everything changed.

It was gradual. A slow accumulation of things I’d been doing for so long they’d stopped feeling like choices. Always being available, always picking up when someone needed to talk. Always the one who said YES when the school WhatsApp lit up asking for volunteers.

I’m not saying any of that was wrong. A lot of it came from a genuine place. I care about the people in my life. I still do.

But I was saying yes when I was already stretched. Carrying other people’s worries home with me and turning them over long after everyone else had moved on. Treating other people’s difficult moments as things I needed to fix or absorb or manage.

I didn’t notice what that cost me. Not for a long time.

Then perimenopause arrived and I couldn’t pretend anymore.

The exhaustion became louder. The brain fog became harder to ignore. My tolerance for noise, busyness and emotional overwhelm seemed to disappear almost overnight. Things I used to push through suddenly felt enormous.

For a while I thought I was becoming less resilient. Less capable. Less able to cope.

Now I think something else was happening.

I think I was finally noticing what things had always cost me.

Perimenopause didn’t create my need for peace. It exposed how desperately I needed it.

The reduced capacity was frustrating at first. I didn’t want it. I wanted to keep doing everything I’d always done, the same way, without consequence.

But the consequences became impossible to ignore.

Too many social plans in one week and I’d feel it. Too many conversations, too much noise, too much stimulation and I’d find myself irritable, overwhelmed and desperate for some space. Not because I didn’t enjoy seeing people. Not because I cared about them any less. I simply didn’t have the same reserves I once had.

Even now I sometimes get it wrong. I’ll look at a week ahead and convince myself I’ll be fine. I’ll say yes to a few things because they all sound manageable in isolation. Then halfway through the week I’ll realise I’ve taken on more than I can comfortably hold.

The difference now is that I don’t judge myself for it.

I pay attention.

Something definitely changed in my 40s.

Not overnight but gradually. I became braver about choosing myself. More willing to honour what I know I need. Less worried about disappointing people.

And often it isn’t even about disappointing anyone. It’s simply about being honest.

Honest with myself about what I realistically have capacity for. Honest with the other person about what I need. I still struggle to say no sometimes, especially to family, especially when someone I love is going through something hard. That instinct to show up doesn’t go away.

But I’ve become more selective. More intentional. The school WhatsApp messages still come in. I just don’t feel obligated to respond to everyone anymore.

That’s the part I didn’t understand for years.

When I constantly push past my limits, nobody gets the best of me. Not me. Not my family. Not my friends.

When I give myself the space I need to rest and recharge, I show up differently. More present. More patient. More myself.

Protecting my energy isn’t something I do instead of being a good friend, wife, mother or daughter.

It’s what allows me to be one.

If this put words to something you’ve been carrying, a restack helps more women find it.

Go gently,
Dani x

If this resonated, you might also want to read the article below — on emotional contagion and the relief of finally having a name for it.

If you’d like to go deeper, HerStillSpace Circle is a smaller, quieter space for women who want more. You can find out more here.

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But a few years ago, things started to feel different.

It was around the time I first realised I was in perimenopause. I was struggling, though not in any way most people would have noticed. My husband probably saw it more than anyone. He’s an extrovert, he genuinely loves being around people and I started to feel like I couldn’t keep up in the way I used to. Socialising took more out of me than it ever had. I needed longer to recover afterwards. I couldn’t do back to back things the way I once could.

I found myself wanting less. Less noise. Less rushing. Fewer things pulling me in different directions.

What I actually looked forward to were the simple things. A quiet afternoon with a book, a walk with the dog, a film on the sofa, time alone in my bedroom, just to have a bit of peace. Or being with my family, but not needing to be the one holding everything together.

For a while I wondered if I was becoming boring. Antisocial. A bit too comfortable shutting myself away.

But it didn’t feel like something was wrong. It felt like relief.

For most of my adult life there was always someone who needed something from me. The children. The house. Everyone’s feelings to think about and manage. I just kept going, the way you do. I became the reliable one. The person everyone could count on.

Somewhere in all of that, I stopped noticing what I needed. Not because I didn’t want to know. There just wasn’t any room left to ask.

Now that space seems to be coming back and what I’m finding there has surprised me.

I don’t have some big urge to reinvent myself. No dramatic transformation, no list of goals, no self improvement project. Mostly I just want peace. The kind that comes from not having to perform a version of yourself shaped around everyone else’s expectations.

For the first time in years I’ve been asking myself a simple question. What do I actually enjoy? Not what I should enjoy. Not what would make me more productive or more interesting. Just what feels right.

And more often than not, the answer is something quiet. Baking. Sitting in the garden. A slow morning. An afternoon on my own.

I still have my more outgoing moments. I love seeing my friends, and I do love to dance. But instead of treating the quiet stuff as something to fix, I’ve started wondering if this is just who I’ve always been.

I read something recently that put words to all of this better than I could.

It said that during perimenopause, even women who think of themselves as naturally extroverted can find they want more time alone. More me time, with a solitary slant. The hormonal shifts can make you more introspective, more emotional and that this isn’t a sign that something’s wrong.

It’s an invitation to turn inward for a while. After years of looking after everyone else, it can be the start of choosing what comes next, with a bit more purpose.

That landed for me. Because there was a period where I really did struggle. My hormones were depleted and it was affecting me in every way, mentally and emotionally. I’m in a much better place now. But even now, some days I am a hundred percent an introvert, and I’ve stopped apologising for that.

There’s a comfort now in being able to turn things down. Choosing my own peace used to feel like letting someone else down. Now it just feels like looking after myself.

Maybe I’m not becoming more introverted after all.

Maybe I’m simply becoming more myself.

Dani x

If this is where you are too, you might like HerStillSpace Circle.
It's a quieter corner of this space, for the posts that feel too personal for here, on the days when a bit more stillness is what you need.

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Before I start, I want to be clear. I am not a medical professional. This is my personal experience only. HRT is not the only option and it isn’t right for everyone. I tried other things first. What I’m sharing is simply what worked best for me, and what has made an enormous difference to my life.

I started HRT on a Monday in March 2023.

By Wednesday morning I felt different.

I noticed it on my walk. A little more energy, a slightly lighter mood, a night’s sleep that had actually done something. I hadn’t expected to feel anything that quickly. But something had changed and I knew it.

What I was living with before

I want to be honest about how bad things had got.

I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn’t fix. My neck and shoulders ached almost every single day. I was taking painkillers regularly just to get through. Tension headaches came and went constantly. My body felt like somewhere uncomfortable to live.

But the hardest thing to admit was the rage.

I was not easy to live with. I would go from feeling relatively calm to intensely irritated in minutes. I was snapping at my children. I was snapping at my husband. I felt angry a lot of the time and I didn’t fully understand why. Everything felt like too much. Everything felt like it was on top of me.

I felt ashamed of it. I knew it wasn’t really me. But knowing that didn’t make it stop.

What I tried first

Before I went down the HRT route I tried other things.

Read more

This is the part that comes after that. What I did next. How I prepared and what I actually said when I went back.

I’m sharing it because I know how many women are sitting in that same place right now. Feeling unwell. Going round in circles. Leaving appointments without answers. Wondering if they’re imagining it.

You’re not imagining it and you’re allowed to go back in prepared.

Before I went back

The antidepressants made me feel numb. Flat in a different way than before, but not better. They didn’t touch the aches, the exhaustion, the brain fog, or the feeling that my body had become uncomfortable to live in.

I remember sitting with that and thinking: what if I’m not depressed? What if something else is going on?

That question sent me to do my own research. I started reading about perimenopause properly, not just the hot flushes and missed periods version, but the full picture. The fatigue. The sleep disruption. The anxiety that seemed to arrive from nowhere. The brain fog, the aching joints, the itchy skin and the low mood. The creeping sense of not recognising yourself.

It all sounded familiar.

I also learned something that changed how I felt going into that next appointment. Perimenopause cannot be ruled out by a blood test. FSH levels fluctuate. A single normal result doesn’t mean hormones aren’t involved. And yet that test is still used as a reason to close the conversation in so many appointments, leaving women convinced they must be imagining things.

I hadn’t been imagining things.

How I prepared

I made notes before that appointment. Not an essay, just a clear list. My symptoms, how long they’d been happening, and how they were affecting my daily life. I wanted facts rather than just feelings, not because my feelings weren’t valid, but because I’d left appointments before having not quite said what I needed to say.

I went in knowing what I wanted to discuss and why I thought hormones might be part of the explanation.

That preparation mattered more than I expected. Not because I needed to impress anyone, but because it meant I didn’t leave anything out and when you’re sitting in a doctor’s room with 10 minutes on the clock, it’s easy to forget half of what you meant to say.

What I actually said

I was nervous. I want to be honest about that. There’s something uncomfortable about suggesting a possible explanation to the person who’s supposed to be providing one.

But I knew my own body. And I knew something had changed.

So I said something close to this:

“I think this might be perimenopause. I’ve been reading about it and so many of the symptoms fit. I’m exhausted all the time, my sleep isn’t good, my body aches all the time, I can’t think straight, my mood has changed and I don’t feel like myself. I don’t think the antidepressants are addressing what’s actually going on. They’re making me numb but they’re not touching the physical symptoms at all.”

That was it. No long speech. No list of references. Just a calm, honest account of what I was experiencing and what I believed might be causing it.

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What happened

She listened. She took me off the antidepressants. She was reluctant about HRT but said I could give it a try, and she prescribed it.

It wasn’t dramatic. She didn’t say I’d been right all along. But for the first time, hormones were being considered as part of the explanation rather than each symptom being treated separately.

I left with a plan. After months of going round in circles, that felt enormous.

What I want you to take from this

Looking back at my medical records now, I can see that my doctor wasn’t simply dismissing me. She ran extensive tests. She was trying to find explanations. The investigations were genuine attempts to understand what was happening.

But there is something that many women experience in that process, and I experienced it too. A focus on mood and mental health before hormones are properly considered. An assumption that normal blood tests mean nothing hormonal is happening. A gap between what women are feeling and what gets formally explored.

That gap has a cost. It’s measured in months of feeling unwell without answers. In medications that don’t address the real problem. In women wondering what’s wrong with them when something very specific is happening to their hormones.

You are allowed to go into that appointment prepared. You are allowed to name what you think might be happening. You are allowed to ask for HRT to be considered. You don’t need to present yourself as uncertain and wait.

Knowing your own body is not self-diagnosing. It’s self-advocacy.

If you want to read more

If you’d like to know what I read to get myself informed before that appointment, I wrote about the books that helped me most here: Nobody Handed Me a Roadmap. These Books Were the Next Best Thing.

And if you haven’t read the full story of what happened at that first appointment, you can find it here: I Was Told I Wasn’t In Perimenopause. I Was 44.

If you’re still trying to get someone to take you seriously, I hope this helps. Not as a script to copy, but as a reminder that you are allowed to show up prepared, name what you think is happening and ask for more than you’ve been offered so far.

You know your body better than anyone.

Go gently,
Dani x

If this resonated with you, I’d love you to share it with a woman who might need it right now. Someone who’s going round in circles, feeling unheard, wondering if it’s just her.
And sometimes the most helpful thing is knowing someone else has been there too.

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There’s a particular kind of loneliness that happens when nobody around you understands what’s happening to your body.

My mother suffered through perimenopause without anyone naming it. Without validation. Without knowing that what she was experiencing had a name, a reason, a shape. She was misdiagnosed. Dismissed. She carried it alone. And I didn’t even know that’s what was happening to her until I started going through it myself.

Now, looking back at her symptoms, it all makes sense. And it angers me, because she didn’t have to suffer that way. She just needed someone to say: this is real. This is happening. You’re not alone.

When I started experiencing perimenopause, I tried talking to the people closest to me. My husband was willing to learn. He showed compassion. But so many others, friends, women I thought would understand—dismissed it entirely. The subject felt taboo. Admitting perimenopause felt like admitting you were old. Over the hill.

So they didn’t talk about it. And I thought I was alone.

Then I found women online. On TikTok, Instagram, Facebook. But it wasn’t until I found Substack that I discovered something different: real community. Not just shared experiences, but witnessed experiences. Not just information, but belonging.

And I started to understand why so many women were doing the same thing I was. Why they were turning to strangers on the internet instead of the people who loved them.

The Silence at Home

A woman in her early 40s went to her doctor with what would turn out to be perimenopause symptoms. She was told she was too young. Given antidepressants instead. She spent years fighting to be heard, while her family saw only anxiety and depression. They didn’t understand that what she was experiencing was a life transition, not a mental health crisis.

It took finding an online community to realise she wasn’t broken. That her body wasn’t the problem. That the system had failed her.

Another woman shared something that broke my heart: she couldn’t tell her own children what her favourite film was. Where she wanted to eat. What she actually wanted. She’d been making herself so small for so long—prioritising everyone else’s comfort, managing everyone else’s needs—that the basic things about herself had disappeared.

She’d become invisible, even to herself.

Multiple women have told me some version of the same thing: “I thought I was going insane.”

They were experiencing mood swings they’d never had before. Hot flashes that woke them at 3 AM. Identity shifts that made them question everything they thought they knew about themselves. And nobody around them named it. Nobody said this is perimenopause. Nobody said this is normal.

So they carried it in silence, thinking something was wrong with them.

Until they found women online saying the exact same thing.

The Gap That Online Communities Fill

Here’s what women aren’t getting from the people closest to them:

Validation. They’re not being told that what they’re experiencing is real. That it’s not in their head. That they’re not losing their minds. Instead, they’re getting dismissal from doctors (”you’re too young”), minimisation from partners and family (”it’s just stress”), and silence from everyone else (which creates the assumption that it’s only happening to them).

They’re being gaslit. Told their emotions are the problem, not their hormones.

Permission to struggle. The idea that midlife and perimenopause are supposed to be hard in certain ways. That it’s okay to feel lost. That you don’t have to keep performing, keep managing everyone else’s comfort, keep pretending everything’s fine.

Understanding. Not just clinical understanding—though that matters. But emotional understanding. Someone who gets what it feels like to question your identity, your relationships, your choices all at once. Someone who understands that perimenopause isn’t just about hot flashes. It’s about becoming a different version of yourself and not knowing if you like that version yet.

These three things—validation, permission, understanding, should come from family. From partners, from the women in your life who’ve been through it or are going through it.

But they’re not coming. So women are finding them online. With strangers, on Substack.

Why Strangers Feel Safer Than Family

There’s something about anonymity that creates safety. Online, you can say things you’d never say at the dinner table. You can admit that your marriage feels uncertain. That you don’t recognise yourself. That you’re grieving the person you used to be. That you’re angry at your body. That you’re terrified.

You can be completely honest because nobody knows you. Nobody will judge you. Nobody will bring it up at Christmas dinner.

With family, there’s too much history. Too much at stake. So you stay small and you protect them from your struggle. You pretend you’re fine.

But online, with women you’ve never met, you can finally tell the truth.

And that truth—that simple act of being witnessed, changes everything.

If something here is resonating with your own story, I’d love to know. You can reply in the comments below, or share it with someone who needs to read it.

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The Question We Need to Ask

Women shouldn’t have to go online to feel understood about their own bodies and lives by the people who love them.

But they do.

And that matters. That’s a failure somewhere. In our medical system. In our families. In the way we’ve been taught to hide our struggles and protect everyone else’s comfort at the expense of our own understanding.

My mother suffered alone because nobody named what was happening to her. I almost did the same thing. But I found women online. I found validation. I found permission. I found understanding.

And I realised that what I was experiencing wasn’t shameful or strange. It was universal. It was happening to hundreds of thousands of women. And we were all looking for the same thing: to be seen. To be believed. To be told that we weren’t broken.

The fact that we have to find that online instead of at home tells us something important about where we are as a culture. About how little we still talk about perimenopause. About how much silence and shame still surrounds women’s bodies and women’s lives.

The people closest to us weren't taught about perimenopause. Nobody told them what to expect, what to listen for, how to show up. So they do their best with the awareness they have.

But women are finding each other now. Women are creating the spaces they needed all along. Women are saying out loud what should have been said by the people closest to them—not because those people failed us, but because the culture failed all of us.

That’s not a failure of community. That’s women building community when nobody else knew how.

Go gently,

Dani x

If you'd like to go deeper, HerStillSpace Circle is a smaller, quieter space for women who want more. You can find out more here.

Something shifted when I turned 40.

It wasn’t panic or the feeling that time was running out. It was the opposite. It felt like permission. Like I’d finally earned the right to stop apologising for who I was.

I cared less what people thought of me. I felt more confident and most importantly, I started being more truthful with myself about the relationships in my life.

There was a friendship that made this clear to me. I’d recently met a school mum and at first we had so much in common. We got along. But the more time I spent with her, the more I realised what was actually happening. Every time we got together, it became a therapy session for her. I was giving everything and getting nothing back.

As an introvert, I’ve always prioritised quality over quantity in friendships. Socialising costs me energy, real energy. So when a friendship starts draining me, I feel it immediately. My body tells me, my nervous system tells me.

But for years, I didn’t listen to that signal. I kept showing up anyway. I made excuses for why I couldn’t come. I softened my no with explanations and apologies, as if I owed her my time and energy indefinitely. I’d say things like “I’m so sorry, I can’t this weekend because...” when what I actually meant was simply: No. That’s it. A complete sentence.

Then something changed, I started setting boundaries. Real ones. Not excuses wrapped in niceness, but actual nos. The shift wasn’t about becoming unkind. It was about protecting something I’d finally learned to value: my own time. My own energy. My own peace.

The Hormonal Shift No One Really Talks About

One of the strangest things about perimenopause is that alongside the exhaustion, overwhelm, and emotional unpredictability, many women also start caring less about external approval.

Not in a dramatic “I don’t care what anyone thinks” kind of way. More subtly than that.

It can feel more like a growing inability to keep performing versions of yourself that no longer fit. Less tolerance for people-pleasing. Less energy for over-explaining. Less willingness to abandon your own needs just to avoid disappointing someone else.

Part of that may actually be biological.

During perimenopause, fluctuating levels of oestrogen and progesterone can affect neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, both of which influence mood, emotional regulation, motivation, and social sensitivity. At the same time, many women experience heightened nervous system overwhelm and reduced stress tolerance, which means the emotional cost of constantly accommodating others suddenly feels much harder to ignore.

Hormonal changes also affect how we process social reward and approval. Things that once felt manageable like overcommitting, emotional caretaking, tolerating draining dynamics—suddenly feel exhausting instead.

In some ways, it’s almost as though midlife strips away the ability to keep overriding yourself indefinitely.

And while that can feel uncomfortable at first, it can also become the beginning of something much more honest.

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What Changed for Me

With the school mum, I didn’t agonise over the decision to step back. I just knew. My nervous system was telling me clearly: this friendship costs more than it gives and for the first time in my life, I listened.

I realised I was giving explanations before anyone had even questioned me. Sometimes I wasn’t explaining myself at all. I was asking for permission. Seeking approval for my own boundaries.

A gentle no is still a no. It doesn’t need explanation. It doesn’t need softening. It doesn’t need you to make it easier for the other person to accept.

Midlife has made me more protective of my energy and less afraid of disappointing people. I no longer have the capacity to manage everyone else’s reaction to my boundaries. And honestly, I’m not sure I ever should have tried.

What I’ve learned is that not everyone will understand your boundaries once they no longer benefit from your lack of them. And that’s their work to do, not mine.

The friendship eventually faded. Not because I was cruel, but because I stopped contorting myself to make it work. I stopped offering more than I had to give.

The Gift in the Boundary

It felt like freedom.

And it taught me something deeper: saying no without explaining yourself isn’t selfish. It’s honest. It’s knowing yourself well enough to protect what matters. It’s choosing the relationships that actually fill you, rather than the ones that drain you.

That’s the kind of no I want to keep saying. Not out of anger or unkindness. But out of clarity. Out of knowing myself. Out of finally believing that my no is enough.

Because it is. And so is yours.

Go gently,
Dani x

I’ve always been someone who walks. Not because I’m chasing anything, but because something in me needs it.

It started years ago when I was training for a trek to Everest Base Camp. Months of preparation, months of walking to build the fitness I’d need for that journey. And somewhere in those months, something changed. Walking stopped being training. It became a practice. A ritual I loved. A way of being in the world that felt like home.

Now, in my forties, walking is still the movement that makes the most sense to me. My walking place is specific. There’s a route I know—tree-lined, peaceful, away from roads. I can’t walk next to traffic. I’m easily stimulated and the noise, the fumes, the chaos of it defeats the whole point. But on my route, with my dog, in the trees, I find something I didn’t even know I was looking for.

Rhythm. Ritual. Myself.

Perimenopause changed what I needed from movement. And it took me a while to understand why.

When your body started asking for something different

Walking has always been what energises me. Not high intensity workouts. Not pushing hard. Just the rhythm of moving through a landscape I love.

But in perimenopause, my body became even more sensitive to what it needs. Declining oestrogen affects so much more than your period. It affects your recovery, your inflammation response, your stress tolerance, your sleep, your muscle preservation and even your mood.

The hormonal shifts meant my body started asking more clearly for gentleness. For consistency over intensity. For movement that supported my nervous system rather than depleted it.

Walking became even more essential. Not because I discovered it. But because I understood it differently.

Walking became something else entirely

The trees help. The consistency helps. Knowing I can do it even on the days when I have no energy helps. My dog helps. Sometimes a friend comes and we talk and that helps in a completely different way. But mostly it’s me and the rhythm of my feet and the green and something that feels like my body settling back into itself.

Walking reduces stress. That’s not poetic. That’s neuroscience. It regulates cortisol. It improves mood. It supports mental clarity. It helps with sleep. It reduces the kind of low-level anxiety that perimenopause often brings.

Even short walks matter. Consistency matters more than intensity.

For decades I was conditioned to believe exercise only counted if it was extreme. But perimenopause taught me something different. The movement that matters most is the movement I can sustain. The movement that supports my nervous system. The movement that feels like care.

Adding to the practice, not replacing it

Walking alone won’t preserve everything your body is losing in perimenopause. Declining oestrogen contributes to muscle loss and lower bone density and metabolic changes. I’ve slowly started weight training to address that. Not because I love it. But because I understand now that my bones and muscles need that support.

Walking remains my anchor though. The practice I come back to. The movement that feels essential.

Weight training is something I’m exploring. Walking is something I can’t live without.

And that’s okay. Movement doesn’t have to look the same for everyone.

The ritual matters

I notice now when I haven’t walked for a few days. My body tells me. Not in a punishing way. In a way that feels like longing. Like something in me has been sitting still too long and needs to move.

That’s different from the fitness culture that tells you exercise is something you have to do. This feels like something my body wants. Something my nervous system is asking for.

The trees. The time. The solitude. The friendship sometimes. The ritual of it. The way it grounds me when everything else feels uncertain.

Walking has become my anchor through midlife. Not because I’m broken. But because I’m human and perimenopause is a big transition and sometimes you need to move your body through it. Sometimes you need the green and the rhythm and the reminder that you’re still here, still strong, still capable of taking yourself where you need to go.

What movement looks like now

For years my relationship with movement was complicated. But walking changed that. Walking has always been simple. Walking has always been honest.

Perimenopause didn’t create that love. It deepened it. It made me understand why I need it. It supports my nervous system. It stabilises my mood. It improves my sleep. It keeps me connected to myself and the natural world.

I don’t know if this is the perfect perimenopause workout. I don’t think there is one. Everyone’s body is different. Everyone’s needs are different. Some women thrive on intensity. Others need gentleness. Learning what your body actually needs is wisdom.

But I know that walking saved something in me. Not my figure. My sense of being okay. My nervous system. My peace.

And if you’re in perimenopause and you’re wondering what movement should look like for you, maybe start with what you actually love. Not what you think you should do. What you love. What your body is asking for.

Go gently,
Dani x

If this is the kind of conversation you’d want to keep having, HerStillSpace Circle is a smaller space for exactly that. You can read more here.

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Most of what I write at HerStillSpace is free. Every essay, every personal post, every piece of honest writing about perimenopause, identity and finding your way back to yourself.

That’s not changing.

But the free posts do something specific. They name the experience. They say: this is what it feels like, you are not imagining it, you are not alone.

HerStillSpace Circle is where we go deeper.

Your Perimenopause Profile Report

If you’ve taken the free Perimenopause Profile Assessment, your full report is waiting for you inside.

The assessment tells you which of 5 profiles sounds most like you right now. Your full report goes further — what that profile actually means, what’s happening hormonally, and what might genuinely help. It’s the part I wrote specifically for you, not for everyone.

If you haven’t taken the assessment yet, it’s free and takes about 2 minutes. You can find it here.

What else is inside

Deeper posts — every couple of weeks I share something more personal than what goes on the main feed. The pieces I’m still working through. The ones that feel too raw or too real for a public post.

The members chat — a private space for real conversations. Ask questions. Share what’s happening in your midlife. This is where the community actually forms.

Ask Dani Anything — occasional sessions where you ask and I answer. About perimenopause, midlife, or whatever’s sitting with you.

I started HerStillSpace because I couldn’t find the writing I actually needed when perimenopause arrived. What I’ve discovered since is that most women aren’t looking for information. They’re looking for someone to give language to what they’ve been carrying alone.

Circle is where I do that more fully, and more personally, than I can in a public post.

£6 a month, or £55 a year. There's also a founding membership at £115 — one payment, lifetime access at this price, whatever Circle costs in the future. Billed in your local currency at checkout.

If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, I’d love to have you inside.

Go gently,
Dani x

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I found them in a television interview, in the pages of books I ordered late at night, in the words of women and doctors who were finally saying out loud what I had been quietly living through for years.

If you’re in the middle of perimenopause and still trying to piece it all together, these are the books I wish someone had handed me at the beginning. Not as a reading list. As a lifeline.

Menopausing by Davina McCall

My journey started with a television interview.

I was watching Loose Women here in the UK when Davina McCall began talking about her perimenopause experience. Her symptoms, how she felt, the age she was when it all started.

She was 44. So was I.

I sat there quietly stunned because she was describing my life. My symptoms. My confusion. That specific, unsettling feeling of not quite being yourself anymore and not knowing why.

That was my aha moment. And it led me straight to her book.

Menopausing is unlike any other book on this subject I’ve come across. It’s beautifully illustrated, filled with questions and answers, and woven through with stories from other women who have lived this too. Reading it felt like exhaling. My symptoms finally made sense and I didn’t feel alone anymore.

But more than that, it gave me language. It educated me in a way my doctor hadn’t. In fact after reading it I was able to go back to my GP and have a conversation I simply couldn’t have had before. I knew what I was experiencing. I knew what to ask for.

If you only read one book on this list, let it be this one.

find it here — Menopausing by Davina McCall

Preparing for the Perimenopause and Menopause by Dr Louise Newson

I came across Dr Louise Newson on This Morning and something about the way she spoke - clearly, directly, without any of the usual hedging and made me want to read everything she had written.

Her book pulls back the curtain on perimenopause and menopause in a way that feels genuinely empowering. No unnecessary complexity. No vague reassurances, just clear, straightforward information about symptoms, treatment options and what you actually need to know.

Reading it I realised I had been experiencing more symptoms than I had even recognised as symptoms. I walked into following appointments feeling informed and confident rather than confused and hopeful. Those conversations changed my life. And this book made it possible.

find it here — Preparing for the Perimenopause and Menopause by Dr Louise Newson

The New Perimenopause by Dr Mary Claire Haver

I found Dr Mary Claire Haver on TikTok, which tells you everything about how the conversation around perimenopause is finally changing. Here was a doctor - a real, qualified, deeply passionate doctor, cutting through the noise and talking to women directly about what was happening to their bodies.

Her book is the most thoroughly researched of the three. It is detailed, well documented and written by someone who has clearly dedicated her career to improving the quality of life for women navigating this transition. What strikes me most about Dr Haver is her commitment to advocacy. She is not just educating women. She is fighting for them.

In a medical landscape where women have too often been dismissed, minimised or simply not included in decisions about their own health, her voice matters enormously.

This book is newer than the others but no less essential. If you want to understand the science behind what your body is going through, this is where to go.

find it here — The New Perimenopause by Dr Mary Claire Haver

A final thought

None of these books should be necessary.

We shouldn’t have to educate ourselves, arm ourselves with information and walk into appointments prepared to fight for our own healthcare. But until that changes, knowledge is the most powerful thing we have.

These three books gave me that knowledge. They gave me the confidence to advocate for myself. And they led me, eventually, to feeling like myself again.

I hope they do the same for you.

Go gently,
Dani x

HerStillSpace Circle is a quieter corner of this space, for readers who want deeper posts, Her Sunday Finds, and a small members’ chat. Details are here, if you’re curious.

I may earn a small commission if you purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend books I have read and genuinely believe in.

For someone who had always expressed herself fairly easily, it was quite devastating.

And then something unexpected happened.…

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A few years ago I was going through a really difficult time. I didn’t fully understand what was happening to my body, and I started keeping rough notes on my phone, not because I wanted to, but because I needed to make sense of it all. Symptoms. Patterns. Days when I didn’t feel like myself at all.

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Looking back, keeping those notes was the beginning of everything. It gave me language for what I was experiencing. It gave me the confidence to walk into my doctor's office and ask for what I needed. It started my HRT journey. I genuinely believe it changed the course of how I navigated this.

Recently I went back and read those notes. And my immediate thought was — I forgot about that. I had genuinely forgotten how hard some of those days were.

That moment stayed with me. Because I know there are women reading this who are in the middle of it right now. Confused, exhausted, wondering if what they’re feeling is normal, trying to explain it to a doctor without really knowing where to start.

So I made something for you.

The Calm Perimenopause Tracker is a free 37-page printable PDF designed to help you gently notice what’s happening in your body, without pressure, without medical charts, and without having to be perfect about it.

It includes a daily check-in that takes under a minute, a weekly reflection section and a monthly awareness page to help you spot patterns over time. One of the questions I made sure to include is one I think every woman in perimenopause needs to ask herself daily — do you feel like yourself today?

Because that’s really what this is about. Not data. Not tracking for the sake of it. Just you, getting to know yourself again.

Download your free copy here: The Calm Perimenopause Tracker

Dani

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I was mid-sentence, talking to someone, and the word just vanished. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. It was right there. And then it wasn’t. I stood there for a second, reaching for it, finding nothing, and said something else instead. Something that wasn’t quite right but would do.

It kept happening. Daily. Sometimes multiple times a day.

Words disappearing mid-thought. Sentences that made perfect sense in my head but wouldn’t come out properly. That feeling of knowing something and being completely unable to access it.

My family noticed before I fully admitted it to myself. And that made it worse somehow. Because when the people who know you best start noticing changes in you, it’s hard not to go to the darkest place.

I genuinely thought something was seriously wrong with me. I was considering speaking to my doctor about dementia.

What nobody had told me was that this is perimenopause. And I had to find that out entirely on my own.

I’ve since come across the work of Dr Lisa Mosconi, a neuroscientist who has spent years researching exactly what happens to the female brain during this transition. Her book The Menopause Brain is genuinely worth reading if this resonates with you. Her research found that brain fog, including memory lapses, difficulty concentrating and mental fatigue, affects up to 62% of women during perimenopause and menopause. Sixty two percent. And yet most of us have never been told that, let alone why.

The reason it happens comes down to oestrogen. Most people think of oestrogen as purely a reproductive hormone but it does so much more than that. It plays a significant role in how the brain functions, in memory, in word retrieval, in processing speed and focus. When oestrogen starts fluctuating in perimenopause, the brain feels it. Not in a vague, background way. In a very specific, daily, sometimes frightening way.

What I found reassuring in Dr Mosconi’s research is that these changes are largely temporary. The brain has a remarkable ability to adapt and rewire itself. Many women find that after menopause, once hormones stabilise, the cognitive fog begins to lift. The brain often emerges from this transition stronger than before.

That doesn’t make the experience any less unsettling while you’re in the middle of it. But knowing there’s a reason, and that it isn’t permanent, changes everything.

I’m on HRT now, which has helped to some degree. But I’d be lying if I said it’s completely resolved. Depending on where I am in my cycle, the brain fog still shows up. Some days are clearer than others. Some days I’m still reaching for words that have temporarily gone somewhere I can’t find them.

What has changed is that I’m not frightened anymore. Because I know what it is.

And that’s really what I want to say to you if you’re reading this and recognising yourself in it. The fear of not knowing is so much worse than the reality of understanding what’s actually happening. Your brain is not broken. You are not developing dementia. You are navigating a hormonal transition that nobody prepared you for, and your brain is responding to it.

You are not losing your mind.

You are just not being given enough information about what your mind is going through.

If this resonates, did you know brain fog was connected to perimenopause or did it come as a surprise?

Go gently,
Dani x

If you want to go deeper on this, The Menopause Brain by Dr Lisa Mosconi is genuinely worth reading.

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For a long time I didn’t have the words for what was happening to me.

I still don’t always have them.

Perimenopause arrived quietly and then all at once and somewhere in the middle of it something changed in the way I moved through my own life. I became quieter about the hard parts. Not because they weren’t there. But because there are only so many times you can bring up the same thing before you start to feel like the problem.

That’s the part nobody talks about. The self-editing that happens when you’re struggling with something long and slow and invisible. You don’t want to be the woman who is always something. Always tired. Always emotional. Always navigating something your partner can’t fully see or fix.

So you start rationing it. Picking your moments. Deciding this isn’t the right time, or he looks tired or we’ve already talked about this. And slowly, without meaning to, you start carrying it alone.

Not because the people around you don’t care. But because perimenopause isn’t a single conversation. It’s a years long recalibration of your body, your mind, your nervous system, your sense of who you are. And there is only so much any relationship can hold before you start protecting the other person from the full weight of it.

This morning I came across a piece by Linda Cooper over at Rise Wise on Substack. It’s called ‘When Menopause Restructures a Marriage’ and it stopped me completely. Not because it’s an easy read, but because it named things I have felt for years and never been able to articulate.

This line in particular:

“She is not pulling away because she does not love him. She is pulling away because she is drowning in sensation, in emotion, in the sheer volume of what is surfacing inside her, and she does not know how to let him see it.”

That’s exactly it.

The pulling away so many women do at this stage isn’t coldness. It’s overwhelm wearing the mask of distance. It’s the exhaustion of trying to translate something that doesn’t have clean language yet. It’s the fear of being too much, for too long, about something that shows no sign of resolving quickly.

And this line:

“Her body has stopped cooperating with her own disappearance.”

Because so many of us have spent years being very good at disappearing. Keeping the peace. Absorbing the mood of the room. Managing everyone else’s emotional world while quietly setting our own to one side.

Perimenopause makes that impossible. The suppression that once felt automatic starts to cost too much. The things you used to carry without thinking suddenly feel unbearable. And you don’t understand why everything feels heavier when nothing has technically changed.

But something has changed. Your body has stopped pretending it hasn’t.

I don’t think women who go quiet at this stage are being distant or difficult. I think they’re exhausted from explaining something that shifts and changes and never quite resolves. I think they’re trying to love the people around them by not making it too much.

What I’m slowly learning is that carrying it alone isn’t protecting anyone and the more honestly we talk about it, the lighter it gets. For all of us.

If Linda’s article resonates with you the way it did with me, I’d encourage every woman and every partner to read it in full.
You can find it over at Rise Wise on Substack.

Be kind to yourself,

Dani x

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I’ve just finished reading an article by Dr Mary Claire Haver, one of the leading voices in perimenopause medicine right now, and something in it stopped me completely.

She opens by describing a patient. A woman of 43 who had spent three years seeing doctor after doctor. She’d been given a sleep aid, an antidepressant, a referral to a gastroenterologist for bloating and a cardiologist for palpitations. One doctor suspected anxiety. One mentioned perimenopause briefly before moving on.

She was in perimenopause. Nobody told her.

I read that and felt it in my chest. Because that woman was almost me.

At 44 I went to my doctor feeling unlike myself. Exhausted in a way sleep didn’t fix. Emotionally all over the place. Not quite right in a way I couldn’t fully explain. I was told I was not in perimenopause. I was prescribed antidepressants.

I took them for a month. They made me feel like a robot. They didn’t touch my other symptoms. So I stopped taking them and started doing my own research instead.

What I found made so much sense of everything I had been feeling. I went back to my doctor and asked for HRT. She prescribed it reluctantly.

It has made a massive difference to my life. I haven’t come off it since.

But here’s the thing that stays with me. I only got there because I was curious and determined enough to push. Not because a doctor recognised what was happening and told me. Because I refused to accept that what I was feeling was just anxiety or stress or getting older.

Dr Haver writes that perimenopause can begin in the mid to late thirties and last up to a decade. That irregular periods are often the last symptom to arrive, not the first. That the brain is frequently the first organ to respond, with women describing anxiety, brain fog, difficulty concentrating and a pervasive sense of not feeling like themselves.

Not feeling like myself. That’s exactly what I felt. And it was dismissed.

She also writes something that I think every woman in midlife needs to hear. The diagnostic gap is not a neutral space. It has a cost. And women pay it entirely.

We pay it in years of feeling confused and unwell without answers. In medications that don’t address the real problem. In feeling like something is fundamentally wrong with us when actually something very specific and very treatable is happening to our hormones.

I’m sharing this because if you’re reading HerStillSpace, there’s a good chance you’re somewhere in this. Maybe you’re already diagnosed and on HRT like me. Maybe you’re still trying to get someone to take you seriously. Maybe you’re not even sure yet what’s happening but something feels off and you can’t quite name it.

Whatever stage you’re at, please know this. You are not imagining it, you are not anxious and you are not falling apart.

You may just be in perimenopause. And you deserve to know that.

Go gently,
Dani x

Dr Mary Claire Haver’s article ‘The 10 Year Window Medicine Ignored’ is published on her Substack. Her book The New Perimenopause is available now.

You’re not alone in this.

That’s really why HerStillSpace exists. Not as a brand. Not as a content strategy. But because I genuinely believe that this stage of life, perimenopause, midlife, all of it, is too big and too complex to navigate by yourself.

I’m Dani. I’m 47, a mum, a wife, and someone who has always valued depth over surface level living. I’m introverted and emotionally led. I don’t need a lot of noise in my life. I need things to feel real and right internally. If that sounds familiar, you’re probably exactly who I’m writing for.

Here in the UK the conversation around menopause has improved enormously in recent years. And yet amongst my own friends, in my own circle, it remained strangely unspoken. Something women were going through quietly, sometimes with confusion, sometimes with what felt like shame. Not because they weren’t educated or aware, just because it’s an intensely personal thing and not always easy to admit, even to the people closest to you.

I believed then, and I still believe now, that there must be so many women feeling alone in this. Especially the introverted ones. The ones who feel everything deeply and process it quietly and don’t always find it easy to reach out.

My own moment of realisation came when I was watching television one afternoon and a well known presenter began talking openly about her perimenopause experience. Her age. Her symptoms. The way it had affected her life, and something in me just stopped.

Because she was describing me.

It was emotional and raw and completely validating in a way I hadn’t expected. For the first time I felt like someone was saying out loud what I had been quietly carrying. That moment started my journey of actually understanding what was happening to my body, looking after myself properly, and eventually starting HRT.

And it made me want to create that moment for other women.

That’s HerStillSpace.

A quiet corner of the internet where women navigating perimenopause and midlife can come and feel understood. Where you can ask questions without judgement. Where nothing is overly clinical or loud or performative. Just honest, calm, real conversation between women who get it.

If you’ve just found this space, I hope it feels like you’ve found your people.

Because you have.

Dani x