It’s Not All In Your Head
Validation is a Magical Elixir
I Forgot…
I did not remember the fourth anniversary of a major surgery until three days later. July 29, 2022 I had an abdominal myomectomy–the second myomectomy of that year–for a 16cm fibroid that had, until the ultrasound proved otherwise, been dismissed as “normal weight gain.”
2022 was a year I spent fighting for my life and my freedom.
Even last year I could never have imagined forgetting.
It felt like passing through a portal, losing track of a date that ended one version of me and started the next.
I Used to Practice in The Car
Five years of doctor appointments taught me to edit myself down to two symptoms.
Three sounded like complaining. Four was anxiety.
I chose the two that seemed most physical and most measurable, the ones least likely to be waved off as too much or filed under getting older, as if that were a diagnosis.
I delivered them in a calm voice, data first. My ordinary self, the energetic one, had been met with disdain, so I built a really boring version of me and sent her in instead.
Even the data-driven version was met with skepticism.
“This is normal for a woman your age.”
“Sounds like you’re anxious. Here’s a prescription.”
“Have you tried sleeping more?”
One doctor told me my iron was low because I am a vegetarian.
I had been bleeding for forty-five days.
I guarantee you, if you, like me, have symptoms, it’s because your body is telling you something is wrong.
Your Body Is Never Wrong
After years of being gaslit or ignored, an ultrasound found a sixteen-centimeter fibroid and a family of smaller ones, one that was partially detached and causing massive hemorrhaging.
My doctor put paperwork for an emergency hysterectomy (within a few hours!) in front of me.
Getting the news that I needed surgery was actually…
AWESOME.
After five+ years of being dismissed, some part of me had already accepted what the doctors said about me: just another midlife woman complaining about aging.
The data proved I was right, and something was wrong.
Had I been listened to years prior, I would have had labwork that proved the imbalances well before a surgery was needed.
So I was elated about being validated, and also rather pissed off.
I used to tell members of my last startup, if you are feeling it, it’s because it is true and real.
People sometimes cried when I told them this.
It was often the first time someone believed them.
We Get Handed Stories
Someone decides what our experience is allowed to mean and hands it over, and we carry it because it arrives dressed as a fact. The fibroid is normal for a woman your age. The exhaustion is stress. The brain fog is a sleep problem, probably our own fault.
Midlife is a slow narrowing we accept graciously and do not discuss at dinner. The assumptions of what we should be are assigned by someone who is not in our body.
Dr. Elizabeth Comen, the Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist who wrote a history of how medicine has treated women, describes a legacy of the hysterical woman, the anxious housewife, the lobotomized woman, and she is direct about what it produces: when doctors do not know what they are talking about, it is easier to say it is all in your head.
The thing Dr. Comen sees most often in her own exam room is the one I recognized on sight. “The emotion I encounter most in the examination room, more potent and insidious than fear, is shame.”
If you speak up, you are a disagreeable or hysterical woman.
But it’s not all in your head, and you know it, and if you need, what a new friend calls “a permission slip,” to believe it, here it is:
You have permission to believe yourself.
Gaslit, Passed Over, Ignored
A Newson Health Research and Education survey of 5,000 women found that one third of women wait three years or more before their symptoms are correctly identified, and that eighteen percent of them returned to a doctor an average of six times before they got the help they needed. Fewer than seven percent of family medicine, internal medicine, and obstetrics and gynecology residents report feeling adequately prepared to manage menopause, and twenty percent receive no menopause lectures at all during residency.
It even affects our work: a 2023 Carrot Fertility study found that eighty percent of respondents named menopause as a workplace challenge, fewer than twenty percent understood the symptoms before they began, and more than half had considered changing jobs because of it.
I suspect part of that reason midlife women are having serious issues getting work after being laid off is because people are afraid our symptoms will prevent us from doing a great job.
As we age, it seems everyone else has an opinion on why we should be not seen and not heard.
What happens is we stop trusting our intuition and our own read on our bodies.
Having someone tell us what’s happening is real is a magical elixir.
Honor Your Voice
Our bodies are always speaking if we give ourselves permission to listen.
And while it seems the market has finally noticed us, buyer beware of the companies monetizing our “imbalance” of hormones or the “impossible” weight loss in midlife, or the need to be tracked 24/7 with wearables, or sneaky attempts at pretending to care while still making you feel less than. A lot of it is the same old message in better packaging.
Things are changing though, because women stopped being polite about what we already knew to be true: we have a voice that demands to be heard.
Our voices come back when we use them, in small ways, daily, until the sound is familiar again.
