Please Stop Sending Me Perimenopause Memes
They're not even good.
My friend sent me my first perimenopause meme about a year ago, when we were 41.
I double-tapped it out of courtesy, not really knowing what it had to do with me. But after she sent three or four more, I finally asked her what she was talking about.
Are we in perimenopause?? I wrote. The last time I checked, I was a sprite young teenage woman, barely into the fifth decade of her life, easily passable for 37 and able to touch her toes.
We are!! she wrote. It starts at 35-38. 🥴
Who said?? I asked, slightly panicked.
Everybody.
As someone being regularly tracked and monitored by Google Ad Services, of course I’d heard of perimenopause. My algorithm basically got down on all fours and started panting like a dog the second I turned 40. Overnight, I was inundated with nonstop ads for pills and potions all promising to reinvigorate my newly decaying corporeal form.
But lately, maybe because I’ve clicked on one or two of those ads or because those memes have multiplied like maggots, I can’t get away from it: Big Perimenopause is here and it’s dragging me with it.
According to Google, the perimenopause conversation exploded somewhere around late 2022, the same time several high-profile female celebrities were talking about (or investing in) its supercharged big sister, menopause.
Naomi Watts launched her menopause-focused skincare line Stripes
Gwyneth Paltrow, Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore all invested in Evernow, a telehealth startup focused on relieving menopausal symptoms
Michelle Obama opened up to People about needing moral support while she went through menopause
Courtney Cox posted a funny updated version of her 1985 Tampax commercial, this time about menopause “eating you alive”
Suddenly menopause was trending (and trendy), so it was the perfect time for perimenopause to tag along.
Perimenopause is the time leading up to menopause that often begins in your mid- to late-40s (though for some women it can begin in their mid-30s). Symptoms include irregular periods, hot flashes, night sweats, sleep disturbances, and mood changes, as well as other physical changes.
It’s not a single event—it’s a continuous process, one that doctors say can last several years. And even if a woman has experienced some or all of these symptoms, there’s no one test or sign that will determine that she’s officially entered perimenopause.
So…excellent! Clear as mud! It’s a thing, for sure (!), but no one can tell you if you have it (?), you just sort of have to guess!
Which could explain why half of the strangers in my algorithm have been so quick to grab the diagnosis and slap it on all of their problems…to the point where it’s starting to feel like an identity.
Weight gain? Perimenopause. Can’t sleep? Perimenopause. Forgot your keys? Perimenopause. Suddenly bad at eyeliner? Perimenopause.
Obviously women’s health is important and chronically understudied. Before 1993, women were rarely included in clinical trials. Women’s health research is woefully underfunded, and physically, the world has been designed for and by men. Ask any woman under 5’5” who’s ever put on a seatbelt—those car companies want us dead.
But I do think it’s important to ask: what if your symptoms aren’t perimenopause?
Or at the very least, what if they’re not only perimenopause?
The body changes for all of us after 40—we gain weight, our skin sags, our vision changes, our joints get stiffer. Not to mention lifetime happiness reaches its low point in your 40s. The sting of nostalgia creeps in and your life starts to look like all the decisions you made along the way.
Your 40s also place you in the “sandwich generation,” where you might be simultaneously taking care of young and/or adult children as well as aging and/or ailing parents. It’s midlife! It’s a mess! And sometimes it really sucks ass. (Or as my man Carl Jung put it, “The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.” 🥴)
As for me, it feels like an important weigh station. A longer-than-usual rest stop where I’m reflecting on the first 40 years of my life, looking out over the next 40, simultaneously sad, happy, joyous and grieving, and wondering who the fuck stole the compass. Sometimes I lie awake wondering what I really want, if this is it, if I should be more grateful for what I have or more active in bracing for the sadness yet to come.
So yeah—sometimes I toss and turn!
But I am not only what is happening to my body. And as a semi-reformed former hypochondriac, I have no interest in labeling every physical sensation sparking inside of me. I know Father Time will have his way with me when it’s my turn, but I’m not inviting him over before our appointment, are you crazy? Maybe, like Candace Cameron said about scary movies, the memes are a portal. And I rebuke them! Get them away from me!
I don’t know, maybe my refusal to laugh along with them is just delusion. Maybe I’m in denial about my age and terrified about the closing of a chapter. And maybe I’m just too scared to look it in the face.
But can’t that be fine, too? Men famously go kicking and screaming into midlife! They cheat on their wives, buy Ferraris, get into MMA, and fly to Turkey for hair plugs. They buy presidential elections and become obsessed with space. And for the most part, we let them!
Maybe I’m just asking for women to give themselves a little more room, to steal some from the men, and to not glom onto any more labels we just spent a decade unlearning. Especially one with such bad PR.
And I guess while we’re at it, I’m at least asking for better memes.
We’re millennials. We invented memes. We gotta do better than this.
I felt blessed to find this piece on my feed as I feel like I've been faced with a barrage of perimenopause content online lately. I understand this may be useful for women in the thick of it, but as a 35-year-old with no signs of it yet, it just feels like an extra thing to worry about (or be sold products for).
“but I’m not inviting him over before our appointment”
EXACTLY.
I also feel this way about people who bemoan getting older in general and those who assume I am as decrepit as they are. Stop talking these things into existence!