When Your Body Changes and the World Looks Away

Menopause doesn’t arrive like a visitor.

It intrudes.

One day you wake up and realize the body you’ve lived in your whole life

has begun to turn into something unfamiliar—

a creature molting in slow, messy spirals.

Your skin feels different.

Your face looks different.

Your mood shifts like the weather in tornado season.

Your weight rearranges itself without permission,

like your body is a house being redecorated

by someone who hates you.

It starts quietly:

A hot flash here.

A forgotten word there.

A sudden tearful breakdown in the grocery store parking lot

because they were out of your favorite creamer

and it was the last small thing holding your sanity together.

Then it gets louder.

Your hormones start operating with the precision of a drunk drummer.

Your metabolism quits like it’s clocking out early.

Your waistline expands without warning,

as if fat is being delivered by Amazon Prime

to places you’ve never stored it before.

There’s a moment—

and every woman knows it—

when you catch your reflection and feel a jolt of horror

because for the first time

you don’t recognize the woman in front of you.

Her face is fuller.

Her eyes are tired.

Her jawline softer.

Her neck different.

Her entire presence altered

in a way that feels like a violation.

“Is this me now?”

you whisper at the mirror,

as if asking it permission to still exist.

Youth is currency in this world.

And menopause feels like someone emptying your bank account

without warning.

No one prepares you for the grief.

Not the grief for youth itself—

but the grief for the version of yourself

you thought you’d have a little longer.

You start mourning things that aren’t dead:

Your smaller jeans.

Your faster metabolism.

Your glowing skin.

Your confidence in being looked at without flinching.

Your ability to feel sexy without choking on insecurity.

But the cruelest part?

The world doesn’t mourn with you.

Society treats aging women like expired coupons—

once useful, now ignored.

Men get “distinguished.”

Women get “let go.”

And every time you feel invisible,

every time you feel dismissed,

every time you feel replaced by someone younger

and firmer

and smoother,

another small crack forms inside you.

Menopause is not just physical.

It is a psychological haunting.

Your brain fog becomes a fog inside your identity.

Your mood swings feel like emotional possession.

Your libido disappears like a witness in a mob movie.

Your sleep breaks into fragments—

twenty-minute intervals of sweating, freezing, thrashing, thinking,

regretting, overthinking,

and then sweating again.

Your body becomes a battlefield

against itself.

And let’s talk about weight.

No one warns you how humiliating it feels

to gain weight without “earning” it.

Not from overeating.

Not from binging.

Not from laziness.

Just from existing in a body

whose hormones have declared mutiny.

You try everything:

Keto

Low-carb

Low-calorie

Walking

Starving

Crying

Supplements

Prayers

Threats

Mirrors covered

Mirrors uncovered

Clothes donated

Clothes bought

Clothes returned

Google searches at 2 a.m.

“Is it possible for a woman to gain weight simply by looking at bread?”

Nothing makes it stop.

Your thighs soften.

Your stomach rounds.

Your arms become strangers.

Your face refuses to reflect who you feel like inside.

And here’s the darkest part—

You start to believe you don’t deserve to be seen.

You apologize for existing in pictures.

You hide behind people.

You stop wanting to be touched.

You stop wanting to be looked at.

You avoid going out.

You avoid bathing suit seasons.

You avoid yourself.

The shame settles in your bones.

But somewhere in that shame,

something else grows—

small, quiet, stubborn.

A spark.

Because menopause isn’t just destruction.

It’s transformation.

Like fire.

Yes, it burns everything down.

Your confidence.

Your self-image.

Your sense of control.

Your ability to pretend you’re okay.

But fire isn’t just an ending—

it’s the start of new growth.

A woman at this stage begins to realize

that her worth was never meant to live in her waistline

or her cheekbones

or her youth.

She begins to see the world with sharper eyes,

less patience for bullshit,

and a deeper connection to what actually matters.

Her anger becomes truth.

Her tiredness becomes boundaries.

Her softness becomes wisdom.

Her changing body becomes armor.

She becomes less concerned with being liked

and more concerned with being free.

Menopause does not destroy a woman.

It destroys the version of her

who lived for everyone else’s approval.

The woman who emerges—

slowly, painfully, fiercely—

is someone the world should fear

in the most beautiful way.

Because she no longer exists to be palatable,

or pleasing,

or pretty for someone else’s comfort.

She becomes someone who demands space

even in a world that tried to shrink her.

She becomes the woman who says:

“I am more than what I look like.

I am more than what I lost.

And I will not disappear.”

Menopause did not kill you.

It revealed you.

The world may worship youth

but it fears wisdom.

And this chapter—

this messy, sweaty, aching, infuriating chapter—

is where your wisdom began sharpening its teeth.

The Girl the Darkness Raised: A Memoir of Scarcity, Survival, and Becoming