The Vasomotor Files

My hot flashes have become operatic. Just before they burst onto the stage of whatever moment I am in, I can detect them in the wings, little tingles of anxiety windmilling their arms and prepping to bellow all the way to the nosebleed sections of my psyche.

The stronger the hot flash, the more intense the agitation.

Conversely, if I feel myself getting upset about something it can bring on a flash.

Like seeing someone drive by in a gas-guzzling monster down the highway with 3 inches of snow on the roof they couldn’t be bothered to clear, a pending avalanche on wheels, (which is why we have laws against exactly this kind of endangering of the safety of everyone on the highway), or

Getting newssprayed by the firehose of awfulness about the cruelty coup, the hate-filled bro-vipers (and the white women who enable them), who are committed only to protecting their own entitlement above anything else, even if it means they continue to injure our democracy and our planet, or

Watching billionaires nonchalantly sting and bite and kill anyone who comes near their piles and piles and piles of cash, or

Listening to the outrage of the morality maniacs when anyone dares question their banal, stupid, absolutely irrelevant ideas about who is legitimate and who isn’t, or

Reproductive justice, and by that I mean the absolute lack of it, or

How it feels to be middle-aged in a society that despises women of any age, but especially how it attempts to destroy the relevance of older women whatsoever, or

The generations of misogyny that have kept research on menopause underfunded.

That one, obviously, is very personal to me.

Or, (fill in the blank). So many blanks.

A single bead of sweat will appear at the nape of my neck like a question, asking, almost daring me, “Do you really want to do this right now?” Quite honestly, no I really don’t. I don’t want to do any of this shit. I don’t want to be physically and emotionally on fire, and I sure as fuck don’t want to be watching the many iterations of cruelty and greed roll through my country in cloud after cloud of poison, descending like a burning fog. Watching all the hate zombies getting off on sucking that air most foul into their lungs.

While the rest of us hold our breaths.

Sacred Rage

The way to make it through this time is not to stop breathing.

The way we will live through this time is by breathing deeply into it.

Imagine, if you will, that the heat has its benefits:

Let’s say Bill and I happen to be walking through the icy, dark streets of Boston on the way to a concert. I may or may not say, “I’m freezing. Let’s talk about any recent example of how lazy this patriarchal oligarchy is. How much good they could be doing in the world, but nope.” Works like a charm. I’m toasty in an instant.

I also am practicing using the heat to help when I am blanching in fear at the utter absurdities of this idiocracy. I refuse to let them attack my mood with a Bye Felicia-type counter cognitive maneuver. Taking any of the multitude of daily examples of moronic overreach and literally visualizing them flowing away down a sewer pipe. Of course since I emphatically do not like being a polluter of any environment, whether it be my mind, yours, or that of the universal consciousness at large, as I release them I bless each originator of the garbage that has spewn my way with my pure intention which is to be part of the solution.

Rage Cleaning. I cannot recommend this enough. Light a candle to all of the people in our collective history that have had to survive shit this bad and worse, and go to town. Even if you’re not really into a home that sparkles with a neat & tidy vibe, I promise you, bringing order to the chaos that is anything domestic is a peak emotional regulation experience you will not want to miss. If you’re still skeptical, invite me over. I’ll do it.

Holy Hell

Most of the flashes happen in the middle of the night, typically between 2-4am. Occasionally I sleep through them, when I am exhausted from not sleeping through them the night before. When they do wake me up, I might stick a foot out of the covers, or get up out of the furnace the bed has become, to pee. The room temperature air cools my body like a hypothermic commercial break. But the risk of not being able to fall back asleep is high, because along with the heat comes an epic rave thrown by my nervous system, and that likely means panic at the disco.

If I’ve tallied a few nights of really good sleep in a row, bedtime itself is sure to be fraught, because there’s a very good chance I won’t be sleeping as heavily, and that means the labor of managing a sleepless night looms large.

This is why my bedtime routine includes a nervous system self-care situation that would rival any 10-step skin regimen.

I have recently added putting my phone all the way across the house to charge overnight, so if when I do wake up, I have to weigh leaving my cozy bed filled with a loving partner and our dogs who I’m sure are our personal bodhisattvas, against doom scrolling. Being in a bed with peacefully slumbering beloveds is wonderful and a balm, but it’s also too easy to turn my back on them, literally, to grab my phone when I can’t sleep. So I’ve removed that temptation.

Recently, however, my nervous system has caught on to my earnest attempts to survive the night emotionally, and has begun to employ guilt as a kind of last-resort lethal weapon. If it can’t seduce me into a full-blown panic in other ways, it tells me that my tossing and turning has degraded my loved ones’ sleep as well. So evidently I’m ruining it for everyone, not just me. Great.

Uncle

So I finally gave up and did what sleep experts have been saying is one of the best things to do when you can’t sleep: get the fuck out of your bed. It took one final, really bad night when I woke up at 1:00 am and went through 3 or 4 cycles of flashing complete with racing heartbeats, disjointed and wildly fear-based thinking. I did meditate and pray a lot, which didn’t work at all because my heart wouldn’t stop racing, and since I couldn’t calm myself back to sleep, at about 3:00 am I went into the living room with tears streaming down my face.

“The changes, the highs and lows and the hormonal shifts, there is power in that. But we were taught to be ashamed of it and to not even seek to understand it or explore it for our own edification, let alone to help the next generation” – Michelle Obama

I cried out of my longing not only for real rest but for a world in which we all have what we need. I grieved for a magic wand no one has, one that instantly stops the madness we’re living in.

I felt every inch of how defeated by exhaustion I was. I ripped off layers with each flash, and piled them back on again as my sweat cooled me too much, furious about the way I’m told I should be feeling. Which is GREAT! Because that’s what has happened now that capitalism has gotten its mitts on menopause such that it flogs ideas and products and messaging at us, all designed to imply we should be feeling great will feel great life will be great if we just spend a full-time job’s worth of money, energy, and time on products and techniques and supplements. The fact that there’s no actual science around most of it is just great.

How ironic that at the same time that women are talking more freely about what menopause is really like, without shame, we’re also being sold an ideal experience that is impossible to experience without extreme privilege. Celebrities and hucksters talk about a menopause that is possible and achievable, but illusory. It’s right there, just out of reach, the fulfilling of the potential that decades of caring for others and people-pleasing robbed from us, our creative renaissance, the most fulfilling chapter of our lives. The ideal menopause is supposed to eliminate all of the ways we care too much about what people think of us, give us an unconditional acceptance of our whole selves including the physical self we are, take away anything non-essential and give our unbridled passions cherished focus.

Scratch the surface and we’re being told we’re not doing it right. Again. We should be feeling better than we actually are. While our planet burns, while no one stands up to the bullies who would love to see it do just that, if it meant they could also watch as many people suffer in the process.

Laying there in the wee hours, outraged at the limitations we’re all living with, the ways our society continues to turn its back on anyone who isn’t a cis het white man, terrified by how the apex predators in our world are baring their teeth at us, how the quiet part they’re saying out loud quite literally at full volume is about how they intend to flex their right to rape, pillage, destroy, and burn?

Ok. All of this may be true, but suddenly my sobbing shifts in tone. From the bottom of my stomach, the noises I’m making, muffled so I don’t wake anyone up, become a kind of keening. Because I don’t want the sacred rage I am feeling to burn me down. I need to find a way to protect my heart and soul from turning to ash.

And then, a miracle. I may have uncovered the only really guaranteed way for me to get some rest.

(it’s not hormone replacement therapy, btw)

I’m not a candidate. I am a breast cancer survivor. Which is part of the reason a hysterectomy was a good decision for me.

it was the moonlight on the snow.

When I was finished crying, I was thirsty. As I walked into the kitchen, I was startled by the blue glow pouring in through the windows.

The full moon on that clear night had turned the multiple feet of snowbanks around the house into another sky. I was absolutely mesmerized. I stood there and breathed deeply for the first time in weeks. I watched the stars twinkling, the surface of the snow alight with sparkles, and the moon, huge in the sky, as it poured itself onto all of the planet. I felt my body feel just right, not too hot, not too cold. I felt fear and rage loosen their grip on my thinking. All that was left was to feel grateful, to be so full of gratitude there wasn’t any room for anything else. The gorgeousness of the light, the softness of the world right outside, right there, right at that moment. Soothed me.

I felt my soul cool.

I had the thought that if I had actually been able to sleep, I would have missed seeing this.

see you at 3am


Big feelings come right before intuition, and often right after. So when a flash wakes me up, I give myself about 30 minutes to meditate and pray, and if I’m still awake, I get out of bed. I look for the moon.

She isn’t always out, but that’s ok. I read a good book and wait for my brain and body to reset. Then about an hour later, I go back to bed and this is key, I fall back asleep, peacefully.

During the quiet time, after the flames subside, I am receiving messages about how to walk forward as part of the solution. I am receiving messages of comfort and strength that are so potent I hardly believe them. I am receiving clarity about the big picture that is sometimes helpful and sometimes hard to accept, but I am also very clear that my mind and heart will never be a prison of fear.

I am now logging more nights in a row without flashes that keep me up. I am starting to feel rested and solid inside. I understand that my hysterectomy essentially drop-kicked into a new chapter of my life, and the terrain is completely unfamiliar to me. Unprecedented, if you will.

But there is a way forward, and I am focused on the task of accepting the world exactly as it is, right this second, in a totally new way. One that keeps the question open, what if acceptance of all of this happening, does not require that I cosign it? Acceptance doesn’t mean I am required to think it’s right, merely that I accept that it is.

That would mean my understanding of all of this *gestures around wildly* would be on a learning curve. And it certainly would not mean rationalizing what is immoral or unjust or unkind.

It would mean the fire that’s burning bigger is looking for bigger outlets, and to do that work, I need to be in good shape. We all do.

So, more fire, but channeled fire. My spiritual work remains the same, only even more part of a “we” that attends to each other with caring, validation, and wild decency. We keep our eyes and ears open for who in our community needs community. We still make the calls, carry the signs, do all the things we know to do.

We just remember that anger is not resentment or bitterness. We can’t let ourselves be poisoned by the same illness that we want to heal from.

And we let the moon guide us at night.

See you next week, Friends.