She Felt Like Herself Again. Here’s What Happened Before That.

This story starts at the end. Because that’s where most women need to begin.

Six months later, she felt like herself again.

She slept. Properly. Not the fractured, sweating, wide-awake-at-3am sleep that had become her normal for the past two years. Real sleep. The kind where she woke up and the day felt possible.

The rage was gone. Not the ordinary frustration of a busy life — that was still there, because school pick-up is still school pick-up — but the other rage. The disproportionate, frightening kind. The kind where a spilled cup of water felt like a genuine emergency and she’d have to leave the room so her kids didn’t see her face.

The fog had lifted. She could read again. Hold a thought to its end. Sit in a meeting and remember what had been said at the beginning of it. Find the word she wanted, the one that had been hovering just out of reach for eighteen months, and actually say it.

She felt, in her own words: like the lights came back on.

This was after starting HRT.

This is her story, told backwards. Because you need to see where it led before you can understand how lost she was before.

Three months before that, she finally got answers.

She sat across from her GP and said, for the first time out loud: “I think something is actually wrong with me.”

Not in the way she’d half-mentioned it before — apologetically, as an aside, framed as probably nothing. This time she said it plainly. She brought the list she’d typed on her phone at midnight. She didn’t minimise it.

Her GP talked to her about perimenopause. About what declining oestrogen does — not just to the body, but to the brain. About why the anxiety had arrived from nowhere. Why she couldn’t sleep. Why her joints ached. Why her mood swung from fine to desolate in the time it took to drive from Castle Hill to West Pennant Hills. Why she’d found herself Googling early-onset dementia at 44.

She had not connected any of this to hormones. Not once.

She thought she was anxious. Depressed, maybe. Burning out. Not coping. She thought the problem was her — her resilience, or the lack of it. She had not thought: this is a medical event, and there is treatment.

They discussed HRT. She had questions — of course she did. She’d heard things. Alarming things. Her GP walked her through the actual evidence. What the research says now, not what a 2002 study said before it was re-examined and largely overturned. The real risks. The real benefits. The difference between older synthetic hormones and modern body-identical therapy. The fact that for most healthy women under 60, the benefits substantially outweigh the risks.

She left with a prescription and a long exhale.

Six months before that, she’d been told she seemed fine.

She had gone to her GP. She had mentioned the sleep. The anxiety. The fact that her periods had become irregular and some months were unexpectedly heavy. She was 43.

Her bloods came back normal. She was told this was probably stress. She was asked about her diet, her exercise, her sleep hygiene. She was given some information about mindfulness. She left wondering if she was making a fuss.

She was not making a fuss.

This is not a criticism of any individual doctor. Perimenopause is genuinely under-taught in medical training. Blood tests for FSH and oestrogen are notoriously unreliable in perimenopause — hormone levels can vary by the hour. A normal result means almost nothing. The diagnosis is clinical: age, symptoms, pattern. Not a number on a page.

But she didn’t know that. She took “your bloods are fine” to mean “nothing is wrong.” And so she went home and tried harder to cope.

A year before that, she thought it was just stress.

The brain fog started quietly. Small things first.

Walking into the kitchen and standing there, completely blank. Re-reading the same paragraph three times. Losing the word calendar mid-sentence in a work meeting and having to talk around it. Writing her PIN into her phone instead of a text message. Getting to Cherrybrook Village and sitting in the car park trying to remember which shop she’d come for.

She was 42. She ran a household of four. She worked. Of course she was scattered — who wouldn’t be?

But this felt different. This felt like the inside of her head had changed. Like the signal that used to be crisp was now coming through static.

She mentioned it to a friend at school pick-up. Her friend laughed and said, “God, same. I think we’re just tired.” They both laughed. The conversation moved on.

She Googled her symptoms at 11pm. The results suggested early dementia. She closed the tab and didn’t open it again for two weeks. When the fear got big enough, she Googled again. This time she found a forum thread. Women describing exactly this. Dozens of them. Someone had written: “I genuinely thought I was losing my mind. I didn’t know it was perimenopause.”

She read it four times.

Two years before that, the rage started.

This is the one nobody talks about at the school gate.

Hot flushes — people know about those. Night sweats — yes, everyone’s heard of those. But nobody mentions what happens to your emotional thermostat. Nobody tells you that oestrogen is deeply involved in how your brain regulates anger and distress. That when it starts to fluctuate, some women experience a disproportionate, full-body rage that bears no relationship to the trigger in front of them.

She snapped at her husband over a dishwasher. She sat in the school car park at Bella Vista and cried because she’d missed a turn-off. She felt a wave of fury — white-hot and mortifying — when someone at work forwarded an email unnecessarily. She didn’t recognise herself in these moments.

She assumed she was depressed. She went back to the GP. She was prescribed antidepressants. They helped, a little, with the low mood. They didn’t touch the underlying problem, because the underlying problem wasn’t depression. It was hormones.

Antidepressants are appropriate for some women at this stage of life. But for women whose low mood and anxiety are driven primarily by hormonal fluctuation, treating the symptom without addressing the hormonal cause is like treating a smoke alarm with a cushion. The noise stops. The fire doesn’t.

And before all of that: she thought menopause was something that happened to older women.

She pictured it as a distant event. Her mother’s generation. Hot flushes at 55. Maybe some mood stuff. A few uncomfortable years, then it was done.

She did not picture herself at 41, lying awake at 2am with her heart pounding for no reason. She did not picture the joint aches that migrated around her body — her fingers one week, her hips the next — that her physio couldn’t explain. She did not picture the skin that suddenly felt different, or the headaches, or the way a glass of wine now made her feel genuinely unwell when two years ago it hadn’t.

She did not know that perimenopause — the transition, the years of hormonal fluctuation before periods stop — can begin in the early 40s. Sometimes earlier. She did not know that it carries more than 30 recognised symptoms, the majority of which have nothing to do with hot flushes. She did not know that the anxiety, the brain fog, the sleep disruption, the rage, the joint pain, the palpitations, the crushing fatigue — these were all one thing. One hormonal event, wearing thirty different masks.

She thought it was stress. She thought it was her diet. She thought she needed to sleep more, drink less, try harder, slow down.

She was doing all of that already.

The myth that does the most damage.

It isn’t the HRT myth — though that one has cost women years of unnecessary suffering. The outdated fear around breast cancer risk from a flawed, since-reanalysed 2002 study has left a generation of women refusing treatment that would have helped them.

The myth that does the most damage is simpler: menopause is just hot flushes, and you just have to push through it.

This myth means women don’t recognise what’s happening to them. They spend years attributing genuine medical symptoms to stress, personality, weakness, or getting older. They don’t seek help because they don’t know help exists. They white-knuckle through it because that’s what women here have always done — in the Hills, in Hornsby, in the Upper North Shore — in suburbs built on the quiet performance of having it all together.

She had it together. Right up until the moment she didn’t. And even then, she didn’t tell anyone for a long time.

Back to now.

She sleeps. The lights are on. She found the word she was looking for.

She told a friend about it at school pick-up last week. Her friend went quiet for a moment, then said: “You’ve just described the last eighteen months of my life.”

This conversation is happening everywhere, in car parks and coffee shops and WhatsApp threads across the Hills District, between women who are relieved to finally have a name for it and furious that nobody gave them one sooner.

You don’t have to wait as long as she did.