Perimenopause: where it all began

I think now that I hit perimenopause in 2015 at the age of 42. After happily living a busy chaotic life with two young children in northwest London for many years, I suddenly found myself anxious - about everything and nothing at all. 

A year earlier, I would have happily driven right across London without satnav, feeling my way to a friend’s house in Battersea. Now, if I had to go somewhere unfamiliar, like taking my daughter to her singing exam two suburbs over, I would start worrying on about Wednesday before the Saturday exam. I traced the route out on Google maps on the big computer screen at home, memorising every turn. And on the day itself, I was a jumble of nerves.

The anxiety arrived one day out of nowhere and stayed on and off until about 2021, when we moved from New Zealand to Hong Kong in the middle of COVID. In my early days in Hong Kong, I was beyond anxious about simple things like getting through the barriers on the MTR. 

After a few months, I found a writing job at HSBC and things started to look up. With some antidepressants and a good paychiatrist, I started to feel a little better, although still a very subdued version of my normal self. 

I’d gained a fair bit of weight since leaving London, which I put down to less exercise. The humidity and heat in Hong Kong didn’t help, not to mention the free flow brunches! 

Asian women are smaller than me at the best of times. Suddenly I found myself in the unenviable position of having to buy all my clothes from M&S, or order them online from the UK, Australia or New Zealand. 

But it still didn’t occur to me that menopause could be the problem until just before my 50th birthday in 2022. Because my tests showed I was still producing eggs, I thought it must be just normal bipolar ups and downs. 

Until one day, at long last, I made an appointment to see a gynaecologist.