Untethered & Unapologetic: Midlife, Menopause, and Letting It All Go
Jess Mujica: Leading us to the light during the Great Unravelling
Welcome to another guest post on Flucking Flourishing. I have the great delight in introducing the wonderful
!Jess is a menstrual cycle advocate, mentor, and writer. As an avid nature lover, it comes naturally to her to observe the outer seasons and see the intricate connection to a woman’s cycle phases using the seasons. Using her life experience of natural cycling for decades, not cycling while on using the contraceptive pill for about 7 years, the suffering and healing from endometriosis, and now 5 years into perimenopause, she understands the whole journey women take.
She goes deep into research: medical journals, books, podcasts—all the evidence of ways the cycle changes, foods that support each phase, and exercise methods geared for cyclic women. Jess cares. She wants to share her knowledge with the world and, like me, refuses to listen to the label “crazy.” Her publication, Go With The Flow, is the perfect place to start to get to know Jess and her work.
Jess is teaching women, and the men in their lives, to live with instead of against their cycles. Without further ado, here is Jess, Flucking Flourishing!
Undoing.
A swirling hive of scatteredness. Overwhelm. Unproductive days trying to grasp at lost motivation. Frayed at the edges and jumpy from lack of proper deep sleep. A remembrance of pregnancy and the word, “normal”. When every dawning symptom feels anything but normal.
Did anyone tell you there would be an unraveling from the inside out? No one told me this internal unraveling was coming.
Here was my Gen X limited understanding of Menopause (perimenopause was not a word used when I was in my 20’s and 30’s).
Hot flashes: so you get hot and sweaty. No problem. Just like a workout without working out. How hard can that be?
Moody: how different can it be from pms moodiness? Reduce stress and it should be fine, right?!
Weight gain: some women do and some don’t. I’ll probably be fine. I exercise and eat okay.
Insomnia: I can go for a while with crappy sleep. It eventually goes away. Just drink more coffee.
Beyond these 4 symptoms, and honestly I don’t think I knew that insomnia was a menopause symptom, you basically just stop having periods and that’s menopause.
But upon arriving at 40, I experienced the breaking away from the mother phase of my late 20’s and 30’s with the wild woman right on her heels. A sudden urge to break free of the to-do lists and to capture every beautiful day, away from domestic responsibilities, to go find myself again.
Here’s how my unravelling began in midlife:
All of a sudden, I wanted to get away from everyone most of the time.
What I used to love about being pleasant and having fun, felt like it was shriveling up.
Easily overwhelmed.
My periods were in the “normal range” but they became heavier and sometimes came with nausea, diarrhea, and no appetite. Long cycles, like 33-35 days long, the debilitating cramping beginning around Day 27 and continuing until days into my period.
The fatigue had me leveled. No amount of coffee would give me the energy I was wanting.
Endometriosis became more painful and had me in bed with cramps for days on end.
Wine became the cause of insomnia, waking me at 3 am.
Night sweats were erratic and added to insomnia.
All of a sudden, I found myself wanting to just say no to most activities and trips, concerts...
In order to continue to be the me that I am, I was heading against society in several ways. Mostly by researching and questioning societal taboos and norms.
An overriding inward energy to want to be able to hear myself. I needed quiet!
Relationship strain. It’s not you, it's me. Well, maybe it’s you too. All of this in my initiated year of 40.
Welcome to perimenopause: a quest to come back home and rest. But first, it gets hard.
Yet in the midst of all of this, I was coming to understand myself and my cycle through learning about women’s cycle awareness.
It’s like as I approached the threshold to go on this rite-of-passage quest; God, the great creator and mentor, handed me a guidebook to myself.
Cycle awareness or cycle syncing is the most basic tool we have to live our womanhood to its fullest potential. It doesn’t require any gimmicks or products. It is free. How? It is written into female biology.
Sounds too good to be true? Maybe. Everything has a cost, maybe not money, but it does cost me my ego, my “wants”, my humility, my pride. The practice is hard only because it goes against the grain of society. And in 2019 I was making people cringe by talking openly to anyone and everyone about menstrual cycles, including co-ed coworkers.
Okay, so I said it’s free, but actually to be fully useful, you will need paper and a pen, or a free app. These tools are for tracking.
How cycle awareness works:
The practice is simply paying attention to each phase of the menstrual cycle. There are four unique phases and vary in length but close enough to be called 4 weeks.
Each phase of the cycle has uncanny similarities to the seasons of the year.
Menstrual phase: Day 1-Day6ish: Winter
Early Follicular: Days 7ish-Days 14ish: Spring
Ovulation: Days 14ish-Day 21ish: Summer
Mid and late Luteal: Days 21ish to Day 28ish: Fall or Autumn
💥More info on this in my podcast episode It Begins With Awareness Ep:1 A Crash Course
The connections between our cycle and the perimenopause phase of life:
Days 21-28 of the menstrual cycle have many many similarities to the perimenopause life phase. How? These are the pre-menstrual days. The characteristics biologically cause an inward mood, critical eye, agitation if we don’t get space, time, and quiet to hear ourselves, bursts of energy followed by low energy levels, brain fog, prickly reactions, and all the rest.
This same premenstrual week has overriding themes of perimenopause years. Our proverbial leaves are falling in our Autumn/Fall phase of life. We are feeling a sense of letting go of our leaves, our outward appearance, and being left bare.
As we practice awareness of every inner Fall phase of the menstrual cycle we are fine tuning how we practice our perimenopause life phase. And beyond that, how we practice our inner Winter menstrual phase, we are preparing to have the tools needed for our menopause and post-menopause life phase.
Tracking shows us our internal weather map
As we jot down our energy levels we will see a pattern of shifts in energy levels. This change happens in every category from physical, mental, social, emotional etc. This is in the top 10 most transformative experiences of my life. Simply understanding that my behaviours, thought patterns, moods, likes and dislikes, assertiveness and insecurities, introvert and extrovert tendencies, physical capabilities, and sexual desires all shifted every flucking week (had to throw Lisa’s catch word in there). It takes so much guesswork out of how I may experience life from day to day.
After 1 month of journaling my daily energy, I saw that I was not the same person every day and that my energies may be similar to the seasons of the year, Winter being my period and then each consecutive week the following seasons.
As I researched books, podcasts, ted talks, pubmed studies and journaled daily for two solid years, I was convinced and there was no going back; this is real.
After 3 months of journaling, I knew that I had specific energy patterns and started to use those patterns to plan by.
After 6 months, I no longer saw the calendar in the same way and started living with my internal calendar.
After 1 year, I knew myself better than I ever had in my entire life. My nuanced moods, peaks and valleys of energy and goals all started to make sense. I really began living with my cycle instead of against it.
After 5+ years, as I am deeper into perimenopause, I am thankful that I was given time to learn all of this and to see it in practice in my biological make-up.
More articles on tracking ➡️ here
What Midlife is teaching me through cycle awareness
The unraveling continues. New symptoms emerge and old ones dissipate. What is not true is permanence. We are not the same every day, every week, every month…
This has been the biggest unraveling; accepting change in midlife. Change makes me feel out of control. How I navigated life, is not how I can navigate it now. I used to be put together, now, I am unraveling. Time management skills—out the window. Daily normal adult tasks—sometimes overwhelming to paralyzing. Word recall—pauses to think of a word to describe—glitchy.
But, if I keep pulling at the ball of yarn, there is more to it than symptoms making me feel unhinged. There are deep life lessons to be learned through massive change.
Four lessons I’m learning in my five years of perimenopause:
Boundaries
In my late luteal phase of my cycle (days 20ish to the last day before bleeding), boundaries really get tested every month. But beyond that, it gets tested everyday of my perimenopause years. The late luteal years of life are the Fall phase years. That sudden feeling of saying ‘no’ to everything and everyone? Fall. After years of saying yes to it all, I finally felt this urge well up inside to whisper to myself, to hear it out loud, or to scream it suddenly. Just, “NO”. I found it shocking to myself and awkward on my tongue, but I am now warming up to it and learning to navigate it with honesty, yet tactfulness. The whole notion of boundaries was somewhat foreign to me. But in this phase of life, turning inward to focus on self-nurturing is an overriding theme, so the more I get used to practicing boundaries, the better.
Letting Go
Just like the Fall phase in nature, our leaves are turning. Our once vibrant ovulating summery self is slowly letting go the ability to conceive and birth children. Part of letting go is grieving. Letting go of younger, more vibrant, more in control—me. Letting go of my expectations of what I should do or should be. I am learning to let go of other’s expectations of who or how I should be. I have to let go of ego from my younger self that thought she had things figured out. Motherhood is losing her grip on my life phase as my son will soon fledge and be a man. The last fleeting years of his childhood. So much letting go. This is part of the grief process of midlife. I don’t hide tears like I used to, although I do a fair share of time crying in the shower. There is something very purifying about crying in the shower, tears mingled with shower spray, as I wash the grief off of me and go on with my day.
We often hear about fewer flucks to give. Well, in some ways this is true. There are things I used to care about that take too much energy to care about now. I've never been one to be super careful with who I am. I have never been good at fashion, make-up, pop culture and what’s in and what’s not. Whatever flucks I had for that in my Spring and Summer years are fading fast. And there is letting whatever that was go as well.
Untethered
Being comfortable with the uncomfortable. All this letting go feels a bit too wild, too free, for me. My self protection is having it together. I may not have had high fashion, but I always left the house in matching wear, make-up and hair done or in a cute hat. Now, I look like I’ve been camping or just came from the gym on most days. 2020 taught me that I no longer needed to wear make-up or match my clothes and I’m kinda still doing that now. Some days I put makeup on and put some product in my hair and other days, not even a shower or a brush through my hair. I have a hat that says, “camping hair, don’t care”. I now wear that on any day I don’t care.
Other areas I’m untethered are my quick overwhelm, followed by my over-reaction, followed by more letting go. Feeling like I did with “pregnancy brain”, I can’t recall words or names mid-sentence. I come unhinged when I hot flash, a flushing red heat across my face and chest, tearing off clothing and sitting in a car ride watching people bundled in winter gear bracing against the 20 degree weather. And here I am in a tank top. Ridiculous. I don’t love the untethered part. But what helps the most is being able to tell my perimenopause girlfriends and laugh about it all.
Slowing the pace of life
I was 40 years old when the world came to “lock-down”. I had been practicing cycle awareness for only a few short months and had come into its full benefits and then global trauma hit us all. Did midlife teach me to slow the pace of life? You betcha. But 2020 expedited the process. In March of 2020, I pulled up my Google calendar and began deleting every event and every schedule and every plan we had. I have to tell you, it was the most freeing experience for me. A wide open path of stillness. My life had every minute planned before that, or so it seemed. And then, everything just dropped off. This was its own unravelling.
As life picked up pace as restrictions were lifted, I remember not wanting to forget to leave space in the calendar. Lots of space wherever I could. My pace of life after 40 is definitely slower, with more space available for phone calls, rest, seeing friends spontaneously, and taking forest bathing days once a week when I can. When I slow the pace of life, I have time to turn my nurturing inward towards self care and reflection.
Making sense of this beautiful mess
I’m only five-ish years into this rite-of-passage of perimenopause. Some say it lasts anywhere from a few years to twelve. So I say only because it could be seven more. The midlife unraveling process is different for everyone. The midlife lessons however, seem to be very similar. There are more lessons, I’m sure, that I will learn along this journey. What I do know is that we were not meant to do this passage alone. The more we share our stories, our internal quests, our questions and our humor; the more we make perimenopause and midlife an awe-inspiring metamorphosis for younger generations to prepare for. Maybe unraveling is not so terrible. Maybe it’s, I dare say, flucking transformative.
More related articles and podcasts
“Start Here” page on Go With The Flow website
It Begins With Awareness Podcast Ep: 01
As you navigate your unique midlife journey, I hope you…
Go With The Flow,
Ways to Work With Lisa:
🌟 Book a Spark Session where you & I sit down, chat, and ignite a spark. You go away with a fresh perspective and something to take action on.
🌟 Buy a course. Mini-courses to get you in touch with your flesh suit, your emotions, or just dive into your creative wellspring.
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